And these same first-class business men have carried on elaborate building programs at the peak of high prices; they have leased a wonderful building site for a long term of years, with the privilege of buying at any time during the life of the lease, at a price set at the beginning of the lease! They have killed Stanford as a democratic institution, and brought it close to the rocks of bankruptcy, by starting a medical school in San Francisco, against the judgment of the best experts, and allowing the expenses of that school to swallow up the funds of Stanford. That they had doubt as to the success of the medical school was shown by their resolution in 1908, to the effect that this school should never be allowed to take more than twenty-five thousand dollars a year out of Stanford’s funds. But in the last president’s report I find the medical school with a minus balance of a hundred and nineteen thousand dollars—and this does not include the expenses of the instruction at Palo Alto, comprising the first four or five years of the course. For instance, the biological group alone shows a deficit of a hundred and thirty thousand dollars! So much for the handling of the Stanford trust. If I had a life-time in which to study universities, I should like to see what care has been taken with the funds of the University of the United Gas Improvement Company of Philadelphia, and with those of the University of the Steel Trust, at Pittsburgh, and with those of the University of Heaven, at Syracuse, and with those of the Mining-Camp University at Denver. I should like to settle down in New York and make a thorough financial study of the University of the House of Morgan, and tell Professor Moses Primrose the names of all those trustees and professors who got advance news of the moving of the university to Morningside Heights; I should like to raise a fund and have a search made of the title records, and give him a list of the various lots and parcels of land which now belong to Barnard College, and figure up the total of the fortunes cleared by the insiders who purchased the old insane asylum which stood on that site! But maybe Professor Moses Primrose would call that “honest graft!” CHAPTER XXXV THE UNIVERSITY OF THE LUMBER TRUST