What is the function of an American university president? Apparently it is to travel about the country, and summon the captains and the kings of finance, and dine in their splendid banquet halls, and lay down to them the law and the gospel of predation. I consult the name of Nicholas Murray Butler in the New York Public Library, and I find a long list of pamphlets, each one immortalizing a plutocratic feast; the Annual Luncheon of the Associated Press, 1916; the Annual Dinner of the Commercial Club of Kansas City, 1908, the Annual Dinner of the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce, 1917, the Annual Dinner of the Association of Cotton Manufacturers, Springfield, Mass., 1917, the Annual Banquet of the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York, 1911, the Annual Dinner of the American Bankers’ Association—and so on. In addressing these mighty men of money there is no cruelty which our interlocking president will not endorse and defend, no vileness of slander he will not perpetrate against those who struggle for justice in our commercial hell. “Political patent medicine men,” he calls us; and he tells the masters of the clubs and bayonets, the gas-bombs and machine-guns that we seek our ends “by some means—violent if possible, peaceable if necessary”; he tells about Socialists “whose conception of government is a sort of glorified lynching.” And all this, you understand, not referring to the Bolsheviks; this in the days of the “Bull Moose”! In his speech before the Republican State Convention in 1912 President Butler portrayed the struggle with the Progressives as one “to decide whether our government is to be Republican or Cossack”! He discussed proposals to amend the constitution, saying it was like “proposing amendments to the multiplication table”! In the year 1911 we find him before the 143d Annual Banquet of the New York Chamber of Commerce, stating that “our business men are attacked,” and that this constitutes “civil war.” Our political conventions are being besieged “by every crude, senseless, half-baked scheme in the country”—a terrifying situation, and what is to be done about it? The orator is ready with the answer: “Why should not the associated business men of the United States unite to demand that the next political campaign be conducted with a view to their oversight and protection?” The associated business men of the United States thought this was fine advice, so through the agency of their Grand Old Party they nominated Nicholas Murray Butler for the office of vice-president of the United States. In that campaign Butler called one of his opponents, Theodore Roosevelt, a demagog, and the other, Woodrow Wilson, a charlatan; and he triumphantly polled the electoral votes of the states of Utah and Vermont, a total of eight out of a possible four hundred and ninety-one.