CHAPTER X THE LIGHTNING-CHANGE ARTIST President Butler’s career at Columbia has been like that of a drunken motorist in a crowded street; he has left behind him a trail of corpses. In the course of twenty years of office he has managed to expel or force to withdraw some two score men, including most of the best in the place. The cases of MacDowell and Woodberry occurred in 1902, the cases of Peck and Spingarn in 1910 and 1911. Beginning in 1917 there was a sudden series of casualties; but before these can be clearly explained, it is necessary that the reader should be made acquainted with another aspect of the career of Nicholas Miraculous—as pacifist and prophet of the Capitalist International. Butler’s friend, Carnegie, put up ten million dollars to establish a foundation in the cause of universal peace; and Butler became a trustee. The pointed question has been asked whether the Carnegie Peace Foundation pays for the elaborate banquets which President Butler serves to peace delegates in his home. Needless to say, when you have half a million dollars a year to administer, you can hire a great many secretaries, and print a great deal of literature, and give a great many champagne banquets, and make a great splurge in the world. Butler engaged a young man, Leon Fraser, to organize a peace movement in the colleges, and had him made an instructor in the department of political science at Columbia. We shall see in a minute what happened to this young man. In the summer of 1914 Butler went to Europe to continue his peace work—but not with entire success. He came home in September, very much horrified at what had happened in Europe, and to the students at the opening of the university he made a speech in which you find him at his best, with his clear, keen mind and driving energy. He denounced the war-makers in language which left nothing to be desired. One thing this war had done, he said; it had “put a final end to the contention, always stupid and often insincere, that huge armaments are an insurance against war and an aid in maintaining peace. This argument was invented by the war-makers who had munitions of war to sell.... Since war is an affair of governments and of armies, one result of the present war should be to make the manufacture and sale of munitions of war a government monopoly hereafter.... How anyone not fit subject for a madhouse, can find in the awful events now happening in Europe a reason for increasing the military and naval establishments and expenditures of the United States is to me wholly inconceivable. Militarism—there is the enemy!”