Good for Nicholas Miraculous, you say! That is the sort of college president we want in America! But in the cold light of the morning after our pacifist orator thought it over. Perhaps he remembered his interlocking directorate—the grim-visaged, growling wild boar, old Pierpont Morgan, preparing to make his billion dollars out of the British government; young Marcellus Hartley Dodge, chairman of Remington Arms and Union Metallic Cartridge, getting ready to clean up his millions by cornering the market in munitions machinery! How awkward to meet Marcellus Hartley on the board, after talking about “the contention, always stupid and often insincere ... invented by war-makers who have munitions of war to sell!” Also, Butler was expecting to be Republican candidate for president two years from date; and it would not be easy to carry Elihu Root and Bill Barnes and Jim Wadsworth for a government monopoly of Remington Arms and Union Metallic Cartridge, to say nothing of Bethlehem and Carnegie Steel! So President Butler sat himself down and edited his eloquence. The passages I have quoted are from the speech as given to the newspapers, September 24, 1914; but now see how it reads as published in Butler’s book, “America in Ferment.” “The contention, always stupid and often insincere,” is softened to “the contention, always made with more emphasis than reasonableness.” The argument which was “invented by the war-makers who have munitions of war to sell” now becomes an argument which was “invented by those who really believe in war and in armaments as ends in themselves.” That lets out Marcellus Hartley, you see; in fact, it lets out Butler’s friend the Kaiser, and everybody in the world since Genghis Khan. The proposed plank for the Republican party’s presidential platform, providing for a government monopoly of the manufacture and sale of munitions of war, has been dropped overboard and lost forever; while the phrase about “increasing the military and naval establishments and expenditures of the United States” has been deftly turned into “asking the United States to desist from its attempts to promote a new international order in the world!” Let nobody expect that Nicholas Miraculous will abandon his charge of that half million dollars a year of Carnegie money! After this you will be prepared for any amount of hedging. President Butler had for ten years been conducting with President Wheeler of the University of California an ardent rivalry for the affections of the Kaiser; but now the interlocking directorate is going to “can the Kaiser,” and their university president is going to enlist in the speech-making brigade. Wheeler of California is three thousand miles away from the seat of authority, but Butler gets the “tip” in time, and saves himself by climbing out on the faces of those who took seriously his belief in universal peace.