the crude malignity of modern life, fortifies and stimulates him, and gives him the surety, which is sturdier than any dream or hope, of the coming time when this life will permeate and pervade all society instead of only a part. XIII THE COLLEGE: AN INNER VIEW The undergraduate of to-day, if he reads the magazines, discovers that a great many people are worrying seriously about his condition. College presidents and official investigators are discussing his scholarship, his extra-curricular activities, and his moral stamina. Not content with the surface of the matter, they are going deeper and are investigating the college itself, its curriculum, the scholarship of the instructors, and its adequacy in realizing its high ideal as a preparation for life. The undergraduate finds that these observers are pretty generally inclined to exonerate him for many of his shortcomings, and to lay the blame on the college itself; the system is indicted, and not the helpless product. For this he is grateful, and he realizes that this dissatisfaction among educators, this uneasy searching of the academic heart, promises well for the education of his children, and for himself if he remains in college long enough to get the benefit of the reforms. Meanwhile, as he attends recitations and meetings of undergraduate societies, talks with his fellow students and the professors, and reads the college papers, he may, even if he can get no hint of the mysterious inner circles where the destinies of the students are shaped and great questions of policy decided, be able himself to see some of the things that complicate college scholarship to-day, from an inner point of view which is impossible to the observer looking down from above. He may find in the character of the student body itself, and the way in which it reacts to what the college offers it, an explanation of some of the complications of scholarship that so disturb our critics; and in a certain new quality in the spirit of the college, something that is beginning to crystallize his own ideals, and to make him count himself fortunate that he is receiving his education in this age and no other. In the constitution of college society, and in the intellectual and spiritual ideals of the teachers, he may find the explanation of why the college is as it is, and the inspiration of what the college ought to be and is coming to be.