Among the men there is one hall for graduate students and one for undergraduates already organized on the plan described above. Snell House, the undergraduate club, is a thriving organization, that promises to do much toward settling the problem of student life. The "heads" of the houses, though in most instances members of the faculty, are in no sense proctors or keepers; they have interested themselves as strong allies in the various clubs, and are regarded by the members as natural friends and leaders, who share the common life and interests. Of course, an unpopular head would quickly lose his influence over his house, but, on the other hand, a house could make existence impossible for an obnoxious head. As the university grows and expands, this manner of life will undoubtedly be developed in the new halls to be built about the campus and in the clubs outside. Each house will have its own restaurant or dining room and also parlors, thus making a separate family existence for small groups of students. Thus the secret societies will find it impossible to obtain firm hold in undergraduate life, and the university will be saved from the complications of boyish, immature conduct that the secret society life fosters. Also, as the mass of students increases, the social life of the individual will be cared for; the Western student, it may be remarked, is essentially a social animal.

Among the women there are many students from Eastern and Southern homes; the undergraduate men are almost without exception from the central West. What is this student like? How does he act in college? What are his amusements? He is decidedly in earnest-too much so, I am inclined to think. Frequently his conditions of life force him to struggle for existence at the university. Students who are earning the means to study are the rule, not the exception. Every possible occupation that a large city affords, from lighting lamps on the streets to tutoring or writing for the newspapers, furnishes the few needed dollars. This condition of strenuous poverty necessarily produces a very dif

ferent atmosphere in the college world from the opulent spirit of our older institutions. The poor man is the dominant person; to be rich and idle would be almost unfashionable. To be sure, the atmosphere is not the dreamy halflights of an Oxford garden; rather the harsh, invigorating breeze of a Colorado desert. Unrelieved, that, perhaps, is the word; unrelieved by prejudice, past and present. The student is unprejudiced in scholarship, accepting no traditions of what is really excellent to know; unprejudiced in social life, despising the tame amenities of a reticent society; unprejudiced in athletics, and therefore, thank Heaven! still willing to regard his amusements as avocations. He is untrained; even the ambitious candidate for a higher degree in the graduate schools is often lamentably unprejudiced about his foundation of knowledge, but he is eager, sensitive, industrious. College means for him work, and I am sure that the faculty rejoice in the fact that an industrious poverty will for a long time prevent any other conception from becoming universal.

I have emphasized the industrious aspect of the student at Chicago. We may think of him only as an academic artisan, but he has his festivities. It is almost amusing to consider the eagerness with which he has entered upon all the activities supposed to be peculiar to "college boys." There is the glee club, the banjo club, the university orchestra, the university chorus, the football eleven, the 'varsity nine, the track team, besides various evidences of interest in oratorical and literary matters. All this apart from the departmental clubs, which are strictly solemn and serious affairs. The athletic teams are restricted by the conditions of life mentioned in the preceding paragraph: the men ordinarily must work for their living; they feel obliged to perform their college work (if they fail in any course the regulations force them to withdraw from public contests); and no athletic organization is rich enough to furnish a lavish training-table. The result is that we have games and contests (for the neighboring colleges support athletics under the

same limitations) rather than battles and slaughters. The games are loosely played perhaps; competition and wealth have not rendered it possible for a team "to develop the game." In a word, the athletic question or disease exists only potentially at the University of Chicago.

The same spirit is true of more serious undertakings: two college settlements in the hard districts of Chicago are supported and manned by the students. In spite of the severe struggles they are making for their education, many of them desire to carry something in time and effort and ideals, even in precious money, to the desolate who are at their doors. The classes and clubs of the settlement show that the college students feel the impossibility of an academic life that lives solely to itself. On the philanthropic committee, and as teachers in the settlement classes, men and woman, instructors and students, work side by side. The interest in sociological studies, which is commoner at Chicago than elsewhere, stimulates this modern activity in college life.

All these clubs and athletic teams exist not merely for amusement, but also because the students feel that one cannot have a full-fledged university without them, They make up the American idea of a university, just as the graduate school, the laboratory, and the elective system go to make a modern university. And this is noteworthy that the students feel a responsibility to construct a great university as much in their way as the faculty and the trustees in theirs. They feel the exhilaration and loyalty to the scope of the institution as men working shoulder to shoulder in a new country, planning for a brilliant future. This sense of personal interest and co-operation which goes far to make men of the students, not college boys, manifests itself most strikingly in the relationship or camaraderie with the faculty, and especially in loyalty to the president. I believe that nowhere in the United States is a college president so thoroughly known and heartily liked and admired by all students as President Harper. Not only does every student feel that the president knows

him personally, but he knows that the president has an individual interest in him and his affairs. He feels that he may go to him about his private concerns, and as far as his position will permit it, the president may be depended upon to see the college life from the student's point of view. He does not impress them as merely an august and powerful personage at the head of a great corporation. This is more than mere popularity-it is loyalty and devotion. The students, one may say without exception, would be unwilling to commit any act that might place President Harper and the new university in an ungracious light be fore the public. They would care little for the possible punishment as compared to the pain and difficulties they might give the president. The result is that student government is one of the least perplexing problems at the university. This fact may be due in part to the large proportion of mature graduate students, who sober the usual college spirit; but I think that the deeper cause is the truer one-a sense of loyalty to the young university and its responsible executive.

It may be said that a government of love and good-feeling is possible in a university of one thousand students, but quite impossible when three times that number must be cared for. The system of the University of Chicago is very elastic at this point. The institution is subdivided, and control and government will be vested more and more largely in the boards that immediately supervise certain divisions. At present the numerous deans-eight I think in all-make it possible to understand the individual work of the students; make it possible to give every student a feeling that he possesses an individuality which means something. Indeed, with us the danger is on the other side-that the student will be pampered into feeling that the univer sity depends altogether upon him.

A young man may walk, some fine May morning, down the flag-stones of the yard at Harvard; the sun comes flooding in through the time-honored trees, the vines in tender green are

creeping about the stiff deformity of this building or softening the angular lines of that, and the very breeze flutters the dignified air of the place; those isolated buildings, each in itself so awkward and plain, with the wide openings between, through which the breezes and the sunshine play-subtly they present themselves to him like a slowly making picture of a past, a puritan past, with its rigidity, its scorn of beauty, its clean correctness and integrity of life. The wide spaces, the uncompromising architecture of the halls, are an incarnation of New England, softened now by time and its associations. And this sense of a fine New England past grows richer as he wanders up Brattle Street or Kirkland Street, that have seen so much which has had distinction in our America. Emerson, and Lowell, and Longfellow -the inadequate but just expression of our early life-all those and many others have left a benediction to Cambridge. Surely nowhere else on our continent is life so precious in its past possessions and subtle influences, as just here in this cluster of puritan buildings, in this fresh air that comes in from the

sea.

And if it be his good fortune to take up his home there, to live that life for four or perhaps seven years, he will find that the place is not merely of the past it has to-day a very definite life of its own. If he is carefully conscious of it all, he will note that this definite ideal of life, made of tradition and sure innovation, is moulding him inevitably, has moulded him irrevocably. If he has given himself up to it freely, he will leave it all with a sad home sickness, a regret of going away and leaving himself. His critics will say that his training has been snobbish, that he belongs to a class, that he is "indifferent" (let us hope that he is to cheap affairs!), that he is not American-whatever that may be. And if he is frank with himself, he will own a part of this impeachment, but not as an impeachment. What has been valuable in his past training is not so much any one piece of work, any one great scholar's influence, as the spirit of the place, its standards of work, its ideals of excellence in short, its

aristocratic bearing. In so far as he has absorbed that intolerant love for the most excellent and but one excellence, he has come out a Harvard man.

We meet a new order of things at Chicago. It is not my purpose to contrast the worth of the two ideals of life, or to judge them; indeed, I have said that Chicago resembles Harvard, paradoxical as it is, in many vital respects. The complete intellectual, unsectarian independence in spirit is the same at Chicago as at Cambridge; the desire for high standards in scholarship is the same; the manliness and maturity of the students, born of great freedom, resembles the Harvard way of life. The multitudinous subjects and teachers are characteristic of all large universities. The one fact that at Chicago professionalism in athletics is absolutely unknown, although the Western colleges have not outgrown the habit of buying success if possible, places the new university with its older sister.

But at the University of Chicago the student graduates as a person, not as a member of a class. His work and student life are individual from the very first. He enters the university when he pleases; he graduates when he pleases. His course has been individual and democratic. The conventions of an old society, the ambitions of a select set, do not trouble him. He has had great freedom, great opportunities, and the stimulus of an eager, emulous life. He goes away certainly not without some insight into what learning and scholarship mean, but without class loyalties, without the intimate personal life so dear to us who have had it.

We look to a new order of things in learning, as in national and social life. In that new life, one fancies, the dominating forces will be traditionless. The uninterrupted appreciation of intellectual goods will no longer be true. The subjects taught will increase without number, and the most catholic means of estimation or valuation will be employed. Our new student will be contemptuous of mere culture, of anything that derives its respect from the past alone; he will despise forms and ceremonies, but he will be powerful in life.

I

ELIA CORBETT was too happy; her happiness frightened her. Not on theological grounds, however; she was sure that people had a right to be happy; but she was equally sure that it was a right seldom recognized by destiny. And her happiness almost touched the confines of pain-it bordered on that sharp ecstasy which she had known, through one sleepless night after another, when what had now become a reality had haunted her as an unattainable longing.

Delia Corbett was not in the habit of using what the French call gros mots in the rendering of her own emotions; she took herself, as a rule, rather flippantly, with a dash of contemptuous pity. But she felt that she had now entered upon a phase of existence wherein it became her to pay herself an almost reverential regard. Love had set his golden crown upon her forehead, and the awe of the office allotted her subdued her doubting heart. To her had been given the one portion denied to all other women on earth, the immense, the unapproachable privilege of becoming Laurence Corbett's wife.

Here she burst out laughing at the sound of her own thoughts, and rising from her seat walked across the drawing-room and looked at herself in the mirror above the mantel- piece. She was past thirty and had never been very pretty; but she knew herself to be capable of loving her husband better and pleasing him longer than any other woman in the world. She was not afraid of rivals; he and she had seen each other's souls.

She turned away, smiling carelessly at her insignificant reflection, and went back to her arm-chair near the balcony. The room in which she sat was very beautiful; it pleased Corbett to make all his surroundings beautiful. It was

the drawing-room of his hotel in Paris, and the balcony near which his wife sat overlooked a small bosky garden framed in ivied walls, with a mouldering terracotta statue in the centre of its cupshaped lawn. They had now been married some two months, and, after travelling for several weeks, had both desired to return to Paris; Corbett because he was really happier there than elsewhere, Delia because she passionately longed to enter as a wife the house where she had so often come and gone as a guest. How she used to find herself dreaming in the midst of one of Corbett's delightful dinners (to which she and her husband were continually being summoned) of a day when she might sit at the same table, but facing its master, a day when no carriage should wait to whirl her away from the brightly lit porte-cochère, and when, after the guests had gone, he and she should be left alone in his library, and she might sit down beside him and put her hand in his! The high-minded reader may infer from this that I am presenting him, in the person of Delia Corbett, with a heroine whom he would not like his wife to meet; but how many of us could face each other in the calm consciousness of moral rectitude if our inmost desire were not hidden under a convenient garb of lawful observance?

Delia Corbett, as Delia Benson, had been a very good wife to her first husband; some people (Corbett among them) had even thought her laxly tolerant of "poor Benson's" weaknesses. But then she knew her own; and it is admitted that nothing goes so far toward making us blink the foibles of others as the wish to have them extend a like mercy to ourselves. Not that Delia's foibles were of a tangible nature; they belonged to the order which escapes analysis by the coarse process of our social standards. Perhaps their very immateriality, the consciousness that she cod never be brought to book