YE LEFT ME BY THE GARDEN WALK. Ye left me by the garden-walk, Ye left me at the stile, Ye failed me at the trystin'-rock Till sure I was forlorn, Ye scorned me arm on Saturday Ye sent me off the balcony An' frowned me off the lawn, A bit o' love behind. Richard John Walsh. Athletics Editorial. Are there to be intercollegiate athletics or are there not? This is the question that comes from the lips of every impatient undergraduate as he contemplates the inaction of the elusive Board of Overseers. Surely there is much to be said in favor of a cessation of hostilities for a few years. Athletics all over America are sadly in need of thorough reconstruction. As the leader on "Harvard and Intercollegiate Athletics" points out, the sums of money involved in present day sports are entirely out of proportion with the value of the sports in themselves. The great games are no longer simple contests of skill and strength between two equally matched universities. They are that to the undergraduates and graduates, but to the great majority of those who flock to Soldiers Field in November, the games are "Roman holidays," the American bull-fight or gladiatorial combat. For many of the colleges football has become an advertising medium. Better one new half-back than two new professors, has been the cry! For such colleges each victory means a certain increase in the registration, and by the registration these colleges are wont to measure their greatness. President Eliot and the Board of Overseers have, on the other hand, consistently opposed football. Far from desiring the notoriety which football victories give, they have even gone so far as to threaten to abolish the game entirely. By degrees, Harvard teams have been forced, of late, to adopt the methods of their opponents. In self-defense, they have had to fight fire with fire. Even now, we are not in a class with colleges that pay their players. We have adopted professional coaching because we have realized that if we want to learn to do a thing as well as it can be done, we must go for our education to a man who has made a life-study of just that thing. To study philosophy we go to a professional philosopher, to study football we must go to a professional coach. As long as we charge the general public a high admission price to the games, we are morally bound to give them their money's worth. We are professionals, inasmuch as we perform on the athletic field and accept money from the public for so doing. Therefore, it is natural and necessary that we should have professional in structors. Forty thousand spectators, receipts of one hundred thousand dollars and more, professional coaches, in less scrupulous colleges professional players, reputations of universities in the balance of athletic success these are the results of the present system. Decidedly they throw true sportsmanship into the shadow. The leader points out one way of remedying the conditions. We must beat our opponents at their own game and then dictate terms to them. Only by achieving a dominant position can we attempt to remodel intercollegiate athletics. When we have done that, it will be time to speak of the means with which it is to be done. That the new system will sanction the professional coach is possible, that it will exclude on the other hand enormous gate receipts and a general public that views the games as it does prize-fights, is essentially necessary. The desire of the Board of Overseers to bring Harvard back to the straight and narrow path of strictly amateur athletics is natural. But it is not likely that stopping all intercollegiate contests will be at all the benefit to the University which they apparently consider it. If the discipline and strict training which a great number of undergraduates who try for the 'Varsity teams undergo every year, were completely relaxed, it is doubtful whether the virtue and spiritual beauty of the community would experience a marked increase. The theatres and restaurants of Boston would undoubtedly do a more thriving business. It is strongly to be urged that the Board of Overseers take the undergraduates into their confidence, and rather than arbitrarily decree this or that, co-operate with them in some measure that will be to the honor and lasting benefit of the college. Tuition The cost of running the University is great, instructors and places of instruction are many, and their maintenance is expensive, but the new system of increasing the income was not a happy thought. It is a boomerang that returns to the Administration whence it came and strikes it in its tenderest part, the elective system. The benefit that many undergraduates derived from the elective system in the past lay in their power to take courses. outside of their regular work, so-called "general culture" courses which did not take much time, but nevertheless, were a decided benefit to the men that took them. Thus, many men, instead of taking merely sixteen and a half courses during their four years took as many as twenty. All that is over now. None but the highly virtuous or reckless will pay twenty dollars a year for an extra course. The only profit that will come to the Bursar's Office through the new fees will come from the men who are taking their degrees in three years, and those are generally the men who can least afford to pay the additional amount. The men who are working their way through college will have to work a little harder and eat a little less. Otherwise they must return for a fourth year. The new tuition fee is illogical. It tends to take away the advantages of two pet institutions of the Administration, the elective system and the three year degree. Book Notices. WALT WHITMAN. By Bliss Perry. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1906. Price $1.50 net. In biography, the problem which details to use and which to discard is an important one. Mr. Perry, in his "Walt Whitman," has made the selection most fittingly. The bulk of the book consists of narrative, connecting quotations from Whitman's prose and verse, together with contemporaneous criticism. It is the story of a happy, roving, wandering man who seems to cry out that all things are good, "now with inarticulate rapture and agony, now with a full-toned ‘Benedicte, omnia opera Domini! Praise Him and magnify Him forever!' Whitman is pictured in the struggle and storm of opposition caused by the "Leaves of Grass," on which Emerson shed a protecting light unawares. During the Civil War we see him writing his battle songs and odes while he tends the sick and wounded of both sides. The years of his clerkship in Washington, and the loyal, eloquent defence by O'Connor of Whitman on the occasion of his unjust discharge-the tale, in short, of the pamphlet, "The Good Grey Poet,"-Mr. Perry describes and illustrates admirably. Of Whitman's days in Camden, where he received almost royally actors and literary men of worldfame, his biographer says, "neither Luther, Dr. Johnson, nor Goethe could have passed unharmed through a Camden apotheosis." In the final essay, Mr. Perry sums up Whitman as a mystic, and as an Oriental, in the sense that his style harks back to the Old Testament and the poetry of the East. A parallel is drawn between Whitman and Rousseau, with each of whom "Back to Nature" was the text. As to form, the biographer believes that "emotional effect outweighs any a priori argument as to the means by which the effect is produced." As regards the "gospel of nudity," the writer remarks, "To a healthyminded person these lines are like accidentally opening the door of the wrong dressing-room, one is amused, embarrassed, disenchanted, or disgusted, according to one's temperament and training." In short, Whitman, with his great vague "divine average" idea is like a guide |