ATTITUDE OF COLLEGE MEN TOWARDS POLITICS ALL WRONG, SAYS PELL

all the more the duty of decent citizens to try to make an improvement in the government of their country, and stupid because the slightest investigation will show any intelligent man that the widespread stories of American political dishonesty are almost always without foundation. In those cases where corruption and bribery have been clearly demonstrated, it has invariably been discovered that a group of the most successful business men of the community have combined to achieve the election or appointment of a corrupt man to a comparatively small position for their private profit. It is my firm conviction that except for certain large contributions which have unquestionably been paid for by percentages in the tariff schedules there is practically no return given for any contributions to party funds.

Condemned to Delays

Of course the average young man going into politics will be condemned to a certain extent to the same delays and disappointments that will attend him going into business or professional life. He will not be able to impress his personality immediately on great numbers of experienced men; he will not be able to achieve the millenium in a minute; he will have a hard time making even desirable changes. It will be slow work. Anybody can sit at a desk and create Utopias ad lib. We must remember that the law stating that momentum equals mass times velocity applies as well in politics as in physics, and that a man speaking for a million voters, the leader of a great party, can not always move as rapidly as a man speaking only for himself. The power of the organization of which he is the head gives tremendous strength to his movements, but its weight will prevent him from advancing very fast. No man who took part in the effort fifteen or twenty years ago to achieve an intelligent coaching system for Harvard football can fail to realize the difficulty of overcoming the inertia of a mass of people even in the best cause.

Do Not Expect Glorious Career

I do not urge others to expect nor do I expect for myself a glorious career covered with public honor. No man can achieve very much by himself; just as in a war all men can not be generals; but unless that part of the community which has received great benefits from the United States and which should situations stands ready without the hope of reward, without the hope of glory, to defend its institutions intelligently and carefully against the insidious advances of their opponents in times of peace, we may be sure that they will fall. We who support the old principles of the American government have to oppose not so much the active opposition of the avowed enemies of the country openly endeavoring to overthrow us as the work of virtuous but impractical and shortsighted individuals dazzled by particular events or maddened by particular wrongs.

The old institutions of our country are at the present moment most seriously menaced, not by the Bolshevist or Socialist, but by men and women consciously or unconsciously trying to foist on this country the ideals of the old German Empire, to impose on us a system of regulation, interference and censorship in the place of our old scheme of individual liberty. They would regulate the life of the poor man for what they believe to be his good; they would censor his amusements and his reading of the State, but they do not realize that in doing this they are putting an end to that system of individual liberty and individual responsibility without which no democracy can live. Their own creed is stated by themselves as being the belief that "civic liberty is more important than personal liberty."

We who believe that all liberty is founded on personal liberty must unite in the defense of our principles and realize that each citizen is a soldier; that every vote is a shot, and we must see to it that no soldiers and shots are wasted. I am firmly convinced that unless the graduates of our universities take a more serious interest in politics in the future than they have in the past our country will fall or at least change so utterly that we will not be able to recognize it, and it will fall not because its institutions are unworthy to survive, but because it could not call on the continuous unrecorded services of its citizens. After all, if men of education who owe much to their country are unwilling to take a serious interest in its affairs, can we honestly blame men who are not familiar with these institutions and who owe very little to them for not taking an interest in them and making sacrifices for them?