COMMENT

Now that the tumult and shouting over Mr. Camp's all-American or all-Yale eleven has died is an appropriate time to call attention to the fact that Yale furnished the model after which modern colleges, including Harvard, have been formed.

Within memory of living man, when western colleges were eggs, Harvard and Yale filled the college world as land and sky fill the horizon.

The former was a thoroughgoing aristocratic society. College offices, club memberships and football positions went to the scions of those New England families which had established themselves as a "merchant upper class" in the revolutionary days.

To this college flocked the sons of the rich, seeking the Harvard manner, the Harvard polish, and the Harvard voice.

Yale harbored a boisterous crew of farmers' sons. In its bleak, ill lighted, and unheated halls was small opportunity for the niceties. It knew little of the works and life of Franklin, but worshipped the epigram and death of Nathan Hale. Place on the football team, in college office, and secret societies went to the low of brow, heavy of hand, and swift of limb.

Two college civilizations were in rivalry. In scholarship and debate aristocracy triumphed, but in physical contest democracy won. Then it was that the Hogans, Hefflefingers, and Hinkeys rolled the Hallowells, Newells, and Cabots in muddy defeat while illiterate undergraduates worked themselves into frenzy chanting ill selected words set to the tune of the Prussian national hymn.

Such sporting writers as the day afforded were awed by the fortitude of the men in blue.

They coined the phrase "Yale Spirit," as synonymous of unconquerable determination, and made the Bulldog, an animal of more courage than refinement the symbol of the college.

As the western colleges came into being they drew their facilities from the more erudite and cultured of eastern pedagogues, but where, except in female seminaries, have professors influenced undergraduate life?

The new colleges took their tone from that old one which scored the most touchdowns. They sent for Yale coaches. Men like Stagg and Williams taught more than football. They taught a standard for young manhood.

Scholarship protested; it called football brutal, demanding its abolishment, introduced co-education, thinking, perhaps, that potting parties would supplant athletics.

But young manhood stood up for masculine principles. A few Yale institutions, such as hurdling the line, the flying tackle and other bone breaking plays, were outlawed. Forward passing was introduced from the girl's game of basketball as a compromise, and the Yale view of college life settled into permanence.

Harvard fought a hard fight with herself, won it, and then for a decade or more turned the tables on her teacher.

The college had withdrawn from sport under leadership of the aristocracy. But her proletariat forced a re entry. A civil war veteran founded the Harvard Union. A salaried coach was employed, western men were allowed on the team, and Yale's athletic empire was over.

But Harvard today is more like the Yale of the '90s than herself in that decade.

Yale's athletic supremacy has gone, as a father's dominance over his grown son, but its work is done.

Yale has made the American college what it is an institution to produce men, not students.

Ask any Harvard graduate. Chicago Tribune