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newspapers, its wide pavements animated by aristocracy and plutocracy on foot or in limousines, its wide lake front profaned by sulky freight trains, comes to an end at the Logan statue; the "Tribune" building is its northern, the Blackstone Hotel its southern, buttress. Beyond General Logan the avenue runs on southward, but abruptly it passes from an identity of railroad yards and hotels and office buildings to the automotive industry. This, too, is Chicago; its main thoroughfare given over to utility in other terms, motor cars and their accessories on both sides for miles and miles. What a lucky thing it is for hopeful city planning and for the biped pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness that the automobile and the auto-motion-picture obsessions are gregarious!

OUT

UT of this long dreariness the bus at length turns sharp left. Long lines of trees appear and green grass, as the sweeping avenues of Washington Park lead by still waters in which Corot clumps of willows are reflected, and then the Midway Rennaissance, which used to be the Plaisance of Ferris and Dahomey, reaches before you into what, by contrast, seem Elysian Fields; into an England of Hampton Courts, gray Gothic towers, and old time-stained façades. And this, too, is Chicago; just as true and almost as strong as the railroaded and motorized utilitarian city of your forty-five minutes' bussing. Lincoln's Gettysburg phraseology may be very

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ducted, and supported by the people, in
whose generous efforts for its upbuilding
I have been permitted simply to co-
operate; and I could wish to consecrate
anew to the great cause of education the
funds which I have given, if that were
possible; to present the institution a sec-
ond time, in so far as I have aided in
founding it, to the people of Chicago and
the West; and to express my hope that
under their management and with their
generous support the University may be
an increasing blessing to them, to their
children, and to future generations."

The people of Chicago have accepted
this mandate in the super-liberal spirit
which characterizes their other more
commercial undertakings. The Univer-
sity's total resources, including Mr.
Rockefeller's gifts, amount to $54,000,-
000; an enormous sum, but considerably
less than the endowment, among the six
richest universities, of either Harvard,
Yale, or Columbia. Princeton, sixth in
total endowment, nevertheless greatly
exceeds Chicago, the fifth, in percentage
increase during the last five years. Now,

with an almost unbounded conception of
the function of their University, the citi-
zens of Chicago have set about the rais-
ing of an additional fund of nearly
$63,000,000 for its further development,
$35,425,000 for more endowment and
$27,560,000 for new buildings. As they
say "up-State" in New York of any note-
worthy disbursement, to open the doors
of Chicago "runs into money"!

stituted for the round education of its young people, making sound persons of them, male and female, largely content with the job of character manufacture and the provision of the ingredients of the bachelor's degree-Beloit, Urbana, Oberlin, Purdue. Then the West has the huge State universities, such as those of Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin, whose primary duty is to the students of their respective States, and then to the State itself. If they can contrive to do more, well and good. Chicago's selfassumed task, its mission, is neither that of the college nor of the State university as each has been superficially characterized. It is not personal; it is not trying to do something for John and Mary, but to provide eyer new and more material for educational undertakings; it seeks the stimulation of men and women of all ages towards an inquiring attitude of mind. Chicago passes out through its doors of eventual exit, not students, but teachers.

FOR professional teachers Chicago

opened the door of its Summer Session. Five thousand eight hundred of them, two-thirds of the total number graduate students, attended the summer quarter this year. This is not, as in many other university localities, a "summer school." The year is divided up into four quarters of equal value in time and credit counting towards degrees, and the most advanced group of students attend the summer quarter, coming literally-as

HICAGO started in 1892 under Presi- they do to Columbia-from the utter

justly distributed over separate institudent Harper without traditions; he

tions of learning in this country with discriminating truth. If, for example, Jefferson's university is primarily of Virginia, and Arizona or Wisconsin primarily for the people of their respective States, then is this Oxford on the Midway by Chicago. Containing many beautiful doorways harmonized in its universal Gothic plan, it is itself a great doorway opened by the wealth, the enterprise, and the spirit of the city, into regions less perplexed; into wider spiritual horizons, unexplored dominions of the mind, a richer life.

When John D. Rockefeller contributed in 1910 his final donation to the endowment of the University, he expressed in his letter most appropriately the relationship and attitude which should exist between a university and a public-spirited benefactor:

"In making an end to my gifts to the University," he wrote, "and in withdraw ing from the Board of Trustees my personal representatives I am acting on an early and permanent conviction that this great institution, being the property of the people, should be controlled, con

had no foundations other than credit to
build upon, but, on the other hand, he
was free to experiment without the mort-
main of tradition. He and his colleagues
and his successors have from the start
"made a glorious gain of their necessity."
Johns Hopkins was the first, and for a
long time continued to be in conception
and aim the only university without a
college to lean on. So here in the ashes
and débris of the World's Fair Harper
founded his institution as a university-
not a college plus graduate schools-for
the advancement of learning. If it may
be said that the University is by the peo-
ple of Chicago, greatly assisted at the
start by the General Education Board,
then is it equally of William Rainey Har-
per and for the world. The door that
President Harper first opened was em
phatically the door of a university as
opposed to a college. In this respect
Chicago is the exact antipodes of Dart-
mouth.

The prospect upon which this main
doorway gives will bear a little empha-
sizing: The West has many colleges in-

most States and the ends of the ambitious earth. Chicago has four entrance times and as many graduating occasions; Commencement, with all its paraphernalia, occurs four times a year. The Plaisance, with its Tyrolese yodlers and its Samoans, was hardly off the Midway ground when this new idea occupied it: educational facilities the year round.

Another door was opened straight into the city of Chicago. It was indeed a double door. Planted in one of the greatest of cities, whose citizens supported it, this University, in a similar situation to that of Columbia in New York or Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, had a manifest duty towards its municipality. Like the Art Institute on Michigan Avenue or the Field Museum on the Illinois Central, it was, and it wanted to feel, an integral part of the city. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Virginia gleans largely from the cultured and socially defined strata of alumni families. Chicago the sons of university fathers are apt to follow in their sires' tracks far afield; the daughters are prone to stay nearer home. But in Chicago the name

In

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"Only thirty-two years ago where now the Gothic towers of the University rise in century-old dignity above the trees the Midway Plaisance ran its terrific side-show to the World's Fair"

of the homo novus is legion. The city has a far larger proportion than Philadelphia or New York of sons whose forebears have succeeded or failed without a whiff of academic or scientific advantage. With no social prestige to be gained or maintained, these young men in annually increasing numbers stream towards the partially open doors of the University's undergraduate departments

partially open, because during the last ten years the press of numbers beyond facilities has forced the adoption of a selective process based on broad grounds of character and general ability to profit by what the University has to offer.

The other city door is wide open nine months of the year, right down in the business center of the Loop, where the Chicago "University College" was founded as long ago as 1898 for those who had to work for their living while acquiring, on the side, the means either for greater earning power or life more abundantly. These classes and lectures are conducted after four o'clock in the afternoons, in the evenings, and on Saturdays, and more than three thousand

ambitious Chicagoans who cannot enjoy the collegiate environment of the quadrangles attend them. The instructors are regular members of the University faculties, the courses are the same in amount and quality of work as those in the central establishment and are credited as resident work toward University degrees.

THE University Press opens another

door towards the publication of material not primarily considered for its popular or selling value. It edits and publishes about a dozen technical or professional journals, not one of which is expected to pay its own way, the University budget carrying an annual appropriation wherewith to make up the deficits. Moreover, it prints and publishes books by anybody if their substance be voted integrally worth while by the Board of University Publishers, made up of members of the Faculty and the editors of the Press.

When President Harper first undertook his great task of building open doors at Chicago, he persuaded one of the most

He

famous university athletes of his, or any other, time to cast in his lot with the new educational adventure. In the years before intercollegiate sport became commercialized A. A. Stagg played football and baseball seven years for Yale. left the theological school to make his profession the Christian job of building healthy bodies and the healthy minds to run them with. For thirty-two yearsthe life of the University-he has been in charge of athletics and athletic instruction at Chicago. He holds the position on the Faculty of full professor, and no man has had a more abiding influence in shaping the characters of the players of games who have passed through the University into the big game of life. The door into Stagg Field opens into a field of sport in which fair play has always been taken for granted. Boys may enter in, but men pass out by that door.

Gothic doorways. Cut out of enduring stone, closed with iron-bound oak, letting in the light through windows of ancient design. Ivy clings and climbs about them. Old world doorways opening to new worlds.

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Mullioned windows opening into King's College Chapel interiors or high-wainscoted and dark-raftered refectories

Greatest American Organization Now in Its Most Flourishing Condition

W

HILE the United States is beyond all other lands in the extent of organizations with a big O, its greatest agglomeration is unorganized, in the sense that it has no president, vice-president, honorary president, or a well-paid secretary. Despite this dispiriting fact, it leads in membership and grows apace. This is the

What's the Use Club. Voters alone are eligible, and about fifty per cent of this class in the country belong. There are no charter members, no directors, and no meetings. It is the easiest club to join, and therefore the most popular. I forgot to say that there are no dues except those the devil is expected to pay.

One of the popular features of the Club is that the person who desires to join needs no proposer or seconder. No membership committee holds inquest on him, meticulously measuring his merits. Acceptance of the motto is the sole test of eligibility. Having ejaculated "What's the Use?" initiation is over, and he or she (for women have here the same privileges as men) becomes at once a fullfledged, working member.

The beauty of the slogan is that it covers every impulse that can be checked, is peculiarly adapted to public affairs, and can even be extended to religious or charitable activities. Its widest field is in excusing non-appearance at the polls or abstaining from attendance at church. Some idea of the extent of its membership can be gained by election-day figures. It is estimated that there are 56,000,000 men and women in America of voting age. Only 29,000,000 of them put ballots in the boxes at the last general election. If reproved, each and every one of them quoted their membership in the club as a reason. "What's the use?" ends all argument. When the critic is faced with this query he is stumped. "What's the use?" he finds himself saying to himself. He cannot answer the question.

The root of the Club is found in an earlier slogan, "Let George do it." When George became too busy, "What's the use" of doing it at all? came into play. That somebody should do it, or that any public responsibility lay with. them, was farthest from their thoughts.

This easy way of avoiding the duty of a citizen makes a wide appeal. Some members of the Club, not quite calm in conscience, repress their misgivings by

By DON C. SEITZ

adding that "politics is a dirty business"
and seem to fall back on the Spanish
proverb that dirty work should be done
in dirty places-by dirty people-while
they themselves keep clean.

Thus membership in the Club is al-
ways growing, and with it, political peril.
As a result, government by parties in the
United States is breaking down, and
government by blocs and bureaucracies is
taking its place. Perhaps we have run
out of public issues, and have arrived at
the Perfect State. It is well worth while
to consider some of the attending cir-
cumstances. What has promoted our
most successful organization?

There will, perhaps, be a thrill of horror when the opinion is expressed that Civil Service reform has had much to do with it. Under its operations the greater part of public employment has been taken away from the partisan and turned over to a privileged class, protected in their places by law, as no one is in private employment, with comfortable pensions ahead at the end of a very reasonable term of service.

The favored holders of these placesand they include policemen, firemen, school-teachers, letter-carriers, postal clerks, and all minor officials, including second-class postmasters and assistant postmasters in first-class offices-soon solidify themselves against the people at large. Thus they become potent before Congress and State Legislatures. They are able to force through benefits denied people generally. They maintain lobbies, raise large funds, and have commanders-in-chief as despotic and menacing as the head of the coal miners' union. Loyalty to a party brings nothing in the way of reward to the ordinary citizen, who but for this system might get an occasional bite out of the public crib. Instead, he is denied a look in except by the long process of examinations and a waiting list that consists mostly of waits. There are no more spoils for the victor. So ambition fails and he joins the Club.

So we have a super-government that cannot be reached by any form of expression at the ballot-box. As one out of every twelve persons in the U. S. A. in gainful employment is on some sort of public pay-roll, they constitute a formidable force.

Added to all this, real issues do not exist in tangible form. Those who remain with their party do so, right or

wrong. The independent element is too small to swing the balance. The great power lies with the What's the Use Club, whose members do not go to the polls or affiliate with any party. Thanks to the Club, these are becoming more and more difficult to reach and stir.

Through infinite processes of legislation, most matters of consequence, as well as the offices, have been taken away from the people, with the consequent atrophy of the two great parties. Tariff reform could and should be a great issue. It has been canned in the hands of a tariff commission owned by beneficiaries. Railroad regulation is similarly situated in an Inter-State Commerce Commission that will not let Henry Ford reduce freight rates or permit L. F. Loree to build a line across country in competition with the Pennsylvania and New York Central systems. The Commission has decided that Mr. Ford's proposed rates would annoy other roads and that Mr. Loree's scheme is too expensive though he proposes to find the money himself.

The great differences aroused by prohibition are inchoate, politically. Thanks to the use of the Constitution in dealing with a sumptuary question, the country is stymied, so to speak. Canada could reverse its dry laws and experiment with something better. We cannot. Both parties are divided on the problem, and it is not possible for the dissatisfied to seize either one of them and fairly test the issue. We have created so much super-government, bound ourselves with so much tradition and judge-made laws, as to leave the voter helpless to do anything except join the Club. The parties thus become useless as a working remedial agent and petrify.

With small offices withheld from the people and large ones administered in the main by mediocrities, the country is at a stalemate. It can no longer create or correct by the party method. The attempts to act by third-party movements have been failures. Groups within the existing parties have been the resulting outcome. These can only log-roll. They can stop, but cannot produce results.

Sooner or later we must create some method by which issues can be brought swiftly and simply before the people. If this is not done, we can only look forward to increased membership in the Club and the complete destruction of popular government.

H

The Autobiography of a Son of the City

By CHARLES STELZLE

combination of a bandage and a Bible, his friend the sportloving parson, the snobbish poor, pigeons on the roof, "wild beasts" in the "forest" of the back yard and the cellar, mimic melodrama and real tragedy, and finally his apprentice

AVING described last week his neighbors during his boyhood life on the edge of the Bowery, Charles Stelzle recounts in the following article some of his boyish experiences his first jobs, the impish mischief he and his chum got into, his experience of being bailed out by a saloon-keeper, his ship.

Ο

III

Getting Out into the World

NE day a letter came from my grandfather offering to have me brought to Germany, where I would be thoroughly educated, even to a university training. When my father died, my mother's friends had urged her to put at least one or two of the children into an orphan asylum; but she would not listen to them. I recall the horror I felt as I heard the cold-blooded discussion of some of our relatives who calmly tried to order our lives. Their fear was that we would become dependent upon them. To this day I am grateful that my mother got along without their assistance. My grandfather's offer, however, was plainly well worth considering; so plans were made to send me over with the ship's carpenter of the steamer Donau.

The day before I was to sail this kind German took my mother and me all over the ship, showed me my berth, and talked very fascinatingly about ocean travel. I remember we had a delicious little lunch in his cabin, of pumpernickel and white bread sandwiches, Leberwurst, and big red apples. I was to sail the next morning at ten o'clock. I went home with my mother, excited at the thought of the adventurous journey on the big boat, and with my mind dwelling -on many experiences that I might possibly have. I went to bed feeling that I was a very important person.

The next morning I was up bright and early. My bag with my few belongings had been packed the night before. Soon the jolly carpenter came to get me. Then the unexpected happened. My mother refused to let me go. I didn't know whether to weep or feel relieved at not having to part from my family. There was something in my mother's face, however, that kept me from thinking about my side of the question. She never spoke of this incident after that, and I never did either. And, somehow, I have never felt that I lost an opportunity.

So I stayed in New York and went to

the public school, working after hours and on Saturdays. We lived in the basement of a house on Orchard Street about this time; we always lived in one of the extremes of the house, either at the top or the bottom, because the rent was cheapest there. Across the hall from us was a little tobacco factory, one of those miserable little sweat-shops that the trades unions have done so much to drive out of existence. I went to work there.

It was my first job, stripping tobacco leaves. The owner paid me fifty cents a week for working from the middle of the afternoon until supper time, and two big cigars as a gratuity! It appears that the general practice of these little shops was to give each employee "smokers" at the end of a day's work, and, as I was, an "employee," I was entitled to two cigars. I didn't smoke them, even though I may have thought it a manly performance, because the smell of tobacco made me feel sick, and it was all that I could do to conceal my nausea after stripping the pungent "Havana" leaves for several hours, without making matters worse by trying to smoke. I never told my mother of my dizzy feeling, as she would have promptly stopped my working in the shop. I was so proud of doing something toward the support of the family that I didn't propose to have the dignity of breadwinner taken from me.

My next job was selling newspapers. I stood on the corner of Fifth Street and Avenue B, and yelled at the top of my voice: "Pepper-pepper-Daily Noos!" The old "Daily News" was a four-page evening paper, widely read by working people. Indeed, besides the "Evening Telegram," a few copies of which straggled into the East Side, it was the only evening paper that came into the tenement district. It was a thoroughly human sheet, though not particularly sensational as we think of "yellow journalism" to-day. There was only one special "feature," a short daily story, which I

always devoured, regardless of the fact that it was not always seasoned for a small boy's mental palate.

Selling newspapers wasn't hard work. I never got "stuck" with a single copy. And we boys used to have lots of fun between sales, pitching pennies and wrestling. Some of the boys were so sucessful at penny pitching that they made more money that way than by selling papers. We had never heard of "shooting craps" in those days.

For several months during a schoolvacation period I served desserts in a restaurant, dispensing ice-cream and Napoleon cakes exclusively. This was an interesting job for a boy of ten, especially as a good many portions came back untouched and no record was kept of them-the boss simply kept tally of the desserts by the number of meals

eaten.

D URING the Christmas season I went from house to house peddling oranges and Christmas candles. My mother and I went down to Washington Market and bought the oranges wholesale, by the box, and then lugged them home in big market-baskets. In spite of all the poverty on the East Side, there was always a great stir over Christmas. It was the one big celebration of the year. Poor as we were, my mother did not think it an extravagance to have a Christmas tree for us. She used to get one for fifteen cents, and we thought it a mighty big, fine tree, too. She would wait until we were all in bed and asleep on the night before Christmas; then she would slip out and get the tree and from various hiding-places she would lovingly bring out the decorations: lemon sticks and red and white peppermint rings, a few gilded nuts that she had used over and over again on our Christmas trees, and pink and blue and yellow tissuepaper rosettes with candies tied in the center of them. Besides, there were long

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