Upton Sinclair's new book. "The Goose Step," is merely an application of these old truths to the universities of America. The professor there, however, is not merely despoiled of his halo, but encompassed within an iron mask, particularly if he is a professor of economics. If he teaches Romance Languages, or Greek literature he may breathe the free air of Heaven, although at a somewhat law salary. But if he teaches advertising or public speaking he may inhale the ozone of Olympus at a comparatively high salary. Indeed, he may even be made President of his University as was Brown of New York, Kinley of Illinois, and Scott of North-Western University. But if he is a professor of economics and protests against sweated child labour and unemployment as Scott Nearing did at Pennsylvania, or if he is a chemist and analyses the typhoid infected water supply whence comes the profits of a wealthy trustee of the university, as did Allan Eaton of Oregon University, then he is summarily dismissed without any hope of redress,

At Illinois, Nebraska and South California they teach millinery; and at New York University there are "three professors of marketing, four professors of finance, four professors of accounting, four of business English, one of salesmanship, one of merchandising one of foreign trade, one of life insurance." President Scott, of North-Western University, who was promoted from his former position of Director of the Bureau of Salesmanship Research, has written hooks on "The Psychology of Advertising," "Increasing Unman Efficiency in Business," "The Psychology of Public Speaking," "Influencing Men in Business," etc. Fortunately, we have the two former in our own library, and have been able to check independently what Upton Sinclair says of the type of man that is honoured and placed foremost in the American university.

"Thus 'Uneeda' is a name which cannot be forgotten," he writes In "The Psychology of Advertising." "It pleases by its very ingenuity, although most of the attempts in this direction have been futile. Thus "Uwanta" is recognised as an imitation, and is neither imnressive nor pleasing. "Keen Kutter" is a name for tools which is not easily forgotten."

Below an advertisement he reprints on p. 209 is the legend:—

"A slimy frog associated with White Star coffee kills the desire for coffee."

In an eloquent chapter on food advertising, he says:—

"Of course there are certain cuts of pork which do not resemble certain parts of turkey, but the question has to do only with those parts of turkey and pork which cannot be easily discriminated with closed eyes. The correct answer to the question is that we prefer turkey to pork because there is a certain atmosphere or halo thrown about turkey which is not possessed by pork. We are inclined to think of pork as 'unclean,' gross and kinesthetic. Turkey has enveloped itself in visions of feasts and banquets."

And on page 27 are some other statements on utilitarian page 42 aesthetics, concerned not with taste but with vision, which laboratory tests proved to be utterly untrue.

Some idea of the state of affairs may be gained from the spectacle of America's richest university, the paragon of millionaire mobsmen — Columbia, the gem of New York State. Nicholas Murray Butler, surnamed "the Miraculous," here reigns supreme over 1500 professors, lecturers, demonstrators, sycophants, bullies, and dullards, with one or two honest men. All problems of academic freedom are in the hands of a committee, whose meetings only two or three attend, who often give no reason for dismissals, and who seem to accept the word of Butler for everything which they wish to believe. And the University which they control is nothing more nor less than an offshoot of the house of Morgan. Its resources are estimated at 75,000,000 dollars, its annual income is over 7,000,000 dollars. Not one of its board of trustees is a scholar. There is an engineer, a physician, a bishop, ten corporation lawyers, eight bankers, railroad and real estate owners, in short plutocrats, and they range from Mareellus Hartley Dodge, son-in-law of Wm. Rockefeller, and chairman of the Pemingtou Arms Co., to llerberl L. Slatterlee, Morgan attorney and Morgan son-in-law. The President of the University is nothing but a snivelling seeker after political honours, for ever fawning at the feet of the rich and powerful (this is America's "greatest educationalist!"). What he is and how his German education has left him may be gauged from the fact that when Senator La Follette said in a public address: "Our forefathers shed their blood in order that they might establish on this continent a government deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed, in which the will of the people, expressed through their duly elected representatives, should be sovereign," Butler rushed to the rescue with the statement: "Our forefathers did nothing of the sort; they did something quite different."

"Official trickery and deception, threat and insult," are the mildest of the words of Professor Joel Spingarn, a poet and scholar, in describing the state of affairs in America's biggest University. "No device, however unworthy, is forbidden by custom or by honour. A professor may be asked to put in a purely formal resignation as a compliment to a prospective new head of his department, and then be dumbfounded to have his letter acted upon by (he President."And behold the intellectual honesty of Butler! in 1914 he denounced the warmakers in unmeasured terms. "One thing this war had done," he said in a speech, "it had put an end to the contention, always stupid and often insincere, that huge armaments were an insurance against war. . . This argument was invented by war-makers who had munitions of war to sell." But Butler publishes this speech, and has time for thought in the meantime (remember the Remington Arms Co., which cleaned up 24,000,000 dollars in one deal). These phrases are softened to: "The contention always made with more emphasis than reasonableness,' and "Those who really believe in war armaments as ends in themselves." Butler always bows to the millionaires.

President Day of Syracuse is another character straight out of a comic opera. "The strike," he says," is a conspiracy and nothing less." "Cod wants the rich man . . . Christ's doctrines have made the world rich, and provide adequate uses for its riches." But even where the Presidents selected by the wealthy boards of page 43 trustees are not as ludicrous as Professors Butler and Day, they are all determinedly set against freedom of speech.

At Harvard, under Professor Lowell, radicals are barred from the platforms of the Union Debating Society on the ground that partisan questions must not be discussed. Speakers who discuss contentious contemporaneous questions of politics or economics or religion are debarred—and this rule was used to exclude Mrs. Pankhurst.

Professor Smith of Pennsylvania is reported to have sum moned some erring members of his staff before him, and said: Gentlemen, what business have academic people to be meddling in political qustions? Suppose, for illustration, that I, as a chemist, should discover that some slaughtering company was putting formalin in its sausage, now surely that would be none of my business." This tone is symptomatic of American university life, for the president, selected by a board of millionaire trustees, has the power of dismissal over his staff; so that Sinclair is able to tell that in the home of big business, where the evils of the competitive capitalistic system are most rampant, there is not one professor of political economy who openly avows himself a Socialist. Indeed, men have been arbitrarily dismissed for much more venial offences. Ross, of Stanford, for advocating free silver and denouncing the importation of cheap Chinese labour, and Love joy, also of Stanford, for recording his protest at Ross's dismissal, are two examples of the hundred or so that are quoted in the "Goose Step." The exercising of this rigid censorship over the teaching of economics has, of course, promoted student intolerance. Professor Laski, of Harvard, was driven out by the force of this carefuly cultured public opinion rather than by the direct exercise of the presidential authority. We cannot resist quoting one gem from the Laski lampoon printed in the College magazine:—

As you sit there growing prouder,
With your skilful tongue awag,
As your piping voice grows louder,
Preaching Socialistic gag—
Stop a minute, let us warn you,
Nature's freak,
That we loath you and we scorn you—
Bolshevik!

Passing over all considerations of respect that is due from student to professor, and Laski's brilliant record, there is Harvard's attitude towards liberalism.

The dragooning of opinion in the universities, of course, cannot easily confine itself to economic teachings. The bulk of American academic opinion has submitted tamely to the shackles imposed on it, and has relapsed into political quiescence. The few men who defended their principles were unorganised and impotent, and intolerance has spread like a bush fire in consequence. But once the chains are on they can be riveted tighter, once the forest is afire it devastates every settlement in the vicinity.

Those men who acquiesced in the suppression of Socialism by the magnates of the university boards, because, forsooth, they did not agree with Socialism themselves, men who were unscrupulous or careless enough to hold that the end justified the means, are now in the ignominious position of finding the instrument of suppression turned against themselves. Capitalistic intolerance is page 44 dragging religious oppression in its wake. The Honourable W.J. Bryan has succeeded in putting through measures in the States of South Carolina and Oklahoma providing that no public appropriations shall be used for paying the salaries of professors who teach Involution or Darwinism. In Kentucky a similar bill was defeated by one vote. And the late Secretary of State is now touring the country to advocate similar measures elsewhere.

Such repression call lead nowhere but to the return of mediaevalism—the tyranny of high finance in place of the tyranny of the Church and a reversion to the gloom that overspread Europe between the fall of Rome before the Goths and the fall of Byzantium before the Turks.

No opinion that mankind has ever held true has been true enough to justify the forcible repression of conflicting opinions. The inquisitors of Spain, the bishops who condemned Jeanne d'Are to be burned at the stake for witchcraft, were as certain that God was on their side and the right was theirs, and theirs alone, as is any American university president to-day in his defence of the existing order. There is but one way to test opinion—by free discussion. The upholders of the status quo need no repression to kill falsehood or error; that they may leave to the commonsense of mankind. And if they are concerned to suppress truth, then it is to. the truth that we owe our highest allegiance. Facilis descensus Averni, especially when our new aristocracy of beer bottles and beef barrels shies at the bogey of freedom of economic teachings and leads the vehicle of civilisation in one last frenzied bolt down the hill to the cliff edge beneath.

And what will the sequel reveal when, in all lands and among. all peoples, failing effective opposition, the means of production, distribution and exchange are aggregated in as few hands as in I he United States of America, when freedom of thought is efficiently muzzled in its last, lorn stronghold, the universities of the world, as it is to-day in those of the Land of Liberty?

The two following extracts from Upton Sinclair's "Goose-Step," and "The Nation" (New York) of July 4. 1923, and H. J. Laski's article, from the "Adelphi" (an excellent London monthly magazine recently started) throw a greater light on American university life than any review can do. We publish them as a dreadful warning to ourselves, for even if we have nothing like the American system in New Zealand yet, still as the Navy League says, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. And it isn't so very long since a prospective professor, recommended by the highest authorities in England, was turned down by one of the New Zealand University Councils because his religious views were suspicious.—Editor "Spike."