Читать книгу People of the Whirlpool - Mabel Osgood Wright - Страница 12

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(To R. R.)

"December 22, 19—.

"So social change has also cast its shadow across even your country pathway, dear Hippocrates? I wish it had spared you, but I feared as much when I heard that your peaceful town had been invaded by an advance guard of those same People of the Whirlpool who keep the social life of their own city in a ferment.

"You ask what is the matter, what the cause of the increasing restlessness that appears on every side, driving the conservative thinking class of moderate means to seek home shelter beyond city limits, and drawing the rest into a swirl that, sooner or later, either casts them forth as wrecks or sucks them wholly down.

"The question is difficult of answer, but there are two things that are potent causes of the third. Money too quickly earned, or rather won, causes an unwise expansion, and a fictitious prosperity that has degraded the life standard. Except in exclusively academic circles, the man is gauged by his power of financial purchase and control, and the dollar is his hall mark. He is forced to buy, not win, his way. Of course, if pedigree and private character correspond in quantity, so much the better, but their importance is strictly held in abeyance.

"Even in the legendary classic shades of learning, the cold pressure of the golden thumb crowds down and chills penniless brains. All students do not have equal chance and equal rights. How can they, when the exclusiveness of many fraternities is not by intellectual gauge or the capability for comradeship, but the power to pay high dues and spend lavishly. Of later years, in several conspicuous cases, even the choice of college officials of high control has been guided rather by their capacity as financiers than for ripened and inspiring scholarship.

"Then, too, the rack of constant change is detrimental to the finer grade of civic sentiment. It would seem that the Island's significant Indian name was wrought into its physical construction like the curse that kept the Jew of fable a wanderer. Periodically the city is rent and upheaved in unison with the surrounding changes of tide. Here one does not need to live out his threescore years and ten to see the city of his youth slip away from him. Even his Alma Mater packs her trunks and moves about too rapidly to foster the undying loyal home spirit among her sons—my college has lived in three houses since my freshman year. How I envy the sons of Harvard, Yale, and all the rest who can go back, and, feeling at least a scrap of the old campus turf beneath their feet, close their eyes and be young again for one brief minute. Is not this the reason why so many of Columbia's sons, in spite of the magnificent opportunities she offers, send their sons elsewhere, because they realize the value of associations they have missed, and recognize the Whirlpool's changefulness?

"What would be the feelings of an Oxford man, on returning from his life struggle in India or Australia, to visit his old haunts, if he found, as a sign of vaunted progress, the Bodleian Library turned into an apartment house!