P. S. As this goes to press, General Wood resigns.
For four years during my early life as a writer I lived—first in a tent, then in a little cabin which I built, then in an old farm-house—in the wooded hills about five miles north of Princeton. I wrote “Manassas” there, and “The Jungle.” For “Manassas” I used the Princeton library, so I spent a great deal of time about the place, and got to know it very well. I dwell on those days, and visions rise of elegant country gentlemen’s estates, deep shade-trees and smooth cool lawns with peacocks and lyre-birds strutting about; and the campus, with elegant young gentlemen lounging, garbed with costly simplicity and elaborately studied carelessness. I remember the warm perfumed evenings of spring, with the singing on the steps of “Old North”; the bonfires and parades and rejoicings over athletic victories; the grave ceremonials of commencement, and the speeches full of exalted sentiments. I remember a tall black-coated figure—I never saw it without a shining silk hat—striding about the grounds, or standing on the steps of “Prexy’s house,” responding to a serenade, and reminding the students how they were destined to go out and be leaders in the battle for all things noble and true and grand.
Then I would go into the library and work for a couple of hours, and come out late at night, and see these same young leaders of the future come staggering out of their clubhouses to vomit in the gutter. The public was told that drinking was forbidden in these clubs; but I saw what I saw. I suspected that the tall gentleman in the black coat and silk hat must also know what was going on, and that therefore he did not mean his golden words to be taken with entire literalness. If only there had been some way by which I could have warned the world concerning this eloquent college president who did not mean his golden words—what a tragedy to mankind might have been averted!
I did not meet Woodrow Wilson at Princeton, but I met a good many of his professors. I called on his professor of literature, Henry Van Dyke, poet and scholar, a dear amiable gentleman who had about as much idea of the realities of modern capitalism as had the roses in his garden. I met some of his students—I took walks over the hills with one who had literary aspirations, and considered Tennyson’s poems to Queen Victoria the highest imaginative flight of our age. This earnest young man discovered that I admired a disreputable English free-lover by the name of Shelley; and so our acquaintance died. Another time my family was away, and I lived in town in a student boarding-house; I turn weak even now when I think of those solemn, pale, black-clad young men from the theological seminary, eating their thin and watery meals, and living in a state of mind precisely as if the last hundred and fifty years had never happened to anybody.