of the cloud of war that hangs over this country. God help-
ing us, we are not going to get into the war. .

I pray that we may keep out of the war if we can keep out
of it honorably, and I stress that term “honorably,” because
not only have we to think of the loss of life of these boys of
ours whom we are coaching today, not only have we to think
of the tremendous piling up of debts that will never be
paid—even by our grandchildren—but isn’t it true that there
must, when this holocaust is over, be some great nation that
has stood apart and that will have in its hands the rehabili-
tation of a war-torn world? I think so; and I think that is
the challenge to you and to me today—to think of athletics
in broader terms than we ever have before, because America
is the only great nation in which academic matters are mov-
ing forward normally. Only three weeks ago they dropped
bombs and tore apart the great old University at Athens.
Four weeks ago they closed the two universities in Holland
because there were Jewish professors in them who insisted
upon teaching the truth. Last spring they entirely destroyed
the library of the University of Louvain, and with it 750,000
volumes—many of them first editions without any dupli-
cates in the world. Today there is no university education,
as it should be, in Germany—that country from which the
best scholars of the world have come. Those universities. are
still open, but they are propaganda institutions. Truth and
the teaching of truth have been eliminated from them. In
Oxford and Cambridge there is little academic life. Cam-
bridge is partially a military headquarters, and most of
those boys are in the R.A.F. The Sorbonne in Paris is out
of the picture. The great University in Poland has been
destroyed. We sent no boys abroad as Rhodes Scholars
this year.

I am saying all this merely to suggest to you that on the
American college and on the American university, on their
departments—those of athletics more than a good many
others, perhaps—there rests the responsibility of preserving
civilization at a most trying time in the history of the world.

That is what we are here for, as I take it, to consider how |

to preserve certain values; how to strengthen the youth of
America to meet the issue which is to come before them.

I have said to you that we hope to God that we will not be
in this war and in this present military conflict. But there
isn’t a chance in the world that the boys in your gymna-
siums, in your locker rooms, will not be called upon, when
they graduate, to participate in a tremendous economic and
social and political conflict forced upon us by the totalitarian
powers.

There is something that we can face and realize, and that

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