The Students Journal
PUBLISHED WEEKLY
BY THE
Students Journal Publishing Co.
W. C. Fogle  Editor-in-Chief
C. E. Kipton  Local Editor
Clara S. Bossworth  Literary Editor
BUSINESS MANAGERS.
JAS, V. MAY,
A. O. GARRETT.
BUSINESS MANAGERS.
ASSOCIATES
Boalt, W. Neal ... Literary
B. L. Pampel ... The Halls
Artie Kelly ... Muscle
W. C. Athehson ... Local
D. C. Kelley ... Athletic
R. E. Blackman ... Exchanges
The stock of the STUDENTS JOURNAL company consists of non-transferable one dollar shares. Any student, instructor or employee of the university may hold one and only one share.
The sermon before the Young Women's and Young Men's Christian Association Sunday night at the Baptist church was a marvellous exposition of the fundamental principles of Christianity. Dr Mabie is truly a giant among the many able champions of Christianity to-day.
It is only one week till the Christmas vacation. We sincerely hope that no member of the faculty will burden his students with three or four volumes to read during the holidays. It may be well to suggest a few good things to read, but please do nos say, 'I wish you would read xxxx.'
Some thieves who are enrolled as students are sneaking books from the library to use at home. These thieves have no intention of stealing the books—no, that would be dreadful—they will return them when they are through with them. They are simply stealing the privileges of other students. This is the basest form of theft. Who steals my purse steals trash but he who steals my opportunity to refer to a required book steals the very essence of my privileges in college.
THE communication regarding the duties of a student's landlady would perhaps be of more value if our paper were mailed to the landlads rather than to the students. We suggest that, if any student is troubled with having his study table "rid up" and things put into such disastrously neat order that nothing can ever be found, he occasionally leave on his table a copy of the STUDENTS JOERENAL so folded that the communication will be easily seen.
THE fact that Henry Watterson has postponed his date with us on account of sickness, has led a number of students to think that the Lecture Bureau management is a body of cut throats, thieving money from honest students. We desire to say for the benefit of these few misinformed students, that the lecture course is offered to the people at actual cost. It is under the control of the University, and any money made on the course this year will be applied toward a better course next, while money lost this year will be taken from next year's receipts. There is no cause whatever for complaint, therefore.
THE football team has gone out of training for this year. The record made is not as high as usual, yet it is no mean record. Although the management of the team has been good on the whole, yet a few mistakes can be pointed out by even an uninitiated observer. It will be remembered that before the two critical games of the season our team was mercifully slaughtered. Before the Baker game, and while our boys were yet untrained, they were brought against the champions of the whole west. Then, before the Missouri game for the pennant, our men were again led to their slaughter in the encounter with Ann Arbor. Who ever heard of an eastern team of
any standing playing its most doubtful game at the beginning of the season? Futtner, the opinion of many of those who have given the matter consideration has been that the extra money squandered on the training table might better have been burned. We withhold the reasons and merely mention the fact in order to bring it to the attention of members of the Athletic Association.
On the other hand many good moves have been made. The same management to whom we have laid the blame for the mistakes should have due credit. The advance in the game fee proved a success and the imposers of the increased fee should have double credit from the fact that they had to take the step directly against public opinion.
STUDENTS who take studies only in order to get through the University, and work only enough to pass, make no difference in their treatment of English, though it might be expected that even they would recognize the importance of thorough work in this branch. The English language is more than our own language, though that it is our own ought of itself to cause hard study; it is one of the leading languages of the world, both as regards literature and diplomacy, and, if the opinion of the eminent Dr Schroer is right, it is destined to be the common language of the world. If anything ought not to be sighted, then, it is English, and the JOURNAL hopes,—both for the sake of the students and of the peace of mind of its editors, present and future,—that English will be given ill the attention a study should receive, whether other studies are or not.
THE last number of the Columbus Star Courier contains, on its front page, over half a column of State University notes. The notes were furnished by a University student. Brief paragraphs are written about each of the following subjects: The Chancellor's residence, the new library building, the University extension work, he lecture course, the Phi PsI chapter house, the Law School, the faculty concert of music. These articles as written set before the readers of the Star Courier the work of the University in the best possible manner, and thereby not only advertise the University but give valuable reading matter to the patrons of that paper. Let us again emphasize the fact that there are hundreds of students here whose home papers never make mention of the University and yet would be glad to receive items of news from us. Go and look at the young man who furnishes these notes has done, and thereby do a favor to your home editor, to the Umi versity, and to yourself.
Prof. Canfield at Chapel
It seems to me that possibly some who complain that the chapel service is not profitable for them are in danger of a vice from which I fear our University life is suffering in other domains. I have watched with misgiving the signs of the growth of the spirit that expects to receive all things as its right, and make no return. The University finds it hard to impose fees to afford an enlarged means for instruction because everything is demanded free as a right. It is notoriously difficult to raise money among the students for purposes directly connected with public University life. In the merely business world where it shows itself thus this spirit is sufficiently hurtful. It is essentially the spirit of panperism. I am always suspicious of the one who wants to get things in any other way than by paying the honest and just equivalent, and to have such a spirit fastened upon the representatives of liberal culture could not fail to be a menace to our integrity. But when the same spirit shows itself in the intellectual and moral region its effects are worse. It is entirely incompatible with vigorous and robust life in those regions.
He who expects to have his culture pumped into him through a number of lecturer's spells will never have an intellectual life worth the name, and he who expects to get charged with religious and moral electricity every morning, like a Leyden jar, by just being brought into an electric circuit will not have a very robust character. Two students go to a lecture room and hear the same world, but they bring away very different amounts. The one who took his two talents with him brings away four; the one who hid his before he went, things away just what he carried—nothing. People reap in this world as they sow. They receive pretty much in proportion as they give. Let us not then be impatient with the chapel service because it does not entertain us, or transform us, or illumine us, or inspire us, or do some other wonderful thing with us, or do any thing at all with us, or for us without our cooperation. But if we are interested in the kind of object which that service sets itself to accomplish—and I do not well see how we can help being—if we are agreed to the supreme value of righteousness, if we are convinced that we have no greater business than to get this idea into our lives, into our conduct every day, if we admit that business for ourselves, if we find its successful accomplishment not all too easy, if we are seriously minded to increase and temper and strengthen the resolution, purpose, will, affection that alone will give us steadiness and progress in its pursuit, then I think we may reasonably come to chapel and find it of use. Then we can improve the opportunity it offers every day to get out of the old rut for a few moments, to rise out of the blinding and perplexing mists of petty interests and to take our bearings again by the everlasting stars, to see where we have laid our course wrong, to distinguish between what is shifting and what is permanent, to strengthen ourselves by contact with the lives and words of those apostles and martyrs of righteousness in whom the tides of spiritual life were fullest and deepest, to resolve with ourselves to be truer to our highest view of things and to make fewer compromises with expediency, to inspect our moral armor and see where it has given way and where it needs reinforcement, to open ourselves by conscious effort of our will to the great spiritual forces, to put ourselves in harmony with the divine movement that makes for righteousness, to be stirred with the feeling of gratitude and praise. And such exercise as that will not fail, I think, to be of some service for the most practical business of our lives. Do you say that all this you can do quite as well each one for himself and there is no need of chapel for it? Hardly I think. There’s help in numbers. The sentiment of community of purpose and effort stimulates and strengthens. And we derive from it a corrective agent upon impurity or a missionary that might arise as if one could work out his salvation aside from those human relations that bind him at every point to his fellows. But even if we could do quite as well without chapel, would we? Do we? I doubt it. Occasion means much in our lives.
The University Lecture Bureau regrets the necessity of reporting to the students whom it represents, that it finds it impossible to carry out the course which it had arranged. It used its best efforts to secure si eakers, artists and companies of the best standing and was able to offer a course which is felt to be of exceptional excellence. The expense involved was something more than one thousand dollars in been about one hundred and seventy-five yielding less than three hundred and fifty dollars. It is plain that there is not a sufficient demand among the student body which it aims to serve to warrant the Bureau in going on with its work in the face of the certain large deficit.
E. M HOPKINS,
A. G CANFIELD,
C. F HUMPHREY.
I know a number of persons who have dumbbells in their rooms, but I do not know of a single one who uses them regularly. But I know there are a good many who come regularly to the University to exercise in classes. The chapel service presents us regularly the occasion and opportunity of a kind of exercise and culture that bears upon our most serious and practical business. It is not possible that we can make it useful for ourselves when no one else can?
Announcement.
OUR STUDY WINDOW
There seems to be a general impression that in a new country like the United States, where everything grows freely, almost spontaneously, as by a new creative impulse, literature had better be left to develop itself without criticism, as practically it has been left—every tree to get as high as it can without reference to shape or character. We say, as practically it has been left. For while there has been some good criticism in this country of other literatures, an application of sound sch harshhip and wid comparison, there has been very little of this applied to American literature. There has been some fault-finding, some ridicule, a good deal of the slashing personality and the expression of individual prejudice, and like and dislike which characterized so much of the British review criticism of the beginning of this century—much of it utterly conventional and blind judgment—but almost no attempt to ascertain the essence and purport of our achievement, and to arraign it at the bar of comparative excellence, both as to form and substance. It is not denied that there has been much ingenuous and even just exploiting of our literature with note of its defects and its excellencies, but it will be scarcely claimed for even this that it is cosmopolitan. How little of the application of universal principles to specific productions! We thought it bad taste when Mathew Arnold put his finger on Emerson as he would put his finger on Socrates or on Milton. His judgment may have been wrong, or it may have been right,—matter of individual taste we would have been indifferent to,—it seemed as if it were the universality from which our National vanity shrunk.
It seems that the thing American literature needs just now, and needs more than any other literature in the world, is criticism. In the essay by Mathew Arnold, in which, as is remembered, he defines criticism to be "a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world," he would have had smooth sailing if he had not attempted to apply his principles of criticism to the current English literature. And this application nade the essay largely an exposition of the English Philistine.
Now we have not in the United States the Philistine or the Philisianism, at least not much of it, and for the reason that we have no tradition. We have thrown away, or tried to throw away, tradition. We are growing in the habit of being suficient unto ourselves. We have not Philistinism, but we have something else. There has been no name for it yet invented. Some say it is a satisfaction in superficiality, and they point to the common school and to Chautaquag, the French say it is satisfaction in mediocrity. At any rate, it is satisfaction that has a large element of boastfulness in it, and boastfulness based upon a lack of enlightenment in literature, especially a want of discrimination, of the discernment of quality. It is a habit of looking at literature as we look at other things; literature in national life never stands alone; if we condone crookedness in politics and in business under the name of smartness, we apply the same sort of test—that is, the test of success—to literature. It is the test of the late Mr. Barnum. There is in it a disregard of moral as well as of artistic values and standards. You see it in the press, in sermons even—the effort to attract attention, the lack of moderation, the striving to be sensational in poetry, in the novel to shock, to advertise the performance. Everything is on a strain. No, this is not Philistinism. It is sure, also, that it is not the final expression of the American can spirit—that which represents its life or its literature. We trust it is a trans
We have our own standards; if we choose, a dollar is sixty five cents, and we resent the commercial assertion that a dollar is one hundred cents.
PIANOS AND ORGANS
GUITARS, MANDOLINS, VIOLINS,
BANJOS AND ZITHERS
FOR RENT OR SALE ON EASY TERMS.
Musical Merchandise, Sheet Music
and Books.
SPECIAL • PRICES • TO • STUDENTS
Call and see the Mandolin-Guitar and
Mandolin-Barijo.
OLIN BELL,
845 MASSACHUSETTS ST.
WHITE FRONT
Our December sales up to date are far beyond our expectations. We do not advertise our prices, but give them over the counter. A close inspection is better than prices in print. A number of specialties this week
Come and see us.
SPARR AND * ALEXANDER
SUMMERFIELD & JACOBS,
737 Massachusetts St.
Students furnished with Bread and Cakes
Wheaties and Stuices.
737 Massachusetts St.
Grocers & Bakers.
INSTRUMENTS AND SUPPLIES
H. A. STEVENS.
Successor to C, N. Dunham & Co..
120 W. 8th St., Kansas City, Mo.
Engineers and Draughtsmen.
Write for prices before buying elsewhere.
You can save money by buying from
J JOHNSON & SON,
Meat Market!
SPECIAL RATES TO CLUBS.
687 Massachusetts Street.
DOUGLAS COUNTY
: : Bank.
Willis,
South Tenn. St. Photo Artist.
Opp. Eldridge House. H. E. BENSON, Cash'r
A T I E N S COUNCIL NO. 3.
A FRIENDSHIP NO. 10.
Fraternal Aid Association,
Has the finest Hall and Dancing Floor in
the State. For terma, call on
ED. ROUSELL, Mgr.,
Under Selig's.
JACKSON'S LAUNDRY KANSAS CITY.
R. E. BLACKMAN, STANTON OLINGER,
Agents.