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Kansas University Weekly.
SHALL THE Kansas-Nebraska debate be held this year or shall it be abandoned?
It can not possibly be held unless the students and members of the Faculty in some way assure the Committee on Debate that they are interested in the debate and are willing to support it.
The committee very justly refuses to carry the whole burden as they did last year; to hold a preliminary debate in a practically empty hall, and consequently to be financially embarrassed, and then when it became necessary to solicit contributions to pay actual expenses, to be blamed for a failure due entirely to the indifference of others. And indeed no one who has the welfare of the University at heart wishes to see the debate conducted on any such discreditable plan.
Nebraska selects her debaters early in the school year and is now awaiting from Kansas a statement as to her intentions in the matter. It is therefore necessary to take some action at once. Nebraska is anxious to continue the debate. The close contest last year aroused enthusiasm there to the highest pitch, and they are eager for another meeting. It would seem that if we have any University spirit or pride at all we will not back out at such a time as this. The abandonment of the debate will injure the reputation of the University in other states where this contest has been watched with interest during the past two years. It will lower the University in the estimation of her own people in Kansas, because they expect her to be always ready to cope with any institution of equal rank in the country. It will prove a keen disappointment to our Alumni, who have taken no little pride in the record of their "Alma Mater" in the former contests.
This is the year for Lawrence to have the debate, and it might be made a rousing affair, and a success financially as well as in other ways if it received half the support which it merits.
WE ARE glad to give space to the following communication on a subject now being earnestly discussed all over the country, especially in Eastern cities. The demands of this matter for consideration are daily becoming more imperative, and can no longer be treated lightly. Editor University Weekly:
I once heard of an American in Europe who, for a reason, attempted to conceal his nationality. A Scotchman accosted him as one from the United States, and on being asked how he recognized him said: "Well, I have been watching you for ten minutes. Within that time you have said 'I guess' five times and spat on the deck more frequently than I have cared to count." Not long ago a Londoner remarked, paraphrasing Carlyle's most famous sentence, that the "United States is a nation of seventy million people, mostly spitters." Such incidents show how we are regarded by respectable people abroad, and we are left the alternative of reforming or hanging our heads in shame; we cannot deny. We are, facile princeps, the spitting nation. Nor is the custom excluded from any locality or society. Wherever men go, there is spitting also. Less than a year ago I was listening to a sermon on some theme like "The Beauty of Holiness," when the preacher, after suffering from a spasm of tuberculic coughing "shot his wad" on the pulpit floor, and proceeded deliberately but discretely to rub it into the carpet with his foot. Even the centers of culture and learning are likewise sufferers. In our own halls one must, indeed, "look up, and not down" if he hopes to avoid shocking his eyes with the repulsive exhibition of universal expectoration. In spite of the faithful services of our janitors the corners and often the open spaces of the floors are smeared and splotched with the familiar brown tracks of the tobacco user. Nor is it some untutored, unkempt, ill-clad frontiersman in our midst who is thus insulting those who desire to be respectable. Watch for him and you will find that he is as liable to be elegantly dressed and well barbered, and prominent in the "best society" of the University. He is nevertheless
IF STUDENTS are going to talk "silver" in the halls, as some have shown a tendency to do, we positively must be allowed ten minutes to change classes or else have an elevated sidewalk.