where Visit New Haven's Largest, Lightest and Handsomest Store. Are You Ready for Your New Spring Suit? Reliable black and blue suits, guaranteed fast color and all-wool, from $10 to $25, the best value your money can buy in suits. Spring overcoats and rain-proofed coats, $8.50 to $30, for all-round service. Spring furnishings-negligee shirts, neckwear, hosiery, underwear, glovesa specially large collection of the best. Work and dress trousers that never disappoint in point of service-$1.50 to $7.50. MEIGS&CO. 91, 93 and 95 Church Street Charles Bower, SHIRTMAKER AND IMPORTING OUTFITTER, Samples upon application. 12 East 42d St., New York. Competent man sent to measure you. "L AN APOLOGY FOR A LEADER. all. AST scene of all وو quoth the melancholy 1905 Board, and went its way. So "At first the infant, mewling is the logical motto of the 1906 Board, new-born into the LIT.'s little world. Mewling is an unfortunate failing in any infant. It drives papa to drink and mamma to despair. But, bless his little heart, there is method in the baby's whine. If he be a prosaic little baby, he wails for his bottle, and he gets it. If he be a poetic little baby, save the mark, he whines for the moon, and he does not get it. But he gets his longings out of his system anyhow. If the truth be told, the child that whines for the moon whines for it solely because it is visible, and the bottle is not. He does not as yet know enough to howl for his bottle. All of which means this--this leader is intended to be a criticism of the abstract, merely because the concrete is completely beyond me. We all of us have many shortcomings. But the News has very many shortcomings. With the requisite material spread out before me I feel sure that I could concoct a very pretty criticism of something about the News. But the secretive News wraps its shortcomings up in a napkin, with its earnings, and buries them in the ground, that no man may know exactly what they are. Also the News has unusual facilities for stoning glass houses. Wherefore I drop the News. Then there is a rumor that the Faculty is to sacrifice the beautiful old Library at the altar of Utility. But there is little more than a rumor, and the details are kept dark as death. Wherefore I may not write a lengthy and indignant protest against such action. Lack of data also prevents any discussion of the present social system.? It is hard to bring home any well-founded definite accusation against it, although there is undoubtedly a growing feeling that somewhere, somehow, it is radically wrong. Some day the baby may grow wiser and learn to wail for the definite bottle. But meanwhile he must cry for the moon, and wail for the perfection that is not in that shadowy abstractionthe Average Undergraduate. Once upon a time, in the very, very old days, when Universities were first established, students actually went to college to learn something. Professors were fined for cutting lectures- Think of it! Imagine, if you can, a crowd of present-day college men howling for the blood of a Professor who had failed to deliver his expected lecture in the Thirty-third Degree of Some Totally Unknown Science. Nowadays the Average Undergraduate picks one course as a "gut," another because it comes at a convenient hour, a third-perhaps because he really is interested in the subject. It is the much reviled grind alone who gets very much out of his college course, as such. He spends five hours a day over Greek roots-and comes out of college, you say fitted only for such grubbing. That may be; but he knows Greek roots down to the ground, while the Average Student on graduating has a smattering of everything and a real knowledge of nothing at all. This question, however, has been very effectually discussed. It was the President of Harvard University, I think, who so ably contested the claims of C C is the (roughly 225-250), as a "gentleman's mark." loafing mark of the Average Undergraduate. And it is his steady mark, for in his studies the Average Undergraduate is undoubtedly a loafer. But it is not in scholarship alone that this shadowy personality is deficient. The Undergraduate as a rule does not, avowedly, come to college to study. Culture is his watchword, culture is his vague desire. But does he attain his end? The raw country youth, at best, learns how to wear his clothes at college, and what clothes to wear. He cribs his conventional way through the classics, and bluffs his English courses. As a Graduate he can startle the neighborhood with his clothes and his classical allusions. But, even in a raw country youth, does that constitute culture? And the Average Student is not a country boy. He comes from among cultured surroundings, and he goes back to them. Does he take much added culture with him? He has only lived four years of his life with his crowd, as the countryman has lived with his crowd. Without doubt a man develops in culture as in everything else in these four years. But this advance in culture is due but little to essentially collegiate influences. It is but the natural development of his youth, wherever spent. The Art School is to him unknown ground, the Library a gloomy prison. He fails to benefit from the advantages peculiar to the place. Perhaps the reason for this is not hard to find. To the Undergraduate, college is less of a preparation for life than a little life in itself, governed by the prejudices and caste distinctions of the larger life but apart from it. He enters college and plunges into the four years as though he were to die at the end of the time. Books and art are not necessary to success in a man's class, so they are neglected. Two things are all important to the Average Undergraduate, and two only, social success and a "Y". When he leaves college he may have two tremendous possessions, a fine physique and some political ability. But he could have obtained his fine physique by heaving coal, his political ability in practical politics. The man's side that college should have most developed, the ideal side, has been almost totally neglected. His knowledge of the world of letters and art is at best a surface knowledge. And this is the curse of the college man. He is no loafer except in his studies, he is ever-busy, but he never really gets anywhere. He is playing at work, instead of preparing for serious work. At the end of his course all the aspirations that have directed his work through four good years have been satisfied, or can never be satisfied, and the college world passes out of his life, except as a relaxation. Through his college existence he has been but marking time in his bigger, more useful life. gives zest to what you write, But if you spread it on too thick, it spoils the matter quite. Lewis Carrol perpetrated something like that. Perhaps I have spread it on a little too thick. Seriously I did not mean that a college education is absolutely useless, or anything like it. But there is undoubtedly a tendency on the part of the student body, unconsciously, perhaps, to render college life practically useless, to throw away their present opportunities. There-that's done. J. N. Greely. HARBINGERS OF SPRING. The breath of spring is in the air; Shines soft on meadows lush and fair And blithe and strong, the morn to greet, Each note of his fresh music yields Of summer 'midst the golden fields |