AMERICAN UNDERGRADUATES

In an article in the Century Magazine on the "American Undergraduate," Clayton Sedgwick Cooper takes a diametrically opposite view from many men who have lately been setting forth their ideas of colleges and college men. He finds that the average student may fairly be called a student, that he posseses a desire for realism and entire naturalness, that he has a keen sense of humor and radiates a generally breezy atmosphere, that for the most part his life and his nature are free from animosity and bitterness and that "he has acquired the fine art of laughing at himself and with himself."

Mr. Cooper believes that the college man is really religious, not that his religion is always directed toward the expressions of it exemplified in chapel attendance and attention to religious instruction, but that he really has the religious impulse and the religious spirit. He cites the great increase in active betterment work as indicative of the practical rather than theoretical nature of the college man's religion.

Though he does not find college athletics an unmixed good and believes that too few are able to indulge in them, and though he finds certain post-victory observances highly objectionable, he nevertheless finds them valuable for discipline and for moral restraint. He also enlarges on college spirit and the sportsmanship and gentlemanliness required of and usually possessed by both player and spectator as making athletics a positive good.