"BEHIND ME, SATAN!"

Though the country south of Mason and Dixon's line has sometimes been accused, together with New England, of being the home of conservatism, it has not infrequently been the birthplace of great men and greater ideas. Unfortanately, however, one of the latest ideas is open to criticism, not wholly of the favorable variety. In brief, it is a plan to buy up the entire town of Sulphur Springs, Arkansas, and establish there a new institution of higher learning, to be known as John Brown University. The purpose behind taking ever the community as a unit, including the hotels and amusement centers, is to insure that dancing, jazz, gambling and profanity be utterly taboo.

This is highly praiseworthy; the sponsors of the scheme, no doubt, looking abroad upon a naughty world and finding it bad, have decided to establish for themselves a little oasis of purity in the surrounding desert of profane bellhops, jazz-mad chorus girls, and deftfingered, silk-hatted Oakhursts. As an ideal, this is to be commended, but its practical; wisdom seems questionable. The removal of temptation has never, in the Social history of man, taken the place of the indispensable qualities of self-control and firm restraint. Even in the Puritan England of Oliver Cromwell, John Milton decried the growing tendency to banish evil influences instead of enabling men to overcome them by a sense of personal responsibility. And the present move is, besides, some what reminiscent of the retreat of the eighteenth century romanticists to their ivory tower.

It has moreover, been pointed out more than once by persons of educational experience that it is too much the tendency of modern colleges to run their own course entirely apart--from the march of events in the world at large: and that when their sheltered graduates attempt to take their places as cogs in the larger machine, they spend much unnecessary time in orientation. Although this point of view may be in part open to a charge of exaggeration, particularly in the case of great universities, there is contained in it enough truth to make the present experiment seem not absolutely certain of success. And the idea of naming the institution where recklessness and revelry are forbidden after John Brown is enough to make that old warrior turn in his several graves.