SPARTACUS AND THE LIONS

If there is any mortal whose lot no mortal need envy, it is that of Mr. Nicholas Murray Butler. The honored president of Columbia University can seldom stir from its portals without arousing a storm of reviling quite incommensurate with the strength of his opinions. His latest mishap along the road of liberal salvation is named "The Faith of a Liberal", and what a whirlwind of scarn and opposition it has blown up! His liberalism is satirized, his progressiveness denied, and all his past is dragged forth "to affright his eyes".

The Nation sees in the worthy president a trembling hypocrite, who dusts off his fetish of personal liberty to aid him in regaining the right to drink, although this same idol lay untended and forgotten in the days of war when all men's minds must belong, willy-nilly, to their country. The New Republic, equally impious, destroys his hypothesis that high taxes restrict individual beneficence toward education. On all sides Doctor Butler's pet theories are bombarded with havoc. But evidently he has found a bomb-proof shelter, from which he mocks his adversaries. From the solid materials of scholarship and reflection, he has built an edifice of authority within which he sits untroubled by the blood-cravings of the hostile mob without.

President Butler's definitions of "liberal" are ridiculous to a small sector of public opinion; his social theories resemble ancient spinsters masquerading in too youthful garb; his right to the name "progressive" is challenged by a few. It remains indisputable, Lone the less, that he has surpassed his adversaries in poise of mind, in clarity of immediate purposes, and most completely, in preserving his calmness under the heat of debate.