Mr. R. R. T. CRANE, of the Crane Company of Chicago, publishers of the Valve World, has been for years investigating the worth of higher education. He contends that his investigations justify him in saying that the colleges do not fit men for the struggles of real life; that the best practical men of America are recruited from the lower grades and the technical schools; that the colleges are not only wanting, but that college life is demoralizing.
These conclusions of Mr. Crane have been severely criticized, sneered at, ridiculed, and some have attempted to refute them. In the Valve World of August, 1911, Mr. Crane has "a refutation of the claim that colleges produce men of high moral character." Of his investigations at Harvard University, one of the leading institutions of the country, we are told that "the details are too disgusting to print," and that the post-office authorities had informed him that "the original report would be excluded from the mails." The investigations covered a period of two weeks, between the hours of 8 and 12 P.M. They were made at the restaurant of one hotel, "typical of a considerable number." This report abounds in expressions like the following, when fifty-nine students were present:
"Waiters powerless to preserve order;" "severely cut about the head by a wine-glass;" "free fight in one corner;" "chorus girls put in appearance;" "rough house reigned supreme;" "majority of students . . . drunk;" "living lives of great debauchery;" "students very lawless;" "drinking very free; partially intoxicated freshmen, . . . including the girls, were forthwith ejected;" a student, considered reliable when he entered, pays a bill for drinks in one night amounting to "over sixty dollars," and he is on the downward path of debauchery.
Some of these debauched students enter the college to prepare themselves for the ministry. All the diseases and degeneracy of debauchery follow.
Answering the charge that it is but the few comparatively who are thus degraded, we are told that this restaurant had a lower room resort where not less than two hundred met night after night, and that there were six other hotels "equally popular with the students," "and many others come in for a large percentage." Besides these hotels there are the fast clubs and fraternities where some of the worst drunkards of the college are found. Mr. Crane quotes from "Mr. E. C. Mercer, special secretary of the Association of Colleges of North America," who is laboring for reform, and he tells us of "twelve hundred college-bred men in the slums, prisons, jails, sanitariums, who were down
