The approaching end of another college year gives peculiar timeliness to the following account of a recent meeting of the Supercollegiate Committee on Entrance Examinations. For the details of the story I am indebted to the able and conscientious correspondent of the Disassociated Press at Nottingham. The discerning reader will have no difficulty in identifying the persons mentioned. Professor MÜnsterberg is, of course, Professor MÜnsterberg. Professor Lounsbury is Professor Lounsbury. Professor Hart is Professor Albert Bushnell Hart. Dr. Woods Hutchinson is Dr. Woods Hutchinson.

Professor MÜnsterberg: The meeting will please come to order. We are now in the first week of October. This fact, which the average citizen has probably accepted without question, has been amply confirmed in an elaborate series of laboratory tests carried on by means of white and yellow cards and rapidly revolving disks. Thus we are prepared to discuss once more the highly interesting question, why the vast majority of freshmen cannot spell. Neither can they write their native tongue in accordance with the rules of grammar.

Professor Lounsbury: Aw, gee! Why should they? Look at Chaucer, Milton, and Browning. The fiercest bunch of little spellers you ever saw. And their grammar is simply rotten. They didn't care a red cent for the grammarians. When they saw a word or a phrase they liked they went to it. If the grammarians didn't agree with them it was up to the grammarians. Chaucer should worry.

Dr. Hutchinson: Quite right.

Professor Lounsbury: The question is this: Are freshmen made for the English language or is language made for freshmen? Language is like a human being; change does it good. Stick to your Lindley Murray and it's a cinch your little old English tongue will be a dead one in fifty years.

Dr. Hutchinson: I agree with Professor Lounsbury, speaking from the standpoint of physiology. Constant use of a plural verb with a plural subject plays the deuce with the larynx. You know what the larynx is, gentlemen. It's the rubber disk in the human Victrola. Drop the pin on the rubber disk and the record will grind out the same formula, again and again. Keep it up long enough and the record wears out. That's the larynx under the operation of grammatical rules. It gets the habit, and the first law of health is to avoid all habits. What you want to do is to shake up the larynx by feeding it with new forms of expression. When a man says "I done it," it imparts a healthy jolt to the delicate muscles of the throat, limbers up his aorta and his diaphragm, and reconciles him with his digestion. This is the opinion of eminent physiologists, like Drinckheimer of Leipzig.

Professor Lounsbury: Whom did you say the man is?

Dr. Hutchinson: Drinckheimer, professor at Leipzig. He doesn't write for the magazines.

Professor Lounsbury: Then you agree with me that when a man has something to say he will say it?

Professor MÜnsterberg: We have an excellent illustration on this point in a history paper submitted in the last entrance examinations. In reply to the question, "Name the first two Presidents of the United States," one candidate wrote, "The first pressident was Gorge Washington; his predeceassor was Alexander Hamilton." Observe the extraordinary psychological correlation between thought and expression in such a reply.

Professor Hart: I don't think the young man was guilty of an injustice with regard to Alexander Hamilton. You will recall that Hamilton was one of the principal founders of the system of privilege which has produced, in our own day, Lorimerism and the purchase of Southern delegates. If it had not been for Hamilton and his crowd we should not now be compelled to wage a campaign for social justice and I should not be under the necessity of writing Bull Moose history for Collier's.

Dr. Hutchinson: But getting back to the real point of our inquiry, whether the failure to spell and write correctly is a sign of mental feebleness—

Professor MÜnsterberg: On that point I believe I can speak with authority. Psychological tests in the laboratory show that the average freshman is as quick-witted to-day as his predecessor of fifty or a hundred years ago. We examined three hundred first-year men from eleven colleges and universities. Each man was required to peep into a dark box, shaped like a camera, through an eye-hole sixteen millimetres in diameter. By pressing a button, light was flashed upon a slip of paper inside the box, on which was printed, in letters nine millimetres high, the following question: "What is your favourite breakfast food?" The candidate was required to signify his answer by tapping with his finger on the table, one tap for Farinetta, two taps for Dried Husks, three taps for Atlas Crumbs, and so forth. The average time for three hundred answers was six and seven-tenths seconds. Thereupon the candidates were asked to think over the question at their leisure and to hand in a written answer sworn to before a notary public. On comparing the written answers with the laboratory results, it appeared that only thirty-seven out of the three hundred had tapped the wrong answer. Need I say more?

Professor Lounsbury: May I ask how the written answers showed up from the point of view of spelling and grammar?

Professor MÜnsterberg: They were impressively defective.

Professor Lounsbury: I'm tickled to death. When you cut out bad spelling and grammar, you queer the evolution of the English language. There's nothing to it.

Professor MÜnsterberg: But take the case of the freshman squad whom we kept in a hermetically sealed room for twenty-four hours at a temperature of eighty-nine degrees—

Professor Lounsbury: May I ask what their language was when they were released at the end of twenty-four hours?

Professor MÜnsterberg: Truth compels me to say it was something awful.

Professor Lounsbury: But how about the grammar?

Professor MÜnsterberg: There was no grammar to speak of. They used mostly interjections.

Dr. Hutchinson: Finest thing in the world, interjections. Good for the lungs and the heart. Rapid process of inhalation and expulsion keeps the bellows in prime order. That's all a man is, gentlemen, a bellows on a pair of stilts driven by a hydraulic pump. If the bellows holds out under sudden strain, that's all you want. That's why I like to hear people swear. It's good for the wind. Next time you walk down a step too many in the dark or lose your hat under a motor truck, don't hold yourself back. It's the way nature is safeguarding you against asthma.

Professor MÜnsterberg: Then it is the consensus of opinion here that the psychological and cultural status of our college freshmen is everything it ought to be?

Professor Hart: I'd rather take the opinion of a roomful of freshmen on any subject than the opinion of the United States Supreme Court. They don't know anything about American history, but it's the kind of history that isn't worth knowing. I prefer them to know things as they ought to have been rather than as they were before the Progressive party was born. Whatever is worth preserving from the past, including the Decalogue, will be found in the Bull Moose platform. We don't want examination papers. We want social justice.

Professor Lounsbury: Between you and I, the English language won't get what's coming to it until all entrance examinations have been chucked into the discard.

Dr. Hutchinson: Spelling is demonstrably bad for the muscles of the chest and the abdomen.

Professor Lounsbury: You've said it.