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I am not nearly as old as the records of births in Meadville, Pennsylvania, make me seem. My life really began in the early [eighteen] nineties instead of the late sixties. It began at John Hopkins University. Under the influence of Richard T. Ely, Woodrow Wilson, Albert Shaw, James Bryce, I came alive. I felt a sense of responsibility to the world. I wanted to change things. It was not very clear what I wanted to change or how I should go about it. It had to do with politics. Also with economics. My mind found new authorities. They were intellectual rather than moral, social rather than personal.

From Professor Richard T. Ely I learned that the industrial system was not what I had assumed it to be in Meadville, where my father was a manufacturer on a small scale; not a kindly family affair, like my father's furniture store, in which he employed his brother, his nephews, and other goodlooking and engaging young men who came and went in our house as guests. Employers, I now learned, were capitalists. They exploited their workers. They were not considerate men who got rather less than their employees out of the enterprise. Those friendly young men who sang and joked and took me on picnics, occasionally went to a saloon and had a glass of beer. That distressed me. Ought I to tell my father about it? Surely he would remonstrate with them if he knew. One man was always in domestic difficulties. He overdrew his account by several thousand dollars. Such problems of personal conduct I heard discussed at home. They were the only serious ones that business, to my boyhood knowledge, presented.

In the new world that took shape for me at the university, industry was a grim affair of mines and mills, of trusts and monopolies, in which men were numbers rather than human beings. There was conflict in it, division of people into those who owned things and those who worked for the people who owned. There were strikes bloody sometimes like civil war, in which men hated one another. Little children were slaves in cotton-mills and sweat-shops; men in mines worked twelve and fourteen hours a day. There was menace in the industrial system; there was need of change.

Politics, too, had been simple matters in Meadville. The Andrews Brothers, lieutenants of Matthew Stanley Quay, looked after all the offices. They personally selected the candidates and advised men whether or not they should run for office. They gave me railway passes on which I travelled to and from the university. Few persons questioned the right of two amiable gentlemen -- one of them editor of the Meadville Republican, the other a man with no apparent vocation -- to advise men whether they should be a candidate or get an appointment. It did not seem improper that every one in the county should go to them to have things done at Harrisburg or in Washington by Mr. Quay. In the opinion of my relatives -- and that opinion had been mine -- Mr. Quay was maligned by disgruntled men who had not gotten the county printing or some job they wanted. He was a good organizer. He kept his word, rewarded his friends, and punished his enemies. He was a member of the church. That was political morality enough for Meadville. He was known as the "political leader," and people leaned on him much as they leaned on the church. Authority was a necessary and desirable thing. It existed unquestioned. There was something unthinkable to me about being a Democrat -- Democrats, Copperheads, and atheists were persons whom one did not know socially. As a boy I did not play with their children. The Republican Party and the Methodist church divided our allegiance. Their authority was unquestioned. They were the guardians of morality, respectability, and standing.

At Johns Hopkins new authorities took the place of the old. Mr. James Bryce lectured on the failures of democracy and the need of the scholar in politics. I had brought from home a mild distaste for the word democracy; it savored of objectors to Senator Quay. But I did not know that it had failed. I was not aware that everything was not as it should be. My friends and relatives were not only content with things as they were; they were stanch believers in the system which freed them from responsibility and left them free to go about their business, leaving the primaries, conventions, and elections to excellent men who were pillars in the church and respected because of their conventional virtues. Mr. Bryce's American Commonwealth was at that time a work of Biblical authority. When he visited our seminar on politics, professors and students accepted his opinions as beyond and above question. He talked about the spoils system, about the corruption of cities, and the decay of a sense of responsibility among the kind of people whom I knew. That was what impressed me most: the kind of people I knew had neglected their duties.

I had not been interested in politics; I had accepted conditions as I found them, as I accepted business. They were approved by the people I knew; the political system included the local judge, a member of the Methodist church. It had his approval, and it had the approval of my relatives. I might become a part of it some day.

I was interested in getting a job -- perhaps in my father's store. I dreamed about homesteading out West, in Kansas or Nebraska. That suggested adventure. I admired the big brick residences of citizens who had found oil in Bradford, Oil City, or Ohio; I envied their social life outside our own. I fancied myself pioneering, going out as these men had done, and returning to know them and their families. Life meant business, getting on in the world; the business one was in determined one's social position. My ambition was to make money and to enjoy the pleasures that possessors of wealth enjoyed. I should have liked to be the county judge -- but that was out of the question. I did not envy my college professors, though they seemed tremendously wise. They were disagreeable, prone to be critical of me in the classroom. I never thought of being a scholar. The law seemed to me a distinguished, a difficult, profession. I was desperately afraid of being pushed into the ministry, which maiden aunts and Sunday-school teachers urged on me. One of the terrors of my boyhood was that I might get drawn into it. Every one agreed in admonishing me against the saloon; it was the symbol of everything bad, the cause of the downfall of some of our relatives. If one went into saloons. one became a printer or a tramp; one associated with disreputable women.

In these years I wanted what the people around me wanted; wanted to get on in the world; to make money -- though I had little hope of every making much. My mind was empty of enthusiasms. I thought as those about me thought. My world was bounded by the block in which I lived, by my relatives, by the Methodist church, although I always sought escape from it; by the college on the hill. I submitted to college as a tedious experience that had to be gotten through with, and looked forward to graduation as the day when a decision would have to be made for which my previous life and associations gave me no help.

At Johns Hopkins individual authorities took the place of my small-town herd. Professor Ely showed me a cruel industrial system, Woodrow Wilson and James Bryce the evils of party politics. Mr. Bryce said that America, with no leisure class devoted to statecraft, as in Great Britain, was to be saved by the scholar. Unthrilled by eloquence -- for Mr. Bryce was a dull lecturer -- I accepted his creed of responsibility and service. Democracy must be salvaged from the hands of spoilsmen and politicians; it must be salvaged even from Senator Quay and the Andrews Brothers.

This change did not come immediately. It did not come vividly; as old moralities left me, new ones Imperceptibly took their place. I accepted them from men whom I respected, just as I had accepted my previous opinions from men who were esteemed in Meadville. I was accustomed to moralistic authority. These new authorities, too, had a moralistic flavor.

Doctor Albert Shaw, editor of The Review of Reviews, stirred my imagination as did none of the other lecturers. He lectured on municipal administration and painted pictures of cities that I could visualize -- cities that I wanted to take part in in America; cities managed as business enterprises; cities that were big business enterprises, that owned things and did things for people. There was order and beauty in the cities he described. They owned their own tramways and gas and electric lighting plants, and they made great successes of them. Good men ran them, business men, who gave up their business interests to do so. This kind of objective politics I could understand; I could think of material things more easily than economic abstractions. There was something in my mind that seized upon order, on plans, on doing things the way business men did them in their own shops and factories. I was familiar with this sort of thing; it was about the only academic subject that fitted in with my background, to which something inside of me responded. I read with zest Doctor Shaw's two illuminating books on municipal government in Great Britain and on the Continent of Europe. These pictures of cities gave me my first Political enthusiasm. I desired to be an editor and writer, as was he, so that I could further the ideas I had gotten from him. I wanted to go to Europe and see for myself the cities he had described, to study their machinery, their municipal enterprises, their splendid streets, parks, and public buildings.

I do not know why out of all the things I heard at Johns Hopkins this was the thing that gripped me most. Perhaps it was partly my herd instinct that found expression in this dream. I cared about beauty and order in cities -- cities that chose for their rulers university men, trained as I was being trained. Possibly because I was disorderly myself, I wanted order. And I hated waste. That I had had been taught to esteem a cardinal sin, and American cities I was told, were wasteful because they were ruled by politicians, whose only interest was in jobs.

Woodrow Wilson, though our greatest lecturer, gave me no such pictures. He dealt in abstractions about the Constitution. He was interested in political forms, in the fathers of the Republic, especially in the Virginia statesmen, who were writers of great documents. He inspired an admiration for the British constitution, which he counted even more perfect than our own. Mr. Wilson was a brilliant speaker, and it was his brilliance as a speaker rather than what I got from him that made me take every course he offered. In his lecture-room it was not always clear to me what I believed; but I felt that we had departed from the ideals of the fathers and were indifferent to our responsibilities to the state. Listening to him, I got hints of impressions received at home, when preachers lamented our lukewarmness to Christian Ideals, our neglect of responsibility to the church. A note of moral passion in his speech was familiar to me. Great men had departed from Capitol Hill; the Senate no longer reverberated to the high morality of earlier days. Democracy was not concerned over issues of great constitutional import. Politics had become a struggle of vulgar interests, of ignoble motive, of untrained men. We were abandoned to money-making in politics, as we were in our personal relations. We had permitted the government to be seized by spoilsmen and politicians. It was from them that democracy must be reclaimed.

I learned about Socialism. But it did not interest me. It was not believed in by the men I knew. I read Henry George, but the Single Tax seemed altogether too easy a reform to be taken as a social philosophy. Nor was it believed in by my professors. I had a hazy sense of the brotherhood of man, but was not greatly moved by it. I liked my own new kind of people -- of that I was clear; educated, university people, who read books and talked about them. I had a strong belief in the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon. English-speaking people were the chosen people; they must be looked to to carry on civilization.

The new world into which I was emerging was still moralistic. I got its new moralities, the moralities of educated men, of scholars, of intellectual reformers. There were evils within the State to be corrected and abuses without. America required new leaders; without them democracy must fail. The people were misled because business men and educated men had not taken the trouble to instruct them. The people were hungry for guidance; of that we were clear -- guidance which we, the scholars, alone could provide. To this brotherhood of service I belonged. I was one of the chosen; one of the remnant and that Matthew Arnold wrote about. The purple robe of doctor of philosophy dedicated me to this service, as it gave me a distinction which seemed rare in my world. The Johns Hopkins motto was Veritas Vos Liberabit. Through the truth we would redeem the world.

Atlas had nothing on the Johns Hopkins men of the nineties. We felt that the world had been wished onto our shoulders. And I rather enjoyed the burden that I was to carry. I accepted it with conscious satisfaction, though without any clear idea of just how to go about it. I had lost one set of moralities, which had never been very clear to me. The new ones were only less uncertain.

It was a distinction to be on intimate terms with men who had studied abroad, with recognized scholars, to whom the mind was very important. From them I had unlearned many things; I took pride in that, more pride than in my limited acquisitions of something new. I was initiated into a new order; the order of scholars whose teachings had changed me, would change the world.

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