Comment on Address
The editorial quoted below appeared following the release of President Hopkins' address. It is from the New York Times:
ONLY NATURAL
In his address at the beginning of the Fall term at Dartmouth, PRESIDENT HOPKINS said what many undistinguished citizens must be saying or thinking. Two men highly fit to be President have been nominated. The country is sure to have an able and upright President, but too much of the "popular discussion" in the campaign is irrelevant or idiotic. Says DR. HOPKINS: "Temperaments, personal habits, domestic relation- ships, racial antecedents, religious affiliations and even physical appearance are discussed for hours, usually falsely and always cheaply, unworthy of the limited intelligence of those participating in the discussion." This has often, if not usually, been the case.People who devote themselves to the noble art of 'talking politics' in a Presidential year are likely to disengage more heat than light. We may explain this, if we like, by an unconscious tendency to make their man a god and the other fellow a devil who can't be painted black enough. There is a wealth of unsavoriness in this canvass, but as compared with that of the contest between JACKSON and J. Q. ADAMS in 1828 it is mild and fragrant, allowing for the immensely greater modern means of disseminating falsehoods.
It can't be expected that millions will consider political matters without partiality, prejudice and with full knowledge. Man, as has been said, is a reasoning rather than a reasonable animal; and there is no law against wrong-headedness. The considerations whose inclusion in political argument DR. HOPKINS deplores enter unconsciously into many other spheres than the political. Even in the bosoms of college trustees and faculties they are sometimes felt and sometimes have prevailed when a President or a Professor is to be selected. One can only hope that, on the whole, error will balance error and lie, lie.
The part that extraneous issues, whispered or bellowed, have to do with the great decision is easily exaggerated. Moreover, in 'talking politics' people are apt to say a good deal more than they mean and even to say what they don't mean. No doubt all sorts of queer reasons for voting one way or the other are given; but there is a great deal of deceptive humor among them. There is a certain amount of blind, credulous passion that can't be persuaded or dealt with rationally. But through all the hullabaloo and the rain of inventions and calumnies, on one side or the other, there must be a great quiet mass quite undistinguished, not breaking into print or speech, still engaged in weighing the candidates, not yet committed, waiting to hear both sides before making the choice.
To them the impertinences complained of by DR. HOPKINS are nothing. That independent vote is yet largely to be gained or lost- Campaign misrepresentations and slanders can be swallowed only by a certain number of persons. The selection of GOVERNOR SMITH and ME. HOOVER by their parties was an act of intelligence which shows that even the politicians, themselves as a rule not overburdened with that quality, expected from the public an intelligence that is not to be mis- judged on account of some manifestations of the cussedness of human nature.
