to all of them the constitution and the laws of our land, like the scriptural householder,give what is just,—to all of them Columbia says: "Take what is thine and go thy way."

God save the Republic of the United States of America and make us all worthy of her sovereign citizenship!

The Holy Cross Purple.

VOL. XII.

FEBRUARY, 1901.

EDITORIAL.

No. I.

Nothing in our college life is of greater importance or is considered with less thought than the politics of our own little world. Our mode of college life furnishes unsurpassed opportunities for us to know the true worth of the various candidates for the positions within the gift of the student body. Yet the prevalent custom of electioneering warrants us in saying that such opportunities are ruthlessly thrust aside by far the greater portion of the students vote for the one in whose interests they are first approached, if he be a good fellow." Good fellowship, as we consider it to-day, is simply a tendency to turn everything into fun, fall into your comrades' ways, enjoy their jokes, never indulge in a dispute for fear of injuring your popularity; in fact, to take things easy. Such a feeling exists here at the present time that the ability, worth and fitness of a candidate are all made subordinate to good fellowship.

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Every one of us should ask himself if he is performing his duty towards himself and his college in placing good fellows in office over

men of ability. Does it befit us as college men? Is this a result to be desired from an educational training that should make us solid thinking men? "The boy is father to the man," and if we use not our judgment in the affairs of college life there is certainly good cause to fear that we shall use it in after life in a manner unworthy of college men.

J. F. MURPHY.

THE COLLEGE STAR.

If anywhere, the charm of novelty is had to the full in College dramatics. From the moment of the first faint rumor that a play is to be staged, until the heroic Thespian, clad in regal gold and purple, bows his "Vos plaudite" and enters anew upon the course of ordinary life there is wont to exist a continuous flow of excitement; there is running to and fro of daft managers and property men; there are relentless conflicts between the all-absorbing stars and aspiring lesser luminaries; there are addresses, rhetorical and un-rhetorical, polite and impolite, encouraging and discouraging, delivered by irate. critics and prompters to that most used and yet most abused of all stage machinery, the intractable supernumerary,-all of which to the unsophisticated extern seems folly, but to the initiated the acme of all that is novel and mirth-exciting. What more novel scene, for instance, can be imagined than the sight of an aggressive god of athletic fame, whose days have been spent gathering olympic dust, stealing off to some

retired nook and there, in the midst of vain contortionings of mind and body, striving to master the lore of some Shakespearean tome which has been the while gathering classic dust, but not that of Olympus? What stranger or more thrilling than the same divinity (for the younger scions of the college have already deified him) being now coaxed, now driven to the well nigh futile task of standing gracefully, while the hero courses up and down the "boards," ever and anon turning towards the "wall-flowers" and distributing impartially his Boothian glances, antics and accents?

The picture may seem somewhat overdrawn, and yet in the main, with some slight modifications for the varying circumstances of time and place, it is a true one. The college actor is not created but made, and made to a type and in the midst of environments which are hard to find elsewhere. He has been an abused and blushing debutante, he has stood an adamantine statue during the most affecting and heartrending scenes, panoplied at one time in helm, corslet and glittering buckles, at another in nothing save an abbreviated under-tunic, a spectacle to the gods and to the pit; he has been alternately laughed at and cheered; he has been the unresisting target of numberless jests and nick-names which his dramatic doings and imaginings have begotten; in fine, there is not a bone of his body, nor a quaver of his voice that has not been criticised and labeled. Should his nerve fail him he gives a farewell performance, sometimes accompanied, sometimes unaccom

panied, and becomes either an ardent manager or a savage critic; should his heart be of triple brass, despite the many pleasantries that are leveled at him, he plods onward, overcoming at every step novel situations and inconveniences, until finally he gains the mastery over his novelty-seeking fellows, and forces them to relinquish him for newer and easier game, and to recognize the position that his efforts have attained. Such is the genesis of the College Star.