Page 6 Scribulus Winter Issue sideration on any of the points where modern thought is left in profound and almost hopeless uncertainty. Their complacent minds do not feel even a breeze when the intellectual whirlwind swirls about them. Many of them are brilliant students. But they merely memorize what facts are needed for recitation and never ask their meaning. They never draw them inside deep inside for examination. But there is a student, now and then, who, on stepping into the college atmosphere, begins to feel, however slightly, the impact of the modern uncertainty. He wonders at his own surety and begins to revalue his conclusions. A new idea doesn't fit his picture of life and forces him to scan that picture more closely. Another strange idea strikes him, and he examines it. Another old belief is reconsidered. Another new idea challenges, and another and suddenly, almost against his will, he outgrows his old philosophy and enters free into the full and rapid current of modern thought. In the waters of modern skepticism he flounders, he sinks, he loses hold of everything he once clung to. His old religion and social and moral faiths do not stand the test of the new ideas, and he must cast them regretfully aside. What beliefs the college does not strike away, in his bewilderment he voluntarily throws away. Desperately he seeks a new intellectual base, a new certainty. It is not easy to find. In the new thought there seems to be no truth nothing escapes challenge. Each class suggests a base of reorganization; each succeeding class sweeps it away. His doubt increases, and as the current propels him through class after class, his quandary turns to despair. There is no bulwark anywhere like those he knew before he entered college. No firm headland of God, of democracy, or of unselfishness, or of chastity stands above the flood. Though he may not recognize each of these ideals as illusion, yet he cannot be sure that any of them is not illusion. He must doubt them all. But suddenly one day he finds himself standing aright. A new and fresh philosophy has taken form within him. It stands the test. It may be a negative code, one of doubt and skepticism and unbeliefs, but it is stimulating and it has the ring of permanence. He stands and surveys his path and looks about him. And though still uncomfortable and a bit rueful at his rough treatment in the intellectual flood, he smiles half-sorrowful and half-amazed to see his schoolmates, wrapped securely in the philosophic armor they donned when they were children, walking from class to class not even aware that the flood rolls by! They do not even hear on every side the challenge of facts, ideas, beliefs facts ground between the remorseless slabs of experimental science, ideas found on the world of 1936, ideas drawn from every temperament and every land and every kind of experience all shouting incessantly to them to re-examine those crude philosophies formed so many decades past, which they learned to respect when they were so immature and defenseless. And as from his new intellectual shore he watches them amazed, his pity rises that they do not know the rocks they stand on are the rocks of illusion. In all his agony of disillusionment he offers thanks that he is not insensate. For, in short, there never was a propaganda machine more powerful than the combined persuasion of the home and the church and the elementary school. Every student comes to college with a vast store of ideas these agencies have driven in. One type of student lets nothing disturb the peace that the faiths of his fathers provide him though he graduates with honors from college; he never achieves an education. Another type of student submits himself to the process of unlearning. It is an agonizing process, but he sees that it is necessary. It is wracking, and decidedly unattractive. It costs him some mental effort, and some clashes with friends and relatives who do not care to fathom the modern thought. But when he emerges he is not sorry, for he knows that he can now become an educated man. But lest we become abstract, let us forget our types and trace the disillusionment of a single alert freshman. He will be an extreme example, so extreme as to be theoretical; he will go through all the stages that many educated persons have passed through lightly if at all. But he will serve very well to illustrate the process. Our freshman, then, has had inculcated in him in twelve years of schooling all the ideals of America's past. He has fought in the Revolution with the patriots who died to form our democracy; he has fought along with Lincoln in the struggle to pre- Continued on page 20 Winter Issue Scribulus Page 7 IN THE MELTING POT By Cluster M. Nilsson Today, standing before the class, I thought of something regrettable that came up in the neighborhood where I was a youngster. I lived near the tragedy but hardly knew what was going on at the time, nor its significance until it all struck me in a moment as I stood there before the class. The loss had to do with some strange neighbors of ours in that bleak frontier place. They were Japanese of a sort I have not known since. At that time Orientals were just beginning to seep across the Rockies from Vancouver and out onto the plains. Most of those who came at that time were disquieting Chinese, with and without pigtails but always, we kids felt, with a hungry banana knife. But within a few years the Milk River Ridge, a gravelly glacial deposit composed of three or four vanishing lines of blue hills, was spotted here and there by the shanties of scattered "Japs" and by the colonies of Russian Hut-terites. These Japs were honest and always paid their bills, but they were the antithesis of our mysterious neighbors. One family had its cow caged in burlap in one corner of the kitchen. Another family was itself set off in the same way in one corner of the stable. What they lived on for a month would not have kept a small cat alive for a week. The neighbors in the white house across the way were different. She would come out on occasion, to satisfy her gaping American townsfolk, robed in the most glorious silken kimonos of Japan. Her wondering spectators noised it that she had twenty or thirty of them, with deep sleeves that just missed the floor, and that she wore five or six at a time. I know for myself that her kimonos had huge sleeves in them, and now that I think of it I can recall seeing her turn slowly around, arms outstretched, and then put her hands to her throat and remove a garment, and then turn once again within that circle of awe-struck alien eyes. Everywhere in that cottage there were trunks laden with such treasures, and glass china closets packed with fragile hand-painted things dishes and cups and tiny vases and statuettes of all strange colors and shapes, whole sets and single pieces. Most of it must have been done in the home island of these people, where the minute tracery of immortally graceful figures and flowers is not unlike the ancient art of the makers of mosaics. And then without a word, they were gone. The house stood there with all its contents, for a while inviolate when anyone might have entered through a window. But things of beauty do not stand for long un-scarified. A drove of Belgian peasants had been brought in by the Sugar Company to thin beets. They and their offspring were a tough, ignorant, barbarous crowd. In a fight you might pound them a long time before they knew anything was intended. Each night after school as they passed the silent cottage, these descendants of the Germans of fifteen centuries ago would pelt the walls and windows. Finally they clambered in and sacked the place, not carrying many things away, only throwing them and crunching them under their clogs. When my father finally got the place for taxes, nearly everything was gone. There was left a strange black keg-like drum with golden dragons on it, but one end had a stove poker sticking through it. And, too, there remained a strip of one of the rose-hued garments. It lay across a soot-covered stove crumpled in the center of the room where she had turned and posed and explained her royal wardrobe.