except the reason for the early termination of his career at college.

An interesting account of this incident is supplied by Mr. Hanna himself. In a speech delivered on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of the college, June 13, 1901, he tells the story so well that his account deserves to be repeated in full. He said on that occasion, in the easy colloquial manner characteristic of his public speaking: "I am neither a student nor a scholar, and it is with diffidence I address this audience. My connection with the Western Reserve College reaches back as far as 1857. I had finished my education at the public schools, and I had a choice of going to work or attempting a college course. My mother persuaded me to try the latter. Western Reserve College at 'Hudson' was near at hand, and there I went. I entered what was called the scientific class, in which a kind-hearted professor made things easy for me. There were five members of the class when I entered it. Later the numbers dwindled to three, and when I left there was not any.

"My environment was largely responsible for my going. At my boarding house I fell in with a number of jolly sophomores, and they persuaded me to help them in getting out a burlesque program of the Junior oratoricals. In the division of labor it fell to my lot to distribute these mock programs. I well remember when the iron hand of Professor Young fell on my shoulder. 'Young man,' he said, 'what are you doing?' 'I am distributing literature and education,' I replied,' at the expense of the Junior class.' Well, it was near the end of the term, anyway, and I went home. I told my mother I thought that I would go to work, and that I was sure the faculty would be glad of it. A little while after I met President Hitchcock on Superior Street. I was in jumper and overalls, for I was working. He asked me what I was doing, and I told him 'working.' He didn't say anything, but his eyes and manner said very eloquently that he thought I had struck the right level. And the moral of that story is, boys, 'Don't be ashamed of overalls.'"

The penalty of expulsion or even suspension looks unnecessarily severe for such a harmless joke. In order to account for it, the reader must understand the high importance of the

Junior "oratoricals" among the intellectual festivities of a year of the Western Reserve College. It was the great feature of the college term more important even than the commencement exercises. Every member of the Junior class was expected to "oratorical"; and at the same time the collegiate honors, which were to be distributed among the class a year later, were indicated and practically announced.

Mr. Geo. H. Ford, classmate of Mark Hanna's, tells the story of the episode in the following words: "The 'affair' occurred April, 1859. The Junior class of that year was unusually large and above the average in talent. In it were several Clevelanders. I remember W. W. Andrews, son of Judge Sherlock J. Andrews, as one of them, and John F. and Henry V. Hitchcock, sons of the president of the college. The faculty was justly proud of this class, but certain of its individual members had put on 'airs,' and the lower classmen resented it, Hanna among the rest. The coming 'exhibition' was looked forward to with great local interest. The program was prepared secretly, and to prevent accidents was sent to Cleveland to be printed. Hanna saw an opportunity of removing a little of their conceit, so he went to Cleveland, got on good terms with some one in the printing office, secured a proof of the program, and forwarded it to his fellow-conspirators in Hudson. A racy burlesque or sham program was prepared and returned to him, which he had printed in elegant style and sent back. I think, although I am not sure, he also managed to suppress, or get possession of the genuine programs, and to forward a bundle of the shams by express to the class on the morning of the exhibition, too late for a remedy. The shams were thoroughly distributed throughout the audience in the crowded chapel by boys enlisted by his co-conspirators.'

Mr. Ford does not believe that Mark was expelled. He was merely reprimanded severely by the faculty, indefinitely suspended and his return made conditional on a promise of good behavior. He adds that Mark Hanna was easily a captain among the boys of his age in college-frank, fearless and ener

1 This is a mistake. Mr. Hanna could scarcely have been 21 years old when he entered college. He entered in 1857. The joke was played in 1858.

getic, full of fun and always ready to play harmless jokes on his companions. Once when a local fire company was making a blundering attempt to extinguish a fire near the college campus, he quickly collected thirty or forty boys, charged on the firemen, took the extinguisher away from them, seized the nozzle of the hose with his own hands, climbed to the roof of the house, and remained there until the fire was put out.

Obviously Mark Hanna's suspension was the occasion of his quitting college rather than the cause. After he had finished with the high school, his own preference was for an immediate plunge into business, and in going to college he was merely making a temporary concession to the wishes of his mother. He could make the concession out of respect for his mother, but at the first check his own will prevailed. His parents had allowed him a good deal of independence, and he was accustomed to act for himself. All his deeper instincts urged him to begin his career in business. The fact that he considered himself engaged to be married would alone have been sufficient to make the idea of a long college course irksome. Life itself was beckoning to him. Why potter over books, when there were real things to do?

From his own point of view he made the right decision. He would have gained little from a college training. He was never interested in books. He never learned much out of books. Even at high school his progress must have been slow, or he would have been ready for college before he was twenty years old. By disposition and training he was the true product of a pioneer society, in which an active life without any artificial preliminary discipline is the efficient life, and in which the action adopted is determined by the economic environment. Inasmuch as he was destined to be a business man, the sooner he began, the better. Experience was his one possible source of real education, and his experience could become edifying only as the result of actual experiment. While he had little ability to learn at second hand from books, he had or came to have a gift for learning from his own successes and failures, and so for adapting himself to the needs of his own career.

The business carried on by Hanna, Garretson & Co., into which Mark Hanna entered in the spring of 1858, afforded an