way with their spiritual or worldly interests. There are others, not so gifted, who nevertheless rise to the challenge, get a stimulus from the difficulty, and become doctors, not without some baleful nervous wear and tear and retardation of their purely inner life, but on the whole successfully and with advantage. These two classes form the natural Ph.D.'s for whom the degree is legitimately instituted. To be sure, the degree is of no consequence one way or the other for the first sort of man, for in him the personal worth obviously outshines the title. To the second set of persons, however, the doctor-ideal may contribute a touch of energy and solidity of scholarship which otherwise they might have lacked, and were our candidates all drawn from these classes, no oppression would result from the institution.

But there is a third class of persons who are genuinely, and in the most pathetic sense, the institution's victims. For this type of character the academic life may become, after a certain point, a virulent poison. Men without marked originality or native force, but fond of truth and especially of books and study, ambitious of reward and recognition, poor often, and needing a degree to get a teaching position, weak in the eyes of their examiners among these we find the veritable chair à canon of the wars of learning, the unfit in the academic struggle for existence. There are individuals of this sort for whom to pass one degree after another seems the limit of earthly aspiration. Your private advice does not discourage them. They will fail, and go away to recuperate, and then present themselves for another ordeal, and sometimes prolong the process into middle life. Or else, if they are less heroic morally they will accept the failure as a sentence of doom that they are not fit, and are broken-spirited men thereafter.

We of the university faculties are responsible for deliberately creating this new class of American social failures, and heavy is the responsibility. We advertise our "schools" and send out our degree requirements, knowing well that aspirants of all sorts will be attracted, and at the same time we set a standard which intends to pass no man who has not native

intellectual distinction. We know that there is no test, however absurd, by which, if a title or decoration, a public badge or mark, were to be won by it, some weakly suggestible or hauntable persons would not feel challenged and remain unhappy if they went without it. We dangle our three magic letters before the eyes of these predestined victims, and they swarm to us like moths to an electric light. They come at a time of life when failure can no longer be repaired easily and when the wounds it leaves are permanent; and we say deliberately that mere work faithfully performed, as they perform it, will not by itself save them, they must in addition put in evidence the one thing they have not got, namely this quality of intellectual distinction. Occasionally, out of sheer human pity, we ignore our high and mighty standard and pass them. Usually, however, the standard, and not the candidate, commands our fidelity. The result is caprice, majorities of one on the jury, and on the whole, a confession that our pretensions about the degree can not be lived up to consistently. Thus, partiality in the favored cases; in the unfavored, blood on our hands; and in both a bad conscience are the results of our administration.

The more wide-spread becomes the belief that our diplomas are indispensable hall-marks to show the sterling metal of their holders, the more wide-spread these corruptions will become. We ought to look to the future carefully, for it takes generations for a national custom, once rooted, to be grown away from. All the European countries are seeking to diminish the check upon individual spontaneity which state examinations with their tyrannous growth have brought in their train. We have had to institute state examinations too; and it will perhaps be fortunate if some day hereafter our descendants, comparing machine with machine, do not sigh with regret for old times and American freedom, and wish that the régime of the dear old bosses might be reinstalled, with plain human nature, the glad hand and the marble heart, liking and disliking, and man-toman relations grown possible again. Meanwhile, whatever evolution our state examinations are destined to undergo,

our universities at least should never cease to regard themselves as the jealous custodians of personal and spiritual spontaneity. They are, indeed, its only organized and recognized custodians in America today. They ought to guard against contributing to the increase of officialism and snobbery and insincerity as against a pestilence. They ought to keep truth and disinterested labor always in the foreground, treat degrees as secondary incidents, and in season and out of season make it plain that what they live for is to help men's souls, and not to decorate their persons with diplomas.

There seem to be three obvious ways in which the increasing hold of the Ph.D. octopus upon American life can be kept in check.

The first way lies with the universities. They can lower their fantastic standards (which here at Harvard we are so proud of) and give the doctorate as a matter of course, just as they give the bachelor's degree, for a due amount of time spent in patient labor in a special department of learning, whether the man be a brilliantly gifted individual or not. Surely native distinction needs no official stamp, and should disdain to ask for one. On the other hand, faithful labor, however commonplace, and years devoted to a subject, always deserve to be acknowledged and requited.

The second way lies with both the universities and the colleges. Let them give up their unspeakably silly ambition to bespangle their lists of officers with these doctorial titles. Let them look more to substance and less to vanity and sham.

The third way lies with the individual student, and with his personal advisers in the faculties. Every man of native power, who might take a higher degree, and refuses to do so, because examinations interfere with the free following out of his more immediate intellectual aims, deserves well of his country, and in a rightly organized community, would not be made to suffer for his independence. With many men the passing of these extraneous tests is a very grevious interference indeed. Private letters of recommendation from

their instructors, which in any event are ultimately needful, ought, in these cases, completely to offset the lack of the bread-winning degree; and instructors ought to be ready to advise students against it upon occasion, and to pledge themselves to back them later personally in the marketstruggle which they have to face.

It is indeed odd to see this love of titles-and such titles -growing up in a country of which the recognition of individuality and bare manhood have so long been supposed to be the very soul. The independence of the state, in which most of our colleges stand, relieves us of those more odious forms of academic politics which continental European countries present. Anything like the elaborate university machine of France, with its throttling influences upon individuals, is unknown here. The spectacle of the Rath distinction in its innumerable spheres and grades, with which all Germany is crawling today, is displeasing to American eyes; and displeasing also in some respects is the institution of Knighthood in England, which, aping as it does an aristocratic title, enables one's wife as well as one's self so easily to dazzle the servants at the house of one's friends. But are we Americans ourselves destined after all to hunger after similar vanities on an infinitely more contemptible scale? And is individuality with us also going to count for nothing unless stamped and licensed and authenticated by some title-giving machine? Let us pray that our ancient national genius may long preserve vitality enough to guard us from a future so unmanly and so unbeautiful!

WILLIAM JAMES

DISCUSSIONS

DECISION IN THE HARVARD-TECHNOLOGY CASE

Because of the great importance of the questions involved, not only to Harvard University and to the Institute of Technology, but to trustees of educational institutions generally, the REVIEW Prints herewith the complete text of the opinion of the full bench of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, determining the action to test the validity of the Harvard-Technology agreement under the terms of the deeds of trust and the will of the late Gordon McKay.

HARVARD COLLEGE, PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF, v. ATTORNEY GENERAL et al.

Suffolk

November 27, 1917.

Trust-Bequest to Harvard College-Gordon McKay Fund-Agreement by College to Transfer Fund to Mass. Institute of Technology to Carry on Work of Endowment, Illegal.

DECOURCY, J. The question presented by this bill for instructions is whether the plaintiff corporation can lawfully carry out an agreement, duly made by it with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "as far as respects the property received by it under the deeds of trust and the will of Gordon McKay.".

The agreement (above set forth in full) assumed its final form in February, 1915. Speaking generally, it purports to establish a cooperative arrangement between Harvard University and the Institute "in the conduct of courses leading to degrees in Mechanical, Electrical, Civil and Sanitary Engineering, Mining and Metallurgy, and in the promotion of research in those branches of Applied Science." To the maintenance of the plan the University agrees to devote, in addition to other income and equipment, "not less than three-fifths of the net income of the Gordon McKay Endowment." On analyzing the material provisions of the plan, and considering them in their practical application, we are led to certain salient conclusions as to what the agreement accomplishes: Education and research in the five branches covered by the agreement are to be transferred from the University to the Institute, and there conducted under the provisions of the agreement as part of the latter's curriculum. The Harvard professors associated with those courses shall become members of the faculty of the Institute; and the property and equipment which the University may hold for the promotion of instruction in industrial