that shall be a drawing forth and a developing of all the higher faculties he may possess, whether they be few or many. The permanence of democratic institutions depends upon such an educational program of conservation. Such a program means the expenditure on our elementary schools alone of five times the amount we are investing in our whole elementary and secondary schools system. It means elementary classes not of fifty or sixty, but of fifteen or twenty, that the teacher may have a chance to be intimately acquainted with the mental life of every pupil. It means that every teacher in the elementary schools shall be of such high native gifts and of such thoro equipment that he or she can discern the mental need of every pupil. At the present moment the educational world is all agog over the achievements of Montessori, a woman of great ability and splendid equipment, who has given her life to the needs of little children. It is safe to predict that her system will produce results in proportion to the vitality and insight of the teachers who attempt to employ it. When our elementary and grammar schools are manned (or womaned) by teachers of the type of Montessori, we may reasonably expect that of that fifty per cent of pupils who drop out at the end of the grammar school, the nine-tenths who have hitherto been discouraged by impossible mental tasks, will be cared for in vocational schools, and the one-tenth of rare gifts who have dropt out on account of poverty will be subsidized by the state, We may further expect that there will be an end of haphazard election in the high school, and that the freshman classes in our colleges and universities will no longer be congested by those for whom a higher intellectual training is an impossibility. Some one may say that this is a fool's Utopian dream, but any one who dreams less than this is a traitor to the race.

In the common schools of Germany a sharp outlook is kept for the boy of exceptional ability. If the boy is of poor parentage (and who can predict into what family such a child will be born?), the government steps in and gives him a higher education at state expense, that later he may serve the state as an instructor in the public schools. This is good

as far as it goes. Such conservation should be practised for all the professions and all the callings in life. It is easy to say that the boy of unusual ability will persist and get the education anyhow. This is not true. Very often family obligations entirely preclude such a consummation, and the "lad of parts" drops out at the end of the grammar school, or at the end of the high school course. If he does persist, he arrives on the scene of action far behind schedule time, and the state is cheated out of five or ten years of effective service. At one of our great state universities in the Middle West one million dollars is being spent this summer on new buildings. Who shall say that the state would not have been better served if that amount of money had been set aside as an endowment for the education of gifted children of poor parentage? would mean two hundred scholarships, each paying $300 a year. Many years ago in a dedicatory address at Johns Hopkins, Thomas Huxley said: "An ancient historian once declared that successful generals often make a wilderness and desolation and call it peace. Today we sometimes erect palatial buildings and call it a university." And then he emphasized the fact-a fact that can not be overemphasizedthat the power of the university depends upon the quality of its instructional force.

It

A strong movement is on foot for the establishment of a great national university at Washington. Such a university would mean that the fullest possible use would be made of the Congressional Library and the splendid collections of the Smithsonian Institution, and it is to be hoped that the project will find speedy realization. And yet it would be a far more significant thing if Congress were to set aside two million dollars each year for conservation purposes in our elementary and secondary schools, and another two millions for the maintenance of six thousand picked scholars in the undergraduate work of our colleges and universities. It may be, however, that the conservation of anything except material resources is unconstitutional. CHARLES N. SMILEY

GRINNELL COLLEGE
GRINNELL, IOWA

III

WHAT THE COLLEGE STANDS FOR 1

At the beginning of the nintieth year of this old college, I give you hearty greeting. It is a greeting which seems to me to belong not to the present year only, but to all the years preceding, of which this new year is the crown and consummation. Standing near the close of a century of our history, filled with the sense of the duty of the present, and not, I hope, unquickened by the thought of the future, I wish to speak to you upon the great question of what the college stands for. It is a question elemental and fundamental.

The first truth or fact for which this historic college stands is that it stands for a training under liberty, unto liberty in individual judgment and conduct. Liberty is rather a condition than a force, rather a state than a goal. It is man's war cry, man's peace cry, it represents humanity's lengthy struggle. Yet liberty does nothing. It is not a cause. Like time it has no force; like space it represents no achievement, but like both time and space all things are done under it. This college gives to its students liberty. Few and slight are the restraints which it makes, large and wide is its freedom, few are the rules which it lays down, few also are the principles, but the rules are not for the use of one who observes the principles. A primary reason for the adoption of the principle of liberty is this: Soon you are to go out into life, where you are to be the guides of your own conduct, the philosophers of your own character, the masters of your own destiny. The best method of preparation for such freedom in character and conduct is found in freedom itself. Freedom under guardianship which is neither remote nor parental is the best preparation for freedom absolute.

One reason that leads some people to sympathize with England in the great war is found in the fact that with all of 1 Address given at the opening of the college year, 1917-1918.

her excellencies, and they are many, she stands for liberty; Germany stands for autocracy, for an autocracy founded upon military force. England stands for individual liberty. In Germany whatever is not expressly permitted is forbidden; in England and the United States, whatever is not expressly forbidden is permitted. In the one case restraint is the rule, which indeed has advantages unto forcefulness. In the other case freedom is the rule, which indeed has certain disadvantages of intellectual and other dissipation, but which on the whole represents the training of character. In this college the Anglo-Saxon method prevails. It seeks to prepare for full freedom under the large freedom of these years.

A second fact for which the college stands is the training under responsibility unto responsibility. At least three responsibilities each of you will finally assume. First, the headship of a home; second, the guidance of your own character and destiny; third, a share in the well-being of the community. The headship of a home is a purpose which every man and woman should seriously entertain as a worthy aim. The coming into that headship is often surrounded, and, perhaps, almost necessarily, by certain emotional elements. These elements sometimes sink down into the petty and the sillythey should be elevated into largely human and divinely noble relationships. The home is the fundamental unit of society. Into a home you were born, in a home you live, from a home you at last go forth, not to return. To be born not into a home is an event which merits equal degrees of scorn for the offending and of pity for the child who is thus born, belonging to no one. To be the head of a home is a glorious responsibility to which you should look forward with holy desire. Of course, you should have the responsibility of yourself, you want it (and nobody else does); and also you should prepare yourself for assuming your share in the common responsibilities of the community. This community represents civilization. It is the result of all the strivings and struggles, the lives and the deaths, the wealths and the poverties, the triumphs and the bankruptcies of the past. To it you are a debtor. All you are you have received from it. For it you

have not toiled-it is the unearned increment-it is more, it is the unearned treasure, civil, social, political, moral, economic, intellectual, human. Being debtor you are not simply to pay a debt, you are to increase the treasure, to give over more than you have received. You are to seek to become a creditor.

Now for bearing these responsibilities in and of life, the college lays on you responsibilities; the chief of the responsibilities to which I now refer is the responsibility for the communal academic life. Into this life you have come. The wealth of almost a hundred years of it you inherit-use this wealth well, increase it, transmit it to your successors, enlarged and refined. In particular, I desire to call to your serious reflection one important matter. It is the conduct of all the community affairs-the weekly paper, the direction of various associations, dramatic, musical, debating, literary, political. The conduct of all class and fraternity and all similar affairs should be managed with forethought, with judgment, with taste. The officers of the college would not interfere; they would help. Yours is the responsibility, responsibility for the present. This responsibility and all these responsibilities should be so borne as to prepare you for the three great responsibilities which await.

The college also stands for making you catholic in your relations to men. The catholic man is the universal man. He is the over-soul that comes down and blesses. He is the under-soul who at once supports and is enriched and is blessed. He is the around-soul who embraces all human conditions and is embraced by them. Each man knows more than you do about some things: Be a learner. You know more than any other man about some things: Be a teachera humble teacher indeed to the high and the low, to the broad and the narrow, to the poor and to the rich, to the obscure and the conspicuous, to the remote and the near. They each have their lesson and their influence. The college does away with the local, the provincial, the narrow, the transient. The humanistic was narrow, the humane less narrow, the human is broad. The college stands for universal relations: it re