y own old students at Columbia, and I know that this is so.

* * * * *

It is a significant fact, however, for those of us who are interested in
the welfare of college boys and girls, that the United States government
deliberately built up what was to all intents and purposes an
undergraduate college life for the young men of the army, with
athletics, dances, dramatics, singing, and all the rest, even including
opportunities for reading and study. Even the most hardened of regular
officers, who at the first, I fear, regarded this as some of the
civilian foolishness with which all soldiers have to contend, came to
see that the program was a vital factor in building up such a body of
fighting men as they had never seen. And this is only another way of
saying that if you want to use the human machine for any purpose, you
must concern yourself with the whole of it. Human nature does not come
in air-tight compartments.

President Wilson coined a phrase which has thoroughly gone the rounds
when he said that the side-shows of college life should not overshadow
nor distract from the entertainment in the main tent. We all agree to
this. But I think we are more inclined than when the words were spoken
to urge that the side-shows, properly and intelligently subordinated,
should be under the same management as the main tent. The army has tried
the experiment on a large scale and it has worked well. In February last
there were in France and on the Rhine six million and a half individual
participants in athletic games, ten million attendants on
entertainments, nearly a quarter of a million students.

* * * * *

None of the lessons which the Army has learned are more significant
than those which have to do with mobilization and classification. The
activities of the Provost Marshal General, of the Committee on
Classification and Personnel, in cooperation with the Committee on
Education, furnish the best record of large scale human engineering in
the new science of personnel of which we have any record, either in this
country or, I think, elsewhere.

A university like this one is an army, and not such a small army either,
judging by peacetime standards. The United States found that it was
worth while, indeed that it was absolutely necessary in organizing its
forces, to find out everything it could about every man in the army,
what he needed physically to increase his ef