twenty years ago. It is of
considerable significance that the two student essays which took the
prizes offered by the Harvard _Advocate_ in 1913 were both on this theme.
The first of them posed the question: "How can the leadership of the
intellectual rather than the athletic student be fostered?" and was
virtually a sermon on a text of President Lowell's: "No one in close touch
with American education has failed to notice the lack among the mass of
undergraduates of keen interest in their studies, and the small regard for
scholarly attainment."

Now, the _Advocate_ prizeman has his specific remedy, and President Lowell
has his, and other men propose other systems and restrictions; but the
evil is too deep-seated to be reached by any superficial scheme of honors
or to be charmed away by insinuating appeals. The other day Mr. William F.
McCombs, chairman of the National Committee which engineered a college
president into the White House, gave this advice to our academic youth:
"The college man must forget--or never let it creep into his head--that
he's a highbrow. If it does creep in, he's out of politics." To which one
might reply in Mr. McCombs's own dialect, that unless a man can make
himself a force in politics (or at least in the larger life of the State)
precisely by virtue of being a "highbrow," he had better spend his four
golden years otherwhere than in college. There it is: the destiny of
education is intimately bound up with the question of social leadership,
and unless the college, as it used to be in the days when the religious
hierarchy it created was a real power, can be made once more a breeding
place for a natural aristocracy, it will inevitably degenerate into a
school for mechanical apprentices or into a pleasure resort for the
_jeunesse doree_ (_sc._ the "gold coasters"). We must get back to a common
understanding of the office of education in the construction of society,
and must discriminate among the subjects that may enter into the
curriculum, by their relative value towards this end.

A manifest condition is that education should embrace the means of
discipline, for without discipline the mind will remain inefficient, just
as surely as the muscles of the body, without exercise, will be left
flaccid. That should seem to be a self-evident truth. Now it may be
possible to derive a certain amount of discipline out of any study, but it
is a fact, nevertheless, which cannot be gainsaid, that some stud