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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXIV. No. 883 



sadly miss the meaning of this day did we 

 fail to turn our grateful thoughts toward 

 Cyrus Northrop and to wish him many 

 years of serenity and happiness. Unlike 

 Macbeth, he has 



. . . that which should accompany old age, 

 As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends. 



To-day the university sets its face 

 toward a new regime. No man can take 

 the unique place of its second president. 

 The burden must rest on many men and 

 women, who, as comrades, take up the task. 

 The gains of the personal ascendency that 

 has passed must be capitalized. Coopera- 

 tion, organization, team-play, are keynotes 

 for the coming years. An institutional 

 period is at hand. Loyalty must look to 

 purposes rather than to a person. Leader- 

 ship will consist in carrying out policies 

 which many have helped to formulate. 

 Regents, faculties, alumni, students — all 

 citizens, must see the institution more 

 vividly as a noble trust to be administered 

 for the common good. This spirit of co- 

 operation can be aroused only by a com- 

 pelling vision of the university seen as an 

 organ of the higher life of the common- 

 wealth. And this ideal must get its setting 

 in some inspiring philosophy of the state. 



Mr. H. G. Wells tells us that we, as a 

 nation, suffer from "state blindness." 

 ' ' The typical American, ' ' he says, ' ' has no 

 'sense of the state.' I do not mean that he 

 is not passionately and vigorously patriotic. 

 But I mean that he has no conception that 

 his business activities, his private employ- 

 ments, are constituents in a large collective 

 process; that they affect other people and 

 the world forever, and can not, as he 

 imagines, begin and end with him." 



Even our friendly critic, the British 

 ambassador, takes much the same view. 

 "The state," declares Mr. Bryee, "is not 

 to them (Americans), as to Germans or 

 Frenchmen, and even to some English 



thinkers, an ideal moral power, charged 

 with the duty of forming the characters 

 and guiding the lives of its subjects. It is 

 more like a commercial company, or, per- 

 haps, a huge municipality created for the 

 management of certain business in which 

 all who reside within its bounds are inter- 

 ested. . . ." This individualistic, "stock 

 company" theory of the commonwealth is 

 neither ennobling in itself nor does it af- 

 ford a sound basis for a state-supported 

 university. We may paraphrase Mr. Joseph 

 Chamberlin on the British Constitution, 

 and thank God that our institutions are 

 not logical. This philosophy would almost 

 reduce the university to a machine for 

 turning out persons eqiiipped at public ex- 

 pense for getting a living out of the citizens 

 who had been already taxed to train their 

 exploiters. On this basis it is hard to see 

 why the state should give privileges to a 

 few at the expense of their fellows. Even 

 the "antidote against ignorance" philos- 

 ophy leaves the imagination cold. This is 

 only a sublimated form of the policeman 

 theory. Obviously we need some other con- 

 ception of the state if we are to escape 

 cynicism about both our social system and 

 our public higher education. 



But we can not admit that Mr. Wells 

 and Mr. Bryce have quite made out their 

 case. There are signs of change in the feel- 

 ing of Americans toward the state. Espe- 

 cially in the middle and the far west do we 

 note a keener recognition of collective in- 

 terests and purposes. There is a quickened 

 feeling of team-play, a clearer "sense of 

 the state," which is thought of not in a 

 merely political way, but is looked at as a 

 social life with common aims. The people 

 of a state have learned to work together to 

 protect natural resources, to foster agricul- 

 ture, to safeguard public health, to regulate 

 industry and commerce, to improve the 

 highways, to care for the defective and de- 



