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serving in legislatures and on state and national committees. They are good and responsible citizens. The only conspicuous group of committees from which not only the alumnæ of the women's colleges but women in general are absent is the boards of the great national foundations.

To those who have been closely concerned with the education of women it is natural that these colleges, which for fifty years have sent out such intelligent and socially minded graduates, should yield in importance to no other institutions or group of institutions. If women, the mothers and teachers of the next generation, are to have as good an education as their brothers, as solid, as intelligent, and as farseeing, then that education must be established so that it cannot slip backward. Further than that, it must be given every chance to advance without rigidity or restriction. The women's colleges must parallel the education offered, not by the mediocre colleges for men, but by the colleges which train men most efficiently, for, unless women are to be less seriously trained than men, the first rank must be the same for each.

It is precisely at this point that we meet the crux of the question confronting the women's colleges to-day. Are we in America prepared to admit the right of women to the same quality of educational opportunity as men? If we are, it follows that the institutions for women should receive financial support in proportion to the tasks laid upon them. Such support has not so far been given.

It would not, of course, be just to compare the endowments of colleges whose work is mainly undergraduate with those of universities which give graduate and professional training and undertake research on a large scale. But a comparison of the women's with the men's undergraduate college shows

a large disproportion in invested funds. The largest of the women's colleges, for example, has endowments yielding annually less than one hundred and twenty dollars per student, compared with five hundred dollars enjoyed by its nearest neighbor among the men's colleges. The difference is made up by charging higher fees and by greater economy of operation. The fees have already been raised to the point where the number of students from the less well-to-do families is showing a serious decline. A substantial part of the income from increased fees has to be used for scholarships to retain our clientele even among the daughters of teachers, ministers, doctors, and other professional men on moderate salaries. It is from these classes that in our experience come the largest proportion of good minds. We need them to maintain the intellectual quality of the colleges, and it would be a great loss to the country if these girls could not be given the educational opportunities of which they make so excellent a use. We need them and their still poorer sisters to maintain the democracy which has always been a valuable element in our academic life. In spite of all our efforts the proportion of students from public high schools is steadily déclining; and a relaxing of these efforts would speedily bring us to a situation in which ninety per cent of our students would come from expensive private schools. Such a result would be a calamity for all concerned.

The difference in per capita yield does not tell the whole story. In most of the men's colleges the housing problem is largely solved by fraternities and clubs, and there are no corresponding institutions in the group of women's colleges under discussion. Dormitories have to be built out of contributed funds, and their management increases the cost of administration. The present

cost of building is such that the return from rents makes them a poor investment. The money given for fraternity houses by alumni does not appear in the assets of the men's colleges, but it is in effect an additional endowment.

'Greater economy of operation' may not sound like pure loss, but it is necessary to see what it involves. Among the minor implications are restrictions on library and laboratory equipment, less opportunity for legitimate athletics, poorer apparatus, and less leisure for research on the part of the faculty. But the major implication is a smaller salary budget, involving a lower scale of salaries or fewer teachers or both. For the last ten years salaries in the men's colleges have been steadily rising, and, the supply of able teachers being strictly limited, this means more and more severe competition. The women's colleges have also increased salaries, partly by means of funds raised by alumnæ and a few generous outside friends and foundations, partly by means, as has been said, of higher fees. But the alumnæ are exhausted by their efforts, and the limit of higher fees has been reached for present economic conditions. We must, therefore, expect more and more to have our best men drawn away from us by our wealthier brothers.

What we are most concerned about is the quality of the intellectual life of our institutions. To maintain the present level, and still more to raise it, there must be money enough to retain our good scholars, to give them reasonable working schedules, to afford them time

and resources for research and writing. Positions in the women's colleges must be made positively as well as comparatively attractive, and this to first-rate women as well as to men.

It is easy enough to see how the situation has come about. Most of the money in the country is in the hands of men, and those disposed to give or bequeath large sums to education naturally think first of their own colleges. Even when their fortunes are at the disposal of their widows, the alma mater of a husband or son is much more likely to benefit than a college for women. To thousands of families in which both husband and wife are college-bred, simultaneous appeals have come during these last seven years for contributions to a campaign. In how many cases has the wife's college fared as well as the husband's?

The question which we wish to raise is one of fair play. We have sketched the history and achievements of the colleges for women. They invite scrutiny and they can stand comparison. They are eager to go on, to develop, to experiment. The material which is being sent them in great numbers consists of the daughters of men who hold them as their dearest possessions. For their physical welfare and for their pleasures they lavish their means. For the training of their minds and the development of their personalities the provision they make, in comparison with that made for their brothers, is meagre and grudging. Do Americans believe in educating women or do they not? If they do, the question is one of justice rather than of chivalry.

THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER

BY JAMES TRUSLOW ADAMS

As it happens, within a span of not many months I have stood beside the graves of three Unknown Soldiers: one buried on the green slope of Arlington at Washington, one who rests beneath the stone flags of Westminster Abbey, and one buried in the middle of the swirling street traffic of the Place de l'Étoile in Paris. Italy also has her milite ignoto, and doubtless others lie in other lands whose troops took part in the Great War. Even making all allowance for the laws of imitation and the herd spirit which govern so much of our life to-day, this widespread honoring of the unknown dead is a phenomenon worth considering.

Man has always delighted to honor the great and those who have performed conspicuous service according to the ideas of their age and place. But now for the first time whole nations, and those the most enlightened, have come to honor the man of whom we know nothing, the Unknown Soldier. As a matter of unfortunate fact, the particular body may be that of one who fought the draft to the last ditch and was a slacker in service. That, however, is of course wholly irrelevant; for it is not really the Unknown Soldier who thus receives the almost religious adoration of his people, but the Common Man, for that is what he is intended to typify the ordinary man who, willingly or unwillingly, served his country and, either because of the lack of a fortuitously happy combination of circumstances, or perhaps because of the lack of inherent ability, failed

to make a known and notable record.

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Of course, it may be claimed that what mankind is worshiping at this tomb is in reality 'the soul of the nation' or 'the totality of suffering and struggle and failure and death and victory.' But even if this is true, which I doubt, so far as the generality of the long line of worshipers is concerned, ordinary folk who are not given to rising to abstruse reflections on patriotism, life, and death, ism, life, and death, nevertheless the choice of the symbol remains unaltered. Heretofore throughout all history it has been the great leader who has symbolized a cause or a movement or an aspiration. La Patrie in France used to be worshiped in the pure and girlish figure of the Maid of Orleans. For that 'totality' of ideas and emotions and hopes for which Christianity has stood, it was Christ who was worshiped, not some 'Unknown Christian.' No, sublimate the idealism of that tomb as one will, the fact still remains that mankind has taken the unknown man, the common man, to symbolize to-day whatever lofty emotions may be aroused by that silent body; and the more lofty the idealists proclaim them, the more striking is the contrast between them and their symbol. In the century that has elapsed between the placing of the corpse of Napoleon beneath the dome of the Invalides and the burying of the unknown poilu beneath the Triumphal Arch, there has occurred the most mighty revolution in man's thought that he has ever known.

It has come, this honoring of the

symbolic unknown dead, to be a cult. The first thing that a distinguished foreigner must do on visiting the countries of these canonized Unknown is to go and place a wreath on the tomb, though the visitor himself may never have had anything to do with the war, already ten years past; nor need his visit have the remotest connection with anything military. It is about this unknown common man that the real religion of the present day is crystallizing. No one cares a rap whether the distinguished visitor honor the God of the country he is visiting by attending worship in any of its churches, but he must worship, wreath in hand and with bowed head and silent prayer, its Unknown Soldier, its common man.

In literature also the common man has become the hero. Rarely now does the serious drama depict a protagonist who by any stretch of the imagination can be considered a great character. We are more apt to find ourselves watching the insane rage of a ship's stoker or the marital complications of an utterly uninteresting and inconspicuous commuter in a New Jersey suburb. The men and women sung in our poetry mostly deserve just such epitaphs as they get in Spoon River Anthology. In fiction we have abandoned Vanity Fair to mingle with the drab and narrow inhabitants of Main Street. This admiration for the undistinguished is a comparatively recent development. Of course the common man has for long been coming into his own - and some of ours-economically and politically, though perhaps he has not in reality got so far politically as he flatters himself that he has, save to muddy the waters. He has been steadily forcing himself on the world, but perhaps his most astounding achievement has been to force himself into the leading place in our arts and, at least our publicly avowed, admirations.

It is a mistake to think that the Fathers of this Republic had any great regard for the common man as such. The tradition in that respect which his flatterers have tried to foist on the rest of us will not hold water. Here and there, indeed, were leaders ahead of their time, like Thomas Hooker, Roger Williams, or Thomas Jefferson, who believed in the common man and told him so. But for the most part the leaders in the 'great migrations' and the Revolutionary period, although they may have told him so, did not believe in him. In the colonizing days John Cotton and John Winthrop had about as much faith in democracy and the ability of the common people to govern themselves as had George the Third or Louis the Fourteenth later. Cotton Mather, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, in a fit of spleen spoke of his plebeian fellow townsmen as 'insignificant lice.' Alexander Hamilton's testy remark is well known: "The People - your People, Sir, is a great beast.' Washington, so Jefferson reports, although believing that the people should exercise as much power as they were capable of using wisely, did not have nearly as much faith in their ability and honesty as Jefferson himself did. As for the opinions held of the common man by most of the lesser Federalist leaders who ran America for nearly the whole of the first two decades after the Revolution, they are almost unprintable.

Then along in the 1840's came Bancroft and others who began to write the heroic legend of the country's past, and the common man began his enchanted ascent in public estimation. In Lincoln it was thought that the common man had at last blazed forth in a trail of glory, people forgetting, of course, that although Lincoln was born in poverty he was not a common, but a most uncommon, man. If he had not been,

he would have probably remained in obscurity with the rest of the herd of poverty-stricken pioneers and railsplitters who were common men and who never emerged. As for his alleged remark that 'God must have loved the common people, He made so many of them,' I frankly doubt if he ever said it, at any rate with serious intent. It is too silly. One might just as well say that God must have loved fleas or cockroaches or the yellow-fever mosquito, He made so many of them.

But little by little the common man has got where he is and now receives the homage of poets and novelists, and his bones rest at Arlington and in the Abbey and under the Arc de Triomphe. The trades-unions key their work down to the capacities or inclinations of the lowest of his type in ability. Our public schools and, to an alarming extent, our colleges are standardized on the mental level of his progeny, so that a college degree has ceased to have the slightest cultural meaning. The mystic letters A. B. have come to have less significance as 'Bachelor of Arts' than as 'Ablebodied Seaman.' If a man desires to be president of these United States he must make himself in public as near the common man as he can - indulge in the theatricalism of Roosevelt, be photographed wearing a Shriner's turban like Harding, or with a pitchfork or in chaps like Coolidge, however remote such antics may be from his nature. The cultivated gentleman, no matter how strong his character, how great his ability, how profound his knowledge of the complex problems of the modern State, is no longer a possible leader unless he is also 'folks,' unless he can camouflage his superiority and make the common man believe that after all he is as common as himself at bottom. America pretends to worship education, but I cannot recall a single photograph of any president with a book in his

hand, though I have seen innumerable ones of presidents carrying a milk pail, handling an axe, pitching hay, or trundling a wheelbarrow.

It does not make so much difference, perhaps, how all this has happened as what it means and what it is going to lead to. What does it signify that the world to-day worships the private and not the general? Of course in time we may get some high staff officers into the Abbey also. They seldom die in battle and the supply of bodies has been scant as yet. But, even if we do, they will never again rank above the Unknown Soldier in death, however they outranked, and in qualities of leadership surpassed, him in life. That epoch of history appears to be closed.

That the common man has many admirable traits is undoubtedly true, and I would be the last to deny them. That he often deserves more praise and recognition than he gets I have also observed often enough in a life which has taken me to many places, among many kinds of people, on many different pursuits. But his qualities are for the most part the same fundamental ones of courage, kindliness, generosity, faithfulness, and so on, which are common to all decent men of all grades. On the other hand, the common man lacks qualities which the great man possesses. It is needless to say that by 'common man' I intend no snobbish reference to wealth or social position or early opportunities. I mean by the 'common man' merely the ordinary man who has never in his life done anything distinguished, who is incapable of high emotion, who has never raised himself, mentally or spiritually, above the herd, who has never conferred any benefit on the race, or who at death, except for the sorrow of those near who loved him, leaves no more behind him for the rest of us than a pet dog. I know plenty of common men among the

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