THE WAR AS A PRACTICAL TEST OF AMERICAN SCHOLARSHIP[2]

THE WAR AS A PRACTICAL TEST OF AMERICAN SCHOLARSHIP[2]

It is a difficult task to attempt to define the American scholar of to-day. If any of you doubt it, let him try it as I have tried. Scholarship, like many another broad term, has no sharply marked edges. It is hard to define anything that lacks definiteness; and, after all, the task is relatively profitless, because we all of us recognize what is at the center of the concept. I think we all recognize that the scholar is an expert in some particular field or fields; but he is more than the expert as such, in that he knows enough of other matters to see his particular specialty in its relation to things in general. He must, to this degree at least, be a philosopher. This very general conception of scholarship is fairly constant, but the fields which the conception includes are broadening day by day and almost hour by hour. We cannot to-day limit scholarship to the polite branches which were all that it embodied when this Society was founded or even when this Chapter was established. The scholar of the old-fashioned type must now accept as his fellow the man who has helped to flatten the trajectory of the 16-inch shell, or to control the birth rate of the cootie. Later on I shall suggest one other element which, in the light of the test which American scholarship has undergone in the past two years, it seems to me should now be included in our idea of the typical American scholar.

We Americans are proud of being called a nation of inventors; and most of us have made, or almost made, private discoveries of an inventional nature which, for some reason, have never come to fruition. The scientific boards in Washington during the war received more than sixty thousand suggestions in some mechanical field; and I am told by those who ought to know that of all these not more than five of those coming from untrained minds were of any practical value. Even from the trained minds there came, I am told, no fundamental discovery in science as a direct result of the war conditions. Suggestions of improvements in detail and valuable suggestions there were in plenty, new applications of known principles, but application of a fundamentally new idea, no. That is only to say what we already know, that discovery is not made to order. In each case the idea had already been born in the mind of some intellectual pioneer and worked out by him, and some man who had the idea in the front of his mind was at hand to apply it to the new condition. And that means, I think, that if we met the test, we met it with our scholars.

When the test came, certain fields of scholarship naturally afforded a better chance for immediate service than others. The chemist, for example, had a better chance a thousand-fold than the archæologist. It is extraordinary, however, how many of the gifts which burned bright on the national altar came from men with some out-of-the-way specialty. Take archæology itself, if you will. The best trench helmet developed during the war was designed by the expert in armor from our own academic fellowship. I am told that a very important element in the length of time which it took to control the submarine menace was the fact that when war broke out the science of oceanography was almost wholly in the hands of the Germans. When the world's supply of cocoanut husks was taken up for gas masks and we still needed charcoal, we had to turn for additional sources to the tropical botanist, who might have been expected to remain reasonably undisturbed. It remained for a scholar in perhaps the purest branch of pure science, astronomy, to recognize the well known fact that it is the shape of the tail of any and every moving object, motor car or boat or what you will, and not the shape of the head, which is the factor of chief importance in design, and to apply this recognition to artillery problems. The re-designing of our artillery shells under the direction of this astronomer added miles to their range. Another astronomer applied his experience in studying the movement of comets to solving certain problems of long-range artillery fire where the projectile in its flight rises into the circumambient ether.

In proving the case for the American scholar, as I think we can prove it, we should not be beguiled into the pleasant task of recording the deeds of scholars and gentlemen when the deeds were those of the gallant gentleman rather than of the scholar per se. We have one here in our own academic family whose lieutenant's bars I should be as proud to wear as the stars of any of our generals. Nor need we, I think, cite the instances where the rigorous training of the scholar clearly laid the foundation for great accomplishment in some general field of administration. The man whom we can thank perhaps more than any other for the brilliant conduct of our war finance was seventeen years ago editor-in-chief of the Columbia Law Review. We may well turn with pride, but we don't need him to prove our point, to the scholar of this university, formerly president of this Chapter, who, from his own talents and experience and his alert sense of scholarship in others, has earned the place which he now holds as educational director of the largest university in the world, the A.E.F. University at Beaune.

Our case rests, as I say, upon the direct applications of scholarship, and not only upon their quality, but on their range. A single division of the National Research Council, in its report for 1918, showed work of national significance by the scholars in physics, mathematics, and allied fields toward the solution of no fewer than sixty-eight different problems, every one of which needed for its solution men with training and knowledge and vision. At the outset, who among us had the slightest conception of the complexity of the adaptations to warfare of what was known to modern scholarship? We knew that the war was mounting into the air, but who had any realization of the adjustments which this involved? Fifteen fundamental problems based on pure physics promptly arose with reference to instruments for airplane operation. For example, at night and in the clouds, the aviator must have before his eyes a dial which will indicate the slightest deviation from his course. Seven problems had to do with airplane photography. As the art of camouflage advanced, for instance, color filters had to be devised for its detection from above. Seven additional problems had to do with factors of construction and maintenance, as fuel efficiency. Nine others affected ballooning; and the balloon, as the war developed, came to be of greater and greater importance. Eleven studies were in signalling: one, for example, a device for secret daylight signalling, with a range of five miles or more. And please remember that all these were the task of one branch of one organization within the field of pure science. By common consent, the dullest branch of physics was held to be acoustics, but since 1914 the whole question of sound-ranging has been in the hands of experts in acoustics. A device developed by American physicists gave our men nineteen seconds in which to take cover from cannon fired four miles away. The most brilliant work in this field was that of a former student of the Columbia School of Mines.

If I were to pick out one field in which the scholarly attitude has been most brilliantly rewarded, it is that of medicine. If our army surgeons and sanitarians had been confined to the practical family doctors, who cannot be bothered with all this new-fangled stuff, our men would have died like flies from disease, as they did in the Spanish-American War. It was the laboratory man, the theorist, the highbrow if you like, who made our health record a matter of national pride and congratulation. It was the knowledge of a scholar, coupled with his instinctive understanding of the human heart—neither could have accomplished the purpose alone—which sent hundreds of shell-shocks, as they came to be called (people used to call the condition by an uglier, if not a shorter, term) back into the lines with self-respect and nerve renewed.

To turn to another field, it was a real scholar, even if he were also a dean, who, in spite of the best efforts of his practical associates to deter him, brought order out of chaos in the most important of our war boards through the collection and skillful presentation of statistical data.

In many cases it was the scholar whom we must thank for the pointing out of the obvious. The early drafts rejected thousands of excellent potential soldiers because our existing height regulations were drawn for men of the northern European races; and the minimum height limit was well within the normal variation of the men of southern European ancestry, which has been so large an element in our recent immigration. Similarly, men of science have pointed out that the length of the marching step depends not alone on the length of the legs, but even more on the width of the hips, a simple fact which is of real military significance. The scholars in the Forest Products laboratories knew how to make boxes that would not break and spill their contents on the wharves at Hoboken or St. Nazaire, and, equally important, they knew how to educate the quartermasters to use them.

The fact that in many fields we reached the limits of available man-power meant a wonderful stimulation to the study of certain problems affecting human welfare. Take for example the physiological aspects of industrial fatigue. In this field an excellent theoretical start had been made before the war, but the appeal was limited to those interested in the individual worker. With the war, however, and the shortage of labor, came a new and, I fear, a more potent appeal—the interest in the product and its prompt production. The worker who collapsed could not be replaced. Long hours or unsanitary surroundings meant spoiled material and broken-down machinery and resultant delay. And when there was a scholar at hand to show why this was so, you may be sure he had his day in court.

The work of the scholar has not wholly been in getting things done. Perhaps an equally important side was in keeping impossible or unprofitable things from being attempted. When time was of the very essence of the whole program, the man who could say "No" and prove the validity of his objection, performed a positive work of great value. One of our associates at Columbia had a leading share in devising tests for candidates for the flying school, which, by rejecting the unfit at the outset, saved many lives from the time of their adoption and many, many thousands of dollars; for the training of a flyer who cannot be used when the time comes is a very costly piece of national extravagance in both money and men.

Our scholars did not confine their activities to the battle of Washington. Not only as engineers and doctors, but as geologists and geographers, as meteorologists and sanitarians, they went with the troops to the front, and their counsel as to actual military operations was welcomed and followed. One of them, a bachelor and doctor of this University, died in the service in France. The scholar, like the soldier, stood ready to step forward to fill the gap in the ranks as he saw it, regardless of whether something more dignified might be found for him to do. Our own Barnard, Professor of Education, took what he was pleased to call his vacation in applying his scholarship to organizing an educational program for the wounded men in our hospitals, as a therapeutic measure. Being a scholar and not merely an expert, he saw the broad human aspect of his specialty; that the first thing to do with the man who is blinded, or otherwise maimed, is to make him realize that it is worth while to get well; that he can have a life which is worth living; that if his old job is no longer possible, there are others for which he can be trained. One of America's most distinguished philosophical chemists settled down to the humble but very essential problem of making mixed flours rise and bake with a crust—and solved it. The war services of a past President of this Chapter, now, alas, no longer with us, and those of our present President have been as useful as they have been inconspicuous.

The need for the scholar was not only qualitative, but quantitative. But for the general distribution of chemical knowledge in France and England, and the presence of men capable of promptly applying that knowledge to combat the gas attacks launched by the Germans, the war would have been lost before we could possibly have rendered the slightest assistance; and on our side of the Atlantic when the armistice was signed, there were two thousand trained chemists engaged in the problems of gas warfare alone. Our country, in a word, needed not only to have some men with the requisite training, but men enough to meet simultaneously many needs in many fields, and these men were drawn in large measure from our academic faculties. While one must not press the identity between the scholar and the professor too hard—for a number of reasons—the fact remains that the teaching profession provided the main reservoir from which the country drew. One of my friends in the Chemical Warfare Service has summarized the relation between the academic scholar and that branch of the army activity. Both chiefs of the Chemical Service Station were college professors, one of them a member of this Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. Of the fourteen heads of the Research Division, eight were college professors. It was the college professors who made fundamental improvements in gas masks on the one hand, and who devised new gases to test the German masks on the other.

As a nation, we did not realize at the outset, as Germany did, the importance of the man who knows, and of knowing who he is and where he is; and here, perhaps, lay our most fundamental unpreparedness. What this cost us may be judged from a single instance. A code message from Germany directing the dismantling of the German ships lying in our ports was intercepted. If we had known that there was a professor of English in the University of Chicago who, in the pursuit of his medieval researches, had developed the power of reading ciphers almost at sight, that cable from Germany could have been promptly deciphered, we could have forestalled the sabotage, and something like six months in the use of these ships for the transport of our troops and munitions could have been gained.

The job of getting the man who knew into the right niche was not an easy one. The scholars could not all be spared; for, after all, education and research are essential industries, and, fortunately for our institutions of learning, for our reviews and scientific agencies, and fortunately for the country as a whole, all of our scholars did not rush immediately into government work. The less thrilling task of keeping the lamps burning in our lighthouses was never more important than during the stormy days which we have just gone through. Furthermore, the scholar is a modest person, though he has his human vanities, as we all know who have seen our colleagues in uniform; but usually some one had to know about him and invite him to his place, a very sharp contrast to the business men and lawyers who came down to Washington by the trainload to impress us with their capacity to do any job which involved a commission of properly high degree.

In general, I should say that the individuals in the universities met the test better than the institutions themselves. The latter did not, it seems to me, as institutions, grasp the situation. Very few studied the question of the assignment of their specialists as a problem in conservation as well as in publicity; and as far as the use of their facilities in the training of soldiers and sailors is concerned, the War Department and the Navy Department had literally to teach them how to meet the war conditions. Such help as came from organized bodies of scholars came rather from the learned societies than from the academic groups.

Then there was a further difficulty, particularly among the younger men, though not wholly among them. The expert's job, and hence inclusively the scholar's job, is relatively safe so far as the immediate risk of death is concerned, though not the risk of shortening life through overwork. One Columbia man, well over the draft age, told me frankly that he would gladly give up an important public office he held for the privilege of fighting with his hands, but he could not be tempted by an opportunity to fight with his head. Through this same impulse many and many a man attempted to conceal his special knowledge in order that he might fight in the line. The Army Committee on Classification of Personnel, which was in itself a beautiful example of scholarship in practical application, was able, however, in most instances to pluck out the expert from the line and set him, whether he was willing or not, at the task for which he was particularly adapted and particularly needed.

What, from the point of view of the non-scholar, can be said as to the general usefulness of the men and women (for the women did their share) who came forward or were brought forward to take this trial by fire on behalf of American scholarship? First of all, the scholar must be a real scholar; he must have the natural ability and the long and rigorous training necessary for accurate observation, and observation of the kind which, if I may be forgiven a most unscholarly metaphor, includes the ability to distinguish the blue chips from the white; his deductions must be relentless, and his inductions must be luminous. That is asking a good deal, and it would be enough if his dealings were to be with other scholars or with scholars in the making. The papers of a leisurely recluse can be dug out by others from the even more deliberately published proceedings of learned societies, even as the author has dug out those of his predecessors, and ultimately the practical application of his discoveries will be made. In national emergency, however, this process will not suffice. The scholar must descend from his tower; he must, if he is to serve effectively, learn to think to order and to do it rapidly, to deal with all sorts and conditions of men; he must bear with their amazing ignorances and profit by their equally amazing knowledge of things of which he is ignorant. He must know the art of team play. The war has brought out a new type of scholarship, or at any rate has developed it to such an extent that its implications are new, and that is the unselfish coöperation of experts to meet a given and usually an immediately pressing need. The development of the Liberty motor furnishes a good example of the results of such coöperative effort. It seems to me that the most important single lesson which our scholars can learn from the experience of the two past years is the importance of this team play in scholarship, and not only team play with other scholars, but team play with those who have the equally valuable and perhaps even rarer gift of getting things done, who perhaps deserve the title of scholars in the control of time and space. The scholars who made good were those who had had not only the training and temperament for research, but the training and temperament for working with other people. The scholarship of the man who from self-centeredness or from a mistaken absorption in his specialty lacked the art of dealing with his fellow men was likely to prove a sterile scholarship, and in most cases a useless scholarship in the day of national need.

One of the most dramatic things about the war was the speeding up of supply and transport under the strong hand of the man who had brought the Panama Canal to completion. General Goethals was no administrative theorist. He was willing to try anything and anybody once, but he was prompt in rejecting what did not promptly accomplish his purpose. An engineer of General Goethals' distinction can be regarded as a scholar in his particular field; but the point I want to make is that during his service as Quartermaster-General, when officers of the regular army and over-night majors, as they were called, presidents of manufacturing plants, bankers and lawyers, were passing in what seemed to be an almost unbroken procession through his office, he retained just two men in his inner circle from first to last, and both were academic persons. Herbert Hoover surrounded himself with scholars, entomologists, statisticians and public health men. He did not always use them for their specialties, but he evidently liked the type. The great welfare societies did the same, and the list of academic men whom they used makes an impressive total.

These instances are typical of a very general success among scholars in coöperating effectively and helpfully with eminently practical men. This may be because the scholar has been trained in a form of competition which the so-called practical man lacked. He is used to having his work wiped out by some discovery of a rival, and having to begin afresh. He is used to a checking of his work by his fellows which, if of a different nature, is no less relentless than the war-time check in the toll of human lives. The man of high reputation in business often failed because he had learned to measure success and his own competence only in terms of dividends, and in the new test he found his measuring-rod worse than useless.

Our scholars of the coöperative type not only pursued their researches, but they got their military associates into the habit of thinking in terms of scholarship. One of their most useful accomplishments, initiated by a Doctor of Philosophy of this University, was the organization of Thursday evening conferences for the discussion of the new scientific and technical problems facing the Army and Navy. This furnished a nucleus for the exchange of ideas between the different research groups, both here and abroad; for scholarship was mobilized and utilized in France, England, and Italy, as well as here, and our Allies laid their scientific discoveries before us with the greatest loyalty. At these conferences their reports were discussed and digested and applied, instead of being pigeon-holed at the War College, as I fear might have been otherwise the case. It was as a result of one of these conferences that a member of this Chapter, acting on a hint which came from a French report, was largely instrumental in developing a method of submarine detection through sound-waves of a particular type, which, though it came too late to be of service in the war, may serve in peace to relieve the greatest terror of the mariner, the danger of collision in darkness or fog with sister vessel or iceberg or derelict. A potent factor in breaking down the barriers and delays of departmental jealousies and bureaucratic tradition all along the line was the free-masonry of the company of scholars in Washington.

It must not be forgotten that our scholar in war worked under two powerful stimuli, neither of them operative under ordinary conditions. Although he was out of his accustomed setting, working with strange people and at strange tasks, nevertheless the realization of the national need and the joy of feeling an identification with the forces facing the adversary tended to produce that fine frenzy which enables a man to do better than he knows how. Then, for the first time in history, the scholar had unlimited funds. It is an interesting subject for speculation as to how he can ever go back to the limits of academic appropriations. It is to be feared that in many cases he will not, but will turn to industrial enterprises instead. If, however, there was an unlimited supply of funds, there was a corresponding deficiency in time, and the scholar who could not speed up to meet the new conditions had little chance to make his mark. The men who failed in war because they could not grasp the significance of the time factor may, however, still be eminently useful in peace. On the other hand, the training which some of our scholars received in meeting another war-time condition is likely to have an important influence upon the relation of scholarship to industry. Many a scholar found for the first time that to meet a given condition a beautiful laboratory solution may be no solution at all, that the answer, to be effective, must meet the peculiar condition of quantity production.

The merit of the Liberty engine, of which I have already spoken, lies not alone in the excellence of its design, admirable as that is, but in the fact that it is so constructed that we could produce fifteen hundred of them in a single week. Or, to take another example, in 1914 we made all together eighteen hundred field glasses in this country. Last winter, thanks to the coöperation of the scholars in the chemistry of glass and in the field of optics on the one hand, and of the experts in quantity production on the other, we were making thirty-five hundred pairs of field glasses each week. There are many other adaptations of scholarship to industry that are awaiting similar practical solutions. One of our most distinguished scholars in physics has said publicly that the day is past when one can defend any distinction between pure and applied science. One might as well try to distinguish between pure and applied virtue.

I said at the outset that I would venture later on an enlargement of the conception of the American scholar, in the light of what the past two years have made so clear. The scholar himself as well as those of us who are not scholars, needs, I think, to get a somewhat broader conception of the term; to develop it from its present popular connotation so that the attributes which come to one's mind will no longer be the static and selfish, but rather the dynamic and social. Emerson, in his essay on the American Scholar, seems to have some prophetic glimpse of this broader conception. He says, for example, that "action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential; that without it, he is not yet man; that the true scholar grudges every opportunity of action passed by, as a loss of power"; and elsewhere, "that a great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think." The old idea of the scholar was the recluse, the individual; the new, it seems to me, should be one of a company of builders, each bringing to the common task, for the general welfare, his training and craft, his knowledge and ideas, to combine them with the gifts which his fellows are bringing.

Thus far almost all my modern instances have been taken from the realms of natural science. I need not remind you, however, that although science has tremendously broadened the range of scholarship, nevertheless the scholarship which is a practical asset is not and never will be limited to natural science. The record of the past two years has many an example of the essentially important work of scholars in other fields. The records are not so clear-cut, the results are perhaps more often negative; but the work was done and it counted. In the field of public information our American scholars in the political sciences did excellent work under the direction of a Doctor of Philosophy of this University, and their record for fairness and sanity makes an enviable contrast with the pathetic propaganda of the German intellectuals. Similarly, the work of our Columbia scholars of the Legislative Drafting Bureau proved of great value in formulating and, perhaps more important, in discouraging legislation.

In general, however, I think we ought to face the fact squarely that our scholarship in man's relations with his fellow men, in his understanding of himself and his fellows as contrasted with his mastery of physical things, cannot claim so clear-cut a decision. Even in science we should not set too great store by ourselves. Professor, late Colonel, Millikan writes: "The contribution of the United States in research and development lines was less, far less in proportion to our resources and population, than that of England or France, and this in spite of the far heavier strain under which they were laboring." And yet, with us, science was better mobilized, better equipped, and can make a better showing than the humanities. Part of this can be readily explained by the statement that preparation for war is after all engineering on a huge scale. But we must not prove too much if we are to profit by the lesson. For example, the war found us utterly unprepared in foreign-language knowledge; and we are still unprepared. How many real Americans, I don't mean recent immigrants, but men and women with our traditions and our point of view, can speak Russian? How many can speak the languages of the Near East or Far East?

Excellent work has been done by individual philosophers, economists, and sociologists in labor questions, in welfare work, on the war-time trade and industrial boards; but as a whole our scholars in these fields did not dominate the situation as did the men of science in theirs. Of course, their task was infinitely harder. For one thing, though we may be ready to confess our ignorance of calculus or colloidal chemistry or thermo-dynamics, we all believe in the validity of our off-hand judgments in politics and morals, and indeed in all the springs of human conduct. Yet when all allowances are made, the fact remains that there is a scholarship in these matters and we have American scholars in them, but that with distinguished exceptions these professionals permitted the man in the street or the man in the editor's chair, or in Congress, or in the Cabinet, to proclaim his amateur pronouncement and to get away with it. Indeed, I will go further and say that not a few who know or ought to know that it is not necessary to be intolerant in order to be patriotic seemed to set their knowledge upon this point at one side. In war time it is a matter for the scholar's judgment and conscience to decide whether it is wise to attempt a leadership which at the moment will be misunderstood and probably ineffective, possibly even dangerous, because of the reaction, to the cause he has at heart; or to bide his time in silence, awaiting a more suitable time to be heard. But I submit that he is sinning against the light when he joins in the hue and cry of the untrained and the half-trained. The war has given the natural scientist his chance, and he has profited thereby. In the years to come the test will, I think, shift to the scholars in the human sciences. The crises of the future will have to do with problems of human conduct rather than of the control of physical things; and, as these crises come, our scholars in human relations should be more ready for the call to mobilize.

In practically every case the instances that I have given of the successful tests of our scholarship involve the work of a member of Phi Beta Kappa or of the sister society, Sigma Xi; and I therefore may be permitted to say a word more directly to our younger members of the society of those seeking the philosophy of life, to our Columbia scholars in the making. In my time, which, by the way, was just twenty-one years ago, a man who wanted to live the life of a scholar was practically limited to teaching as the means of making his living. The result in the way of incompetent and halfhearted teaching we all know. Let me say to you of to-day that unless you want to teach, there is no reason under heaven why you should do so. There are plenty of other means of earning an honest living. The scholar is not nowadays limited to the academic halls. We have scholars of the first quality not only in special research institutions, but in government bureaus and in industrial organizations. The men in government service who could be spared from their other responsibilities for war work made an excellent war record. On the other hand, we want to remember that the real teacher, whether in the faculty or out of it, has a tremendous advantage in the art of presentation. During the war the effectiveness of our scholar teachers was well tested by an entirely new set of pupils, pupils sometimes with eagles or stars on their shoulders, or in the civil field, captains of industry, clad in the glittering armor of a big business reputation.

Nowadays one cannot be a scholar in general. One has to have some specialty. As to what that specialty shall be in terms of usefulness to the community, I think I have given you examples enough to show that the range is almost unlimited. I had planned to sum up this by a brief record of the discovery and application to war purposes of helium; but I find that one of my own students in Columbia College, now a member of the Geological Survey, has beaten me out; and you can find the whole story in the May issue of the National Geographic Magazine. I cannot resist, however, a summary of the steps. First, the astronomer, just about the time this chapter was established, finds a new line in the solar spectrum. Thirty years later, the geologist comes upon an unusual stone and turns to a great chemist for its analysis, with the consequent recognition of helium as a mundane element. About the same time comes its identification as one of the newly recognized ingredients of the air, and the study of its properties. Then a Kansas chemist discovers its presence in some natural gas about which he was consulted because it would not burn properly. Then comes the war with its incendiary bullet and the need of a non-inflammable content for balloons and dirigibles. Then the coöperation of physicist, engineer, and geologist—Canadian and American—makes helium available for this purpose. Before these researches helium cost $1700 a cubic foot and was obtainable only in Germany. The present price is 10 cents a cubic foot, and it is falling. The importance of all this for peace is very great. In these days of airplane hops we are forgetting that a Zeppelin made the trip from Bulgaria to what should have been German East Africa with medicines and ammunition. The Germans having disappeared in the meantime, the Zeppelin turned around and came back, making a continuous voyage of several thousand miles.

But do not forget that not all scholars made good in the great test. Let me sum up what I have already said. In the first place, to be useful the scholarship must be sound. The near-scholar, the man who took the short-cut in preparation, proved to be a positive danger. The mere expert in some narrow field, the man who did not realize the implications of what he knew, was relatively useless. A man to succeed had to be intense without being narrow. Even among the sound scholars, the men who really knew, the isolated and insulated individual could very rarely make much headway. It was the open-minded scholar, the maker and keeper of friends, who got his chance, the scholar whose learning was to him a living thing, not necessarily to be displayed in the market place, and never for the sake of the display, but on the other hand never wrapped in a napkin and buried in the earth.

Will the scholar, now that his practical worth has been tested and proved, be content to slip back into relative obscurity; or will he, on the other hand, be tempted too far into the limelight and thereby lose those very qualities which gave him his value? Will he be satisfied with positions of leadership rather than leadership itself, which may be a very different thing? It is largely for you young men and young women of the rising generation of scholars to say.

FOOTNOTE: