Editorial.

The President's report is always food for reflection; but in the report for this year there is one thing that comes particularly close to undergraduate affairs. It is the matter of "signing-off." The figures would be amusing if they were not so nearly disgraceful. Briefly, they show that the undergraduates in the college are sick ten times as much as the rest of the university, if the number of "sign-offs" may be taken as indicative. Of course nobody fancies that this is the truth; it is only the good old story of the man that "signed off for every disease his janitor could spell."

Two remedies for this appear, neither exclusive of the other. One is a sense of "squareness" in dealing with the Office. The other is a modification of the rules of attendance. The former is too obvious to need comment. It is an undergraduate custom as old as the existence of the disciplinary officer himself to treat "the Office" as fair prey for any deceit that will pass. The fact that the Office treats us with something more than squareness is, of course, no bar to our treating it in a manner quite opposite. We will continue to act as if we were under the police restriction of a boarding-school; it is an evidence of manliness to cheat the powers that be. The whole affair is so ridiculously childish that it almost seems unfortunate to have it appear in print.

The other alternative has been tried. When the "University" ideal first began to fascinate the authorities, attendance upon lectures was no longer to be taken. In practice this was found to be impossible in the College. Men scattered from the ice carnival in Montreal to the hotels of Old Point Comfort in search of "relaxation"; and the privilege had to be withdrawn from the

College. It was clear that the undergraduate with time and good spirits and little work could not find Cambridge interesting enough. But even with attendance taken the evil changes, not its existence, but its form. Instead of frankly leaving town we indulge in bronchitis and neuralgia, to which Montreal is distinctly preferable.

It is reasonable to ask more honesty in dealing with the Office; but at the same time one must admit that the undergraduate who looks on college as an excuse for a good time is pretty apt to succumb to the temptation to get a few days off. The more so that the system as a whole is not a little farcical. Theoretically cuts are not allowed; in practice three a week, if judiciously distributed, may be taken without danger. If one is indisposed he may send a room-mate or friend to sign him off for a few days. The Medical Visitor makes a formal little call and suggests that rest is needed. But there is no use in going into details. We all know how well this system lends itself to avoiding attendance. And if there is no active restraint no mere regulation, or even a sense of duty, will keep men from taking advantages of its weak points.

Another restraint ought, however, to be possible. There is no question that many men come to college with the sole intention of having a good time. And under present conditions it is quite easy enough to have it. The elective system lets them slip along on a ridiculously small amount of work. And even a moderate sprinkling of "Es" does no harm further than putting a man on probation, or at most dropping a class. As they remain "socially" in their own class such punishment is not very serious. The matter, too, of a degree need not be troublesome. Of course this does not apply to the serious student; there is little sickness in his ranks. For the butterfly, however, and even for the more soberly colored of these, the sign-off is a great temptation.

If, however, everyone were given an interest in going to lectures which were just as keen as that in cutting them, we might reasonably look for better

ment. The method of giving that interest is obvious. An A. B. represents a remarkably small amount of work for most of us; the very fact that so many get it in three years without extraordinary effort is proof enough of this. It would drive few to desperation if the work required were much greater; and it would drive many to study. With our pleasant happy-go-lucky elective system, we can slip along with almost no term-time work, and little enough for the examinations. The inducements to cut are numerous and those to attend but few. But make it more difficult to get a degree and the order is changed. If no attendance were taken the Freshman butterfly would fly very high for two months; then he would be conditioned. Under present circumstances he is allowed to hang on in various "dropped" states as long. practically, as his family will stand it. If he were made to feel, however, that when he flunked two of his hour examinations he would have to leave college and go to work (the contrast is significant) and if he knew that he would have to do some fairly hard work to avoid that disaster, we might have far less of the present semi-humorous, semi-disgraceful tricks for dodging the Office.

We shall have to come back soon to the old real question: "Is college a place to get an education or to take on without effort what is called 'culture'?" The older generation is getting a little suspicious of that term "culture." It seems to them to mean that sons are taught to wear more expensive clothes than their fathers, to be over-tolerant toward the naughtiness of life, to look upon brain exertion as unbecoming a "gentleman,"-and so on. "Why," says the father he usually sits at his desk eight hours a day-"What's the use of spending money to teach a boy a lot of things he has got to forget,-and mighty soon at that?"

And the meanest part of it all is that there's a good deal of truth in what those fathers say. The one thing that most of us do not learn here is the

habit of work, good honest plodding work. We shall have to learn it some day-when the four-year remittance plan stops--or fail. "Flunking an exam" carries with it no whit of disgrace and pathetically little penalty; flunking in business, flunking in a profession does carry with it a very keenly felt disgrace and the penalty of being a nobody or at best a "might-have-been.”

Here's the way some people talk about us-this from an outside magazine: "The chief error of the colleges lies in the fact that they have separated the world of culture from the world of work. That formidable fence at Harvard symbols the popular idea of culture. It is exclusive, it means stand back. Begone! Culture costs and is for the Elect Few. The giving of degrees and diplomas to people who have done no useful thing is puerile and absurd, since degrees so secured are no proof of competence, and tend to inflate the holder with the idea that he is some great one, when, probably, he is not." We can call that vulgar. But don't let us be too well-bred to see what truth there is there. We generally are when anyone talks about us, our good breeding becomes instantly thickness of skin.

But people didn't talk that way about Harvard twenty years ago, and they don't talk that way about many colleges now. The idea is growing that Harvard is, more than any other college, a place to loaf luxuriously and to while away idleness in pursuit of those things which are not of the spirit. Of course we undergraduates don't admit it, we are too conscious of our own position as the best there is. But teachers in the Law School, where men do have to work, are beginning to admit it and to speak pretty freely about the methods of the college. The talk is getting near home. The sooner it does get home the better.

Book Notices.

“WHY LOVE GROWS COLD." By Ellen Burns Sherman. New York: A. Wessels Company.

There is no field of literature which has suffered more severely from the modern specializing tendency than that of the essay. The old school of essayists, composed of men who expressed their views on life with such charming grace, and at the same time with such broadness of view, has been succeeded by a new and more technical one. The essayists of to-day are forced to specialize: a man may write on any one subject, but he seldom dares to extend his reflections to more than one side of life. We have clever literary essayists, clever psychological essayists, clever historical essayists, but we have practically lost the purely human essayist. Consequently, we cannot but be surprised and delighted at the appearance of a volume of essays which deals with no one particular branch of human interest, but with human life in general. Some of the essays included in this collection, Why Love Grows Cold, are, to be sure, purely literary, and some are largely psychological, but for the most part Miss Sherman's work has the broad generality for which one is accustomed to turn to the pages of Addison and Steele. And if these essays do not present profound depths of psychological study, if they do not evince a life-long study of the technique of literature, should we not be grateful for an essayist who, in this age of specialties, can write with equal facility of Ethical Balances, The Devil's Handiwork, and The Salt Lake of Literature?

HA. B.

"THE GENTLE READER." By Samuel McChord Crothers. Houghton, Mifflin & Company.

Boston:

In this series of essays Mr. Crothers wishes to point out the mistake of preferring what is easy to read to what is permanently satisfying. Our best friends among books are not, he says, those who sparkle on first acquaintance but those that we have to know well to appreciate. The first are agreeable to meet; the second to live with. Mr. Crothers takes his chief pleasure in the "rare privilege of sharing with a pleasant gentleman the art of thinking."

Realism is his abhorrence. He does not believe in laying unnecessary stress on the commonplaces of which we see more than enough. There is a witchcraft in romance, but study of the processes of a psychological novel is