When, with the coming spring, Professor John King Lord returns

from a southern sojourn and assumes again his classes, it will be for but a little time. His resignation has been handed to the trustees and has been regretfully accepted. At Commencement his official connection with Dartmouth will cease. The relationship has existed during forty-seven active years; but the influences controlling it reach back over a much longer period. Professor Lord's grandfather, Nathan Lord, was president of Dartmouth from 1828 to 1863. As a boy in college the grandfather's house was for a time his home. In the days of a patriarchal presidency he grew up with the College. No other man has known it more intimately, loved it more devotedly or given of himself more loyally to it. With much the same unflinching sturdiness that characterized his grandfather, he has stood by during the varied alternations between progress and retrogression, enthusiasm and indifference, love feast and animosity, that have characterized nearly half a century of Dartmouth history in a changeful era of national development. As -tutor, associate professor, professor, and acting president, he has accepted and successfully borne the weight of heavy responsibility, often unrelieved by adequate recognition.

It is this very willingness to serve without thought of reward, this readiness to help rear the monuments that will bear other names than his that render it difficult adequately to characterize or objectively to appraise the measure of Professor Lord's work within and without the College. In the long course of years he will be imperishably remembered as Dartmouth's able historian for not only did he arrange for publication the unfinished manuscript of Chase, but continued that patient investigator's labor of collection and cullocation. The fruit of -this is the volume of the History of DartmouthCollege covering the era from 1815 to 1909, a book remarkable -alike for painstaking accuracy of record. and. for wisely balanced judgments of men and events.

Professor Lord's personal influence over men has been primarily that of the really great teacher. Recitations conducted by him are indeed an intellectual exercise, stimulating and strengthening the mental fibre of the students. This benefit they have been quick to recognize ; and as quickly have they come to admire the precise, logical, clear-cut, undeviating method which produced it. Many a Dartmouth lawyer acknowl- edges his debt to John King Lord; and to him, perhaps more than to any other, is due Dartmouth's old-time reputation for turning out graduates equipped to teach.

Though two years from the three score and ten that now mark the accepted termination of academic service, Professor Lord has earned his respite. He has lived to see the struggling college of his boyhood become a great in- stitution. His own share in its progress has been incalculable. One of the truly great men of Dartmouth, may he find his retrospect sweetened by the knowledge of the love, admiration, and respect that today are universally his.

The annual meeting of class secretaries in Hanover has come to be an event that arouses much pleasant anticipation. Classes are beginning to insist upon being represented regularly and in due course by their accredited secretary ; and they are ready to pay the bills to produce that result. Sectional associations are likewise getting into the habit of sending an elected delegate. Thus it has come about that the meeting of the secretaries is recognized as a gathering not to attend which is to have missed something very well worth while.

The secretaries have an opportunity, further, which is denied the councilors, for instance, of seeing the College in operation under normal conditions, and of sensing accurately the everyday spirit of the place. Of late, too, it has been a growing custom for delegates to secure accommodations in addition to those provided by the hospitality of the College, and to bring with them their families for a week-end outing and a renewal or beginning, of acquaintance with Dartmouth. The Hanover Inn, while small, is ample to care for such an invasion: and since its extensive interior alterations of last spring constitutes, in itself, an incentive for the journey.

A recent number of Collier's expresses editorial satisfaction at the growing tendency among the ruling councils of college fraternities to resolve against the use of intoxicants in chapter houses or at fraternal conventions. Resolution is, of course, one thing and conscientious fulfilment quite another. Yet there can be small doubt that college students of today are temperate as college students never were before.

What has seemed, for some time past, an observable tendency has, within a year, become at Dartmouth a patent fact. During the coming spring one of the oldest national fraternities will hold its annual convention in Hanover. Already the word has gone forth to other chapters that this will be a dry affair; and that they are expected to choose delegates accordingly. That is merely the conspicuous example among many.

But really more gratifying than the attitude of the fraternities toward their manner of life is the change which is coming over alumni with reference to commencement. For more generations than the memory of man runneth to the contrary that genial period of reunion has been marred by bibulous carousal. The condition has been worse at some colleges than at others, but has been sufficiently common everywhere to be considered characteristic.

Dartmouth, if no worse than other places, cannot claim in this respect to have been much better. But now measures are under way to make improvement certain. Spontaneously, it would seem, class after class that is planning for reunion next June has come to the conclusion that a foregathering of the graduates of a leading institution of higher learning is not appropriately marked by the physical degradation of alcoholic excess. Unless all signs fail, next commencement will be the most orderly, and hence, for all, the most enjoyable in the history of the College.

Perusal of the alumni periodicals of other institutions gives ample indication that Dartmouth men are not alone in their struggle for better things. What they are doing, whether as undergraduates or as alumni, is but part of a nation-wide temperance movement; a movement which strangely enough, is neither a preachment nor a propaganda, but a silent influence entering into and becoming one with human conviction. Whether college folk are leaders or laggards in yielding to this influence may provide ground for debate: the matter of prime importance, however, is that they have yielded.