The July double number of THE MAGAZINE completed publication for the year,

taking the place of the regular June issue and that for August as well. As usual, this year's new volume starts with November. But it starts under unusual difficulties. Eugene F. Clark, whose faithful and expert editing of THE MAGAZINE for some years past has been chiefly responsible for its -good standing among the alumni, has gone into the service via Plattsburg, and is now serving as personnel officer of the Roch-ester University unit of the S. A. T. C. W. R. Gray, business manager, has gone to Washington to help keep certain operations of the Government Committee on Education satisfactorily on all fours. Such part of the staff as has survived the draft and the subsequent influenza is actively occupied in an undermanned institution that is struggling to carry on through an educational no man's land. The appearance of THE MAGAZINE, at more or less irregular intervals during the coming year, will therefore depend primarily upon the success of its editors in keeping their right hands in ignorance of the activities of their lefts and in managing thus to work both simultaneously on separate tasks.

Various alterations in policy are necessitated by considerations of economy. Obesity is as unbecoming in periodicals as in persons during war time. Hence THE MAGAZINE will endeavor to cultivate a uniformly slender proportion. This will be accomplished in part by judicious selection of material, in part by diminished size of type. Advertising promises to continue of retiringly modest bulk.

War record material has been accumulating more rapidly than there has been assistance to arrange it. In part for that reason; in part because the process of catching up with a large quantity of general news takes the space in this first number of the year, the publishing of news of men in the service is postponed until December.

The finest single accomplishment in the history of Dartmouth alumni effort has been the elimination of the heavy war deficit of the past year. A complete and perfect performance, with no "almosts" or "might-have-beens" to detract from its satisfactoriness, it establishes a new and valuable precedent. A good many times before this, the alumni have started; never until now have they completely arrived. To have thus succeeded once is to make subsequent failure unthinkable.

That of course is the obvious aspect of the case. It is not the most significant. Of more vital concern is the degree to which soldiers, sailors and civilians,— men over seas, men from the midst of the deep, men in cantonments and men at home, men from all quarters of the girdled earth,—responded to the need-call of their College. In their helping they proved the worthiness of the cause; they demonstrated the enduring unanimity and validity of the Dartmouth spirit.

Of course what was done could not have been done without organization, and in this the powerful influence of the Alumni Council manifested itself most beneficently. Initiative in starting the Fund drive lay with the Council. The operations of the regularly constituted class agents were supplemented and reinforced by local agents appointed by each councilor in a district for which he held himself responsible. This device added strength and vigor and the great advantage of definite centers of control to what would otherwise have been little more than a loose affiliation.

The upshot of the whole matter is that Dartmouth College, instead of finishing its first year of war dragging an operating deficit equal to one-fortieth of its entire endowment (the prospect faced by the trustees in the summer of 1917) comes through in better financial condition than it has experienced for many years. For, while the alumni were giving to meet current needs, the trustees had made wise provision for financing heavy plant indebtedness through application of the Topliff Fund, which became available in 1916.

The urge of the Dartmouth War Fund was for the meeting of an emergency. To some, response meant severe sacrifice ; to many, a disproportionate distribution in favor of the College. It is fair to hope that, this year, no such emergency will arise. Much of what the alumni did for the College directly last year they will as taxpayers, this year, do indirectly through the Government. It would be unjust, therefore, to appeal for an immediate repetition of last year's performance.

Nevertheless, the Alumni Fund must not be allowed to lapse, or the alumni be given to understand that College needs have been met for all time. They themselves have on foot many enterprises that must be carried through. They still owe $40,000 on their gift of a gymnasium, payable $5,000 per year until cancelled. They are still interested in helping support abroad the University Union in Paris, refuge of all college men serving in Europe. They need, further, to maintain and to expand the habit of giving in support of the College.

Last year close to fifty per cent of the alumni acquired or continued that habit. The average gift was close to thirty dollars. This year the sum of giving and the average gift should both be smaller, but the number of givers should show an increase. For "after the war" appears to be coming swiftly. That means peace of a kind, but not rest. The College will encounter new emergencies in the surmounting of which all and not a part of the alumni must be called upon.

The colleges have not been taken over by the Government. If they had been, their problem would have been considerably simplified. What has occurred is that the Government is in process of making contracts with the colleges whereby these institutions will agree to house, feed, and instruct a given number of students at a fixed price per man per day. This price, it now seems probable, will approximate, as nearly as may be, the actual cost to the colleges of doing the work. What shall be the recognized elements of cost has not yet fully been determined.

It seems daily more evident that the work which the colleges are being called upon to perform is highly specialized and distinctly apart from the accepted purpose of most of them. Their chief utilization is likely to prove that of great sorting stations where just enough training is given to determine a man's bent, and whence, almost as soon as this—or the lack of it—has been determined, he will be shipped to training camp, technical laboratory, or cantonment. For accomplishing this peculiar task, no better agency than the colleges could have been found or devised. No where else did the capable organization exist. The patronage of the Government came, in its time, fortunately for hard-pressed colleges ; but their readiness was fortunate for a hard-pressed Government.

They have, for the most part, dropped the process of education and undertaken that of training in its stead. They have abandoned academically judicial neutrality in favor of highly organized and affirmatively intentioned propaganda. The orderly sequence of student classification by intellectual attainments they have changed to an arbitrary set of divisions based on age. The introduction and extraction of students without benefit of calendar they accept as a matter of course. They place their discipline in the hands of a commanding officer and their curriculum in those of a committee in Washington. They spend money that they do not possess to meet exigencies concerning which there is no provision in the contract and for which timely authorization cannot be secured from the Government. They see their green campuses churned to wallows of mud bv tramping feet; the hallways and stairs of their recitation buildings and dormitories pitted and scarred by steel-shod army boots. Long standing and carefully cultivated constituencies they perceive shattered and dispersed, ancient avenues of supply diverted, perhaps permanently; while the cherished beacon of each one's individuality sputters, half-submerged, in a rising tide of official standardization.

But the colleges are not complaining. These things accepted constitute their patriotic task. They have set. their hands to a new enterprise; they will carry it through with a will. Yet if to the . losses inherent in their present undertaking were to be added actual financial deficit, their patriotism would have suffered a very real imposition There is reasonable ground for questioning the legal propriety of employing in support of a Government undertaking income from endowments. Entirely aside from that, however, is the fact of the colleges' need for utilizing their own funds for the maintenance of their own identity; for ensuring the constant and unfailing nourishment of their own intellectual and moral ideals that these may, at the appointed time, re-assert themselves vigorously and to good purpose. This need is not, and should not be, a particular concern of the Government, whose interest lies primarily in obtaining adequate specialized service; yet it may not properly, or even safely, be ignored in adjusting compensation for that service as it is rendered.

The Avenue of the Allies seems to have been accepted as a proper baptismal name for a thoroughfare suddenly come so fully into self realization as a great international highway that its hitherto purely numerical designation appears derisively inadequtae. Throughout the weeks of the fourth Liberty Loan drive Fifth Avenue, New York, was ablaze with fervid color, alive with eager, crowding humanity, resonant with martial music and the tramp of soldier feet. At Union Square towered a mighty Altar of Liberty; and thence northward each of twenty-two sections of the Avenue assigned for special decoration in honor of one of the twenty-two nations allied against Germany, vied with every other in gorgeous display of thrilling blazonry.

Here congregated world statesmen and diplomats, great military leaders, famous singers, distinguished actors, facile and brilliant artists; and following, to see and hear, surged a vast responsive public finding new inspirations, revitalizing old ones, and, withal, pledging its life and fortune in their behalf.

And the man who conceived this huge display and organized its carrying out is a Dartmouth graduate, Joseph W. Gan-non, of the Class of 1899.