Editorial Comment

The Virtues of Production

Professor Schelling of the University of Pennsylvania recently raised the question whether there is any real need that every one should be creative. Certainly with respect to the arts it is just about as important that there be an appreciative public to receive the creations of others as it is to breed up a race capable of creating. Poets are born, not made and so, one suspects, are painters, pianists and sculptors—wherefore it is unlikely that the creative process will be greatly overdone with respect to such matters. Nature has that in hand. But is it as necessary as one is usually asked to believe that every one on earth shall justify his presence by producing something ? Much scorn is poured out usually and curiously by non-producers on the idea that non-production may actually be justified. There is no more bitter critic of idleness than the rich sociologist, who has three motors and half a dozen servants at home. The leisured class has acquired a bad name among us, and possibly it is deserved. The question is suggested, however, whether or not we have sufficiently examined the situation and are completely sure of our ground.

One of the recent critics of the American colleges made much of the fact that for four years a very imposing army of several hundred thousand able-bodied young men and women are "withdrawn from productive pursuits" and are not even taught to produce material wealth. Granted but very possibly that is an excellent reason for thanking God. The undoubted fact is that, with the increase in the facilities of production, there is piling up an increment of leisure. It takes less time, and the effort of fewer persons, in these days to provide the world's need.

As one result, millions have had recourse to the provision of what a past age would have set.down as sheer luxuries in order to get their bread. The amounts spent by the American people for recreation, diversion, unremunerative pleasures, candy, tobacco and the like, have been figured by statisticians and are given out as staggering. But are they mere waste?

He that doth not work shall surely die —but how about the nature of the work ? Must it be productive, in the sense that it is contributing something without which the human race must go hungry, or naked? There are other things that a man may do with his hours, and they may conceivably minister to some other than a corporeal necessity. As for those thousands of "unproductive students," one hopes they are learning, perhaps unconsciously, a very needful lesson in a world where leisure is obviously the increasing perquisite of the many, rather than the exclusive privilege and possession of the few; to wit, how best to employ their spare time, whether for their own happiness and betterment, or for the happiness and betterment of their fellows.

This is a materialistic age, and a highly materialistic country, as we are perhaps too often reminded. But it will not always be such and there is room for the suspicion that it isn't, even now, so material as it thinks. Much is said always about what everything costs, and there is much worship of money which surpasses the justifiable forms thereof, but one hopes there is slowly growing up the same sentiment that other and older civilizations have developed with the passage of years, which makes for abstract appreciations, as well as for concrete achievements.

The United States is growing up. It has been told for so many years that it is a freshman among the world's nations that it may have come to believe this to be a condition enduring forever. The fact is that the American people, youthful as a composite, derives from very ancient lineage scattered through Europe and is coming to its own with the more certainty and rapidity now that the pioneering stage of a new land has been passed and that the accumulation of leisure has begun. As we see the function of American colleges today, it is less to fit young people for productive toil than to fit them for living in a day when productive toil has come to occupy less and less of the day's 24 hours. Man doth not live by bread alone. He has a soul also to feed.

Deifying Smut

One of the most perplexing problems of a disciplinary nature for school and college authorities is that arising out of the current passion for daring to say or to print, in public, things that used to be whispered—chiefly by ribald males in smoking compartments a passion by no means confined to the young in years.

It is perhaps natural that the eagerness of older authors to obtain a hearing by the process of shocking the unco' guid should find its imitators among students; and equally natural that the compensating passion, which leads horrified policemen to ban books from sale, should lead educational administrators to repress the efforts on the part of young men and women under their charge when such incidents occur. At all events there has been a bit of a breeze at Clark University, Worcester, within a few weeks, growing out of the fact that the head of that institution had ordered the separation from college of two editors who produced in a college publication matter which the president deemed to be "pornographic.' Just how offensive it was one may not say without seeing it, but the superficial chances are that it wasn't at all events the sort of thing one usually expects to find in print.

One may pass over the incidental question whether or not the sure way to discourage this pandering to unworthiness of thought is repression, to the more general topic of this craze by which writers appear to have become chiefly preoccupied with the world's smut. It is probably a reaction from the excesses of that much derided era usually damned by calling it "Victorian;" and what no one appears to realize is that there may be correspondingly reprehensible excesses the other way about. It may be that the Victorian writers overdid prudery as surely as the authors of a somewhat older day overdid unbridled bawdiness; but that does not in itself make the latter a virtue, and it is submitted that a line might fairly be drawn, midway between the sham morality of the Victorians and the no less sham vulgarity of the present for sham, or at least mere pose, one assumes it to be.

The tendency to go as far as one dares in this direction has flowered forth in the colleges mainly in the so-called and often rightly so-called "humorous" publications. It led one acute commentator a while ago to remark that while the average editor of a college daily paper liked to pose as a sort of Sir Galahad, the editor of the college comic usually preferred to figure as a daredevil who would "scandalize the profligate court of Charles the Second." It would be rash to say that this is a novel situation, however. The safer assumption is that the seemingly greater latitude ventured to be taken in the present day is relative to the general standard—as indeed it was in days of yore. Every one goes farther now than was common in the prudish Nineties, and it is not strange if an occasional headlong young editor goes the limit.

Discipline has the disadvantage in all such cases of producing emotional defenses based on the notions that there is nothing objectionable, but rather much that is virtuous, in perfectly unblushing candor, and that rebtiking extreme instances of that candor is an unenlightened interference with free speech. The naive delight with which a modern author peppers his conversation with hells and damns or rather with much more blistering words than these and adds for good measure the most realistic forms of outspoken obscenity, indicates that this is a rare treat to him. If it shocks the prudes and leads to suppression, so much the better. It has been wisely observed that whereas in older years it was the ambition of every author to get a book published in Boston, it is now the ambition to get a book banned there by the Watch and Ward.

What every one seems to be overlooking is the possibility that there is a proper standard for the speech and conversation of ladies and gentlemen, as distinguished from that of perfect ladies and gents. In the former years, Mr. Kipling has noted, we "never talked obstetrics when the Little Stranger cametoday we have classes in sex-hygiene, and modesty of attire has become positively pre Adamite. That we have attained the unbuttoned conversational freedom of an Elizabethan drawing-room may be doubted, but we are on the way; and a zest is added to the sport by knowing that a lot of ultra-good people are going to be shocked and will make no secret of it.

The pity is that we cannot see ourselves at such moments, not only as others see us, but as we are very likely to see ourselves when we are thirty years older.

The Outing Club House

The equipment of the Outing Club has expanded since its organization by Fred Harris in 1909 from one hunting shack on Moose Mountain to fifteen cabins and the Moosilauke Summit property. The membership has grown from a handful of outdoor enthusiasts to include three quarters of the College. Its activities have enlarged to cover the whole year and to sponsor the most important social event of the college calendar. Its benefactors have been numerous and discerning from the initial impulse and continued generosity of the Rev. John E. Johnson to the recent bequest of Edwin W. Sanborn.

The alumni confidence in the Club is now further shown by the action of the class of 1900 in devoting its fund which has been accumulating since graduation to the erection of a club house on Occom Pond. The fund is expected to total $50,000 and will provide a building adequate in every way to give a home to winter sports and a social center for the activities of the Outing Club. Locker rooms, training quarters for the winter sports team, room for visiting teams, emergency sleeping quarters for team purposes, restaurant facilities, and a large living room with space for trophies meet a demand which has long been felt.

In helping the Outing Club to more fully meet its responsibilities in activities that are of incalculable value the class of 1900 has won the gratitude of the Club and College alike through its discerning gift.

Vagabond Courses

Among the incidental suggestions born of the undergraduate zeal for the New Freedom in academic circles is the interesting one relating to what someone has dubbed the "vagabond course" which appears to be a sort of roving scholastic commission, issuable to men of unusual genius, who should be made free of the whole college equipment, but registered in no courses, held to no requirements, subjected to no restrictions, and given no degree. The theory is that such a genius would only be let and hindered by the usual disciplinary regulations, and thus seriously cramped in his style. Naturally it is not anticipated that very many applicants of such extraordinary talents would ever appear; but it has been soberly suggested that when they do come to light they should be encouraged to browse, without oversight or direction, in the alluring pastures of Academe and be accommodated within the college although not enrolled as members of any class. Studentsat-large, in fine.

There are naturally incidents to this situation which suggest themselves such as that the student-at-large, vagabonding his way through the intellectual field, would be ineligible to extra-curricular activities, or to fraternities, and the like —which things such a personage would quite probably hold in appropriate scorn. Possibly also dormitory residence would be denied. But it has occurred to some fertile brain that such an experiment would be interesting to make, and very possibly profitable to the genius on whom it was made, although not directly profitable to the college itself.

Having viewed this suggestion with calmness for an extended period sufficient to warrant a belief in cooler judgment, one may discover a distinct doubt,

growing up to an estate of some magnitude, as to the practical utility of the idea. This undisciplined ranging over the collegiate scene would confessedly benefit very few and one questions whether in the end it would benefit any. The irksome discipline made necessary by the limitations of the ordipary young mind which requires to be guided and directed, not to say held to the job would be doubly irksome on a man who felt he had no need of such steering and that oversight might even slow him down. But it is at least a possibility that the slowing down, while actual, would be a detriment inferior to that which would attend a desultory, planless exploration of a bewildering array of intellectual allurements.

On the whole, it may be that discipline, with all its potential handicaps on the free souls, has virtues ever for them. At all events the necessity of a disciplined search for truth should have a word said for it now and then, in an age when the much-heralded Youth Movement is inclined to minimize the virtues of conformity to direction and to cry up the glories of unrestricted liberty. To be quite candid about it, one feels that the number likely to derive benefit from a "Vagabond" course would be so small as to be negligible, especially when one takes into account the unsettlement which the presence of such educational hoboes might produce in the minds of others.

The liberal college is not intended to be a nursery of specialization and it is not likely to become to any great degree the kindergarten of genius. It has a rather humdrum function to fulfil in developing, so far as it may, the capacities and appreciations of young men at a distinctly immature age, with general cultivation, rather than special training for definite professional activities, in view. Whether a college like Dartmouth is the appropriate place for uncommonly gifted youths to seek development according to their own unsupervised pleasure is doubted. In any case it might be well to have the experiment made somewhere else first; and there are surely enough colleges specializing in novelty at present to accommodate all the worthy vagabonds the country can muster, in a very narrow compass. The more one hears of undergraduate theories concerning the undesirability of regimentation, the more one sighs for the courage to insist on discipline and the hardihood to tell such as object to it to seek an ampler freedom somewhere else.

Wheelock Hall

The naming of a dormitory at Yale University in honor of Eleazar Wheelock is another reminder of early associations and the influence of Yale on the Dartmouth of the 18th century. Wheelock's neighbors in the Connecticut Valley in the vicinity of Hanover were largely settlers from Connecticut and doubtless many of the clergy in the surrounding villages were Yale graduates. This same influence was reflected in the faculty and governing board of the early college.

Wheelock's right-hand man on the original faculty, Bezaleel Woodward, graduated from Yale in 1764. Of the original board of trustees five of the twelve were graduates of Yale and of the trustees elected prior to 1800, fifteen were graduates of the university which gave its training to Wheelock.

Dartmouth College has always recognized its early debt to Yale and valued these associations dating back to colonial days. Wheelock Hall will serve to recall these ties while the preservation of Wheelock's memory at his own Alma Mater can only be a source of gratification to Dartmouth men.