Distinctive Individuality

IN THIS UNDERGRADUATE ISSUE we are featuring a biographical article about one "unreconstructed" rebel, John Moffat Mecklin, by another but more youthful rebel, Tom Braden. Mr. Mecklin will be 70 next year and will retire from active teaching. Mr. Braden wrote his last editorial for The Dartmouth last month and next month leaves Hanover with the class of '40, of which he is the secretary for the next five years. They are rebels, each in his own way.

Professor Mecklin has for 20 years aroused his classes in Sociology to thoughtful, critical, understanding attitudes about men and the world in which they live. After a stormy passage from Mississippi and way stations he says he found at Dartmouth, under President Hopkins, a freedom that he appreciates and cherishes. If his teaching days that have been so notable and successful are ending next year then there will be that much more time for the reading, research, speaking, and writing which we sorely need and earnestly desire.

Tom Braden's career as editor of TheDartmouth makes one think of J. S. Mill and his essay "On Liberty," in which Mill says so very much, including: "Never when controversy avoided the subjects which are large and important enough to kindle enthusiasm, was the mind of a people stirred up from its foundations, and the impulse given which raised even persons of the most ordinary intellect to something of the dignity of thinking persons."

There is much more we could say about both men, and it would make good reading. We'd like especially to speak of the calibre of writing and tough-minded thinking that has made the edit column of the paper this year one of the most notable in The Dartmouth's venerable 100 years of columns of type. We'd like to say to John Mecklin, for many Dartmouth men, what are the hopes, the fires, the sympathies that his words have kindled among students and associates.

Here they are, in these pages this month —two able and popular rebels.

LABORATORY WORK IN ELEMENTARY CHEMISTRY. A section in Steele Hall directed by Prof. Andrew J. Scarlett '10 (left, center).