Speaks at Taft
As THE INAUGURAL speaker in a program arranged by the Taft School to prepare young students for post-war leadermen ship, President Hopkins on February 7 told a youthful audience at the Connecticut school that American isolationism is dead and that this country must be ready to assume major responsibility for peace and world order after the present conflict.
"England has worn herself out giving some form of order to the world," he declared. "She held the fort until someone else came along to take over the burden. We must now do it, for if we don't, Germany will.
"Whenever a nation has achieved prosperity and abundance in the past," he continued, "it has gone soft and lost out to the barbarian. Outside every Rome there is a Hun. The only question in our minds is whether the coming generation has the ability and the will to do the job. It is for this reason that you must come to understand the world about you. The civilization which we know as good can survive only if you do."
If he were to give any school a motto, President Hopkins told the Taft students, it would be Mary's words to George Washington in the closing scene of Maxwell Anderson's Valley Forge: "There are some who lift the age they inhabit till all men walk on higher ground in that life time."
In his other February addresses President Hopkins spoke at a dinner meeting of Boston alumni on February 4 and at a similar gathering of New York alumni on February 19. Prof. John C. Adams of the history department also spoke at the Boston dinner, and Prof. John Pelenyi, Visiting Lecturer in Political Science and former Hungarian Minister to the United States, spoke at the New York dinner.
Another major alumni speaking engagement for President Hopkins this year will be the annual Chicago dinner, which has been set for Thursday, April 9.
LEADERS IN PLANNING DARTMOUTH'S WAR CHANGES Frequent conferences between these men, and meetings of the faculty committees theyrepresent, have laid the foundations of the war program followed by the College. Commencement on May 10, beginning of the summer term of full semester length on May 25,special summer school open to freshmen July 8, and a continuous 12-months schedule fornext year are high points of the accelerated program. Left, above, is Prof. Andrew J.Scarlett '10, chairman of the committee on educational policy; center, Prof. Wm. StuartMesser, chairman of the American Defense Dartmouth Group and vice chairman of thecommittee on defense instruction; and right, President Hopkins whose active leadershipguides Dartmouth through what may well become the greatest crisis of its history.
