build tenements so designed that more people can be herded into them without endangering the public health, bore underground to build more tubes for perspiring throngs, devise new methods of controlling streams of automobiles. For these are but palliatives. They hardly touch the main issue. POOLING OF POWER IN THE FUTURE Centralization has been accelerated by the individual factory coal pile, the individual factory steam-engine. Decentralization will follow the generation and distribution of electrical energy as a separate enterprise, and decentralization will be attained by power pools. Ford, the mass producer par excellence, himself sees the day coming when the most economical manufacturing will be that "in which the whole of an article will not be made under one roof,-unless, of course, it be something very simple. In the future each part will be produced where it can be best made, and the parts will then be assembled into complete units at the points of consumption." That will be realized by pooled power. Manufacturing will be carried on where raw materials are at hand rather than where railroads or navigable streams meet in some ganglion of brick and stone, from which it follows that large cities will cease to drain the small towns and farms. The pall of smoke that hangs over many an industrial community of the present day will disappear. Streets will be comparatively free from refuse. The grotesquely inadequate steam-locomotive will be entirely abolished. Even during the high-cost year of 1919 the electric locomotives of the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railroad, weighing nearly three hundred tons and traveling some sixty thousand miles a year were maintained at less than one-third the cost of heavy Mallet steam locomotives of equal tractive power. The railroads of the future will haul more freight with one electric locomotive than they can now haul with two steam engines, with the result that the annual agricultural clamor for cars will no longer be heard at harvesting time, and farm produce will no longer be allowed to rot while cities pay exorbitant prices for foodstuffs. Light freight trains will travel at the speed of present local passenger trains. Operating divisions will be lengthened from the present one hundred miles to two hundred, even four hundre miles. An electric locomotive will easily run from New York t Boston and back in a day,—a total distance of four hundred an fifty miles. The passenger and income producing freight tonnag of the United States will be hauled by electric locomotives wit a consumption of but one-third of the coal now burned unde steam locomotive boilers. Entirely new chemical industries will spring up. Electricit enables the engineer to capture matter, to change it, to coerce it Hence, we may expect an almost magical development of electro chemistry, when pooled energy is plentiful and cheap. Iron ca be reduced from its ores in the blast furnace by the chemica energy of coal, but aluminum, calcium, and many other metal cannot. When the Niagara Falls Power Company began tunne ing about 1891, not one of the companies now dependent o Niagara power was in existence. Moreover, not one of th products of these companies was then known to commerce,products such as aluminum, carborundum, alundum, silico artificial graphite, calcium carbide, cyanamide, ferrosilico ferrochormium, ferrmanganese, and similar compounds of iro and other metals. In the future, constituents will be electricall split and melted from substances that must now be thrown upc the dump heap. of We stand on the brink of the neotechnic period in our econom development. The consequences of segregating the productic power can scarcely be exaggerated. The change that w follow the abandonment of thousands of individual steam-engin will be as marked as that which followed the introduction of t steam-engine itself. The technical structure of our contempora civilization will be radically transformed. What the flami hearth has been to the family, electric energy is destined to b come to the nation; for as the crackling flames knit the fam together, electricity generated in a few huge central stations a distributed to every home and factory will knit city and ham together. The steam-engine is the symbol of the nineteenth century; electric motor is destined to be the symbol of the neotech twentieth century. CULTURE FOR UNWILLING STUDENTS SHOULD ARTHUR CORNING WHITE CHOULD colleges advertise the fact that they exist for the purpose of disseminating culture? Most sub-freshmen seem to be under a misapprehension that colleges are a glorified combination of country club and vocational training school. The experience of this professor is that very few students go to college for the sake of obtaining a liberal education. This fact seems to be at the base of the dissatisfaction with our system of higher learning voiced both by undergraduates and by educators. ATRICK HENRY, our eloquent forefather, in common. with most orators, not only of the then, but also of the now, was wont to enunciate, in all seriousness, platitudes whose obvious bathos was equalled only by their truth. "I know of no way of judging the future but by the past" is like saying with a perfectly straight face, "Water is wet." Yet despite the evident verity of the former, how few of our million of gentle optimists will even seriously consider it, to say nothing of believing it? The magazines scintillate with articles intending to show that the colleges are not giving the students what the students want. What the students want! Many writers have made wild guesses on this head. Now I wish to advance a platitude fully as banal from its utter obviousness as this memorable epigram of Patrick Henry's, and just as little accepted. I know of no better way to find out what the American college student wants than to ask him. Then we shall be able the better to decide whether or not we are giving him what he wants and whether what he wants is worth giving him at all. This is fundamental and should precede any discussion as to curriculum and methods of instruction. That all is not well with our colleges, anyone who has anything at all to do with them will readily admit. In those few institutions where the generally chronic malady of intellectual atrophy is only spasmodic, one finds new committees being created to devise new courses of study, to suggest new methods of conducting classes, to investigate the feasibility of the tutorial system, and so on; frequent indignation meetings of the faculty to discuss the distressing problem of undergraduate indifference 78 we to things intellectual; protests from the antique members that if will only keep quiet and let well enough alone, everything will come out right, according to God's will, in the end; and frantic cabals of the young instructors in which we learn that it's all a question of faculty salaries. But these always come to one conclusion. And this is ar actual example of the logic by which this touching conclusion is reached. A few nights ago I heard an erudite professor reason "The difficulty is simple; and I am confident that our students distaste for intellectual interests can easily be remedied. I hav le you found we accomplish nothing by class discussions. If one empty-headed student argue a point with another empty headed student, you get nowhere. What we need is a return t the lecture method. I predict we shall return to it. I am ver hopeful." In other words, though two empty-headed student though a whole class of empty-headed students, give the profess no intelligent answers, they do give him an optimism, naive ar quite touching. I am in hearty sympathy with a searching scrutiny of o courses and our methods of teaching, but I repeat these a auxiliary, not basic in our problem. If I remember rightly, was Carlyle who said the true university is a collection of book I myself believe that the real value of college education for student lies less in his required courses than in his volunta reading. And our students don't read. The reasons they do read are not because we don't teach them properly; the reaso are more fundamental than this. If an American college educates its students today, it absolutely in defiance of the students themselves. This is main trouble with our colleges. The students go to college everything but what the college exists to give them, an edu tion. Our problem is fundamentally a problem of stud attitude. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Ameri college students were recruited mainly from the professio class. They came from homes which, albeit often in the th tling clutch of Puritanism, still possessed some slight degre culture and a wholesome respect for abstract knowledge. In own day, however, all that is changed; the colleges have increa in both number and size almost beyond comprehension. This in- The colleges today are deluged with students to whom real culture, a pleasure in knowledge for its own sake, is as foreign as the aesthetic sense to a Methodist clergyman. I know of many cases in which families have positively resented an instructor's stimulating intellectual interests and appreciation of books in their sons. They didn't send the boy to college to read Balzac, or George Moore. They did not know such authors existed. They sent their boy to college because all the other families in their golf club were also sending their sons to college. Now it is true occasionally, after his first two years in college have been entirely wasted, a student catches on to the idea of education, and by commencement has learned what any sophomore should know. It is because of these rare cases that the faces of gentle college professors sometimes beam with a certain fatuous brightness. But these cases are few. And in any event this boy's first two years have netted him nothing. In the last twelve years I have studied in five American universities and have taught in three. I have always asked students why they were there. Several times I have required them to write themes of this subject. Their answers have always been delightfully ingenuous and, I believe, true. With a few inevitable exceptions, students come to college today for four reasons, no one of which has the least bearing on the acquisition of a liberal education. The students tell me they go to college to make friends, to enjoy the social advantages a college affords (such, for example, dancing), to take part in athletics, and to secure some practical information which will assist them to make more money in busi |