is to be measured by that of the economic environment, to which it is his function to introduce his students. The efficiency of his work will depend not only upon the brainstretching pursuit of economic theory, fundamentally essential as that is, but also to the extent that economics is for his students a true environmental or orientating study, dealing with the actualities of economic life today.

The needs of two classes of students should, if possible, be met. Comparatively few students think they have time or need for more work in economics than that afforded by the general elementary course. It is quite likely that a keener insight into their future vocational and civic needs would lead many of these individuals to go on to other courses in economics, but we may well grant that a large number of students must needs devote their time to other lines of study if they are to get the proper foundation for future calling. Such persons simply do not intend to be, and will not be, scouts in economic investigation or industrial legislation. The other class comprizes those students who to some extent specialize in economics because their prospective vocational needs require a larger basis of economic knowledge than can be gained in a general course. Now these two classes of students need different sorts of introductory courses. The one needs as wide (even tho necessarily superficial) knowledge of economic and industrial phenomena as can be given in a year, after the minimum amount of theory absolutely necessary has been acquired. The other class needs more primarily a persistent grounding in theoretical principles, but always with enough reference to the actual economic life of today to give principles a real and concrete meaning. The small college can not offer two separate elementary courses. It must simply do its best to compromise between the needs of these two classes of students. It will not err greatly if it assumes that the more general need is a knowledge of concrete economic environment. The patent and significant fact at present is that hundreds of students, more especially women, are graduated from American colleges every year who have not even had the traditional "thirteen weeks" in political

economy. We can not but think that this is one of the points where the present-day college signally fails to fulfil its function of fitting the individual to meet the world, to give him, or her, self-reliance in it, to encourage and develop critical intelligence-in short, that a most valuable aid in the development of potential efficiency does not receive the attention it should receive.

Turning to government and still confining our attention to the foundational group, it is clear that no student should finish his college course without acquiring a general knowledge of American government and governmental problems, national, state, and city, and without some passing acquaintance with the general outlines of the great constitutional governments of modern Europe. Here again there exists the methodological conflict between the disciplinary and the informational ideas. Instructors trained in one university will devote most of their students' time to the theory of the state; others, trained elsewhere, will go to the opposite extreme of the purely inductive study of "actual" government. A general course in government should afford both views; it should bring in as much theory as is necessary to an understanding of the principles of the governments and problems studied, but, considering that it is ordinarily freshmen and sophomores who take such a course, its main function would seem to be orientating in nature to afford not only a knowledge of principles but of the way principles work, or do not work, in practise. Indeed one is tempted to think that a college course in dirty politics and corrupt legislatures would be quite as valuable to later civic efficiency as a course in the theory of the constitution.

We come now to what some consider a hopeless field, sociology. No one seems to know what it is or where its boundaries lie. Much less is there any agreement on what a course in sociology, or a textbook in the subject, suppose a satisfactory one ever to be possible, should contain. Much that has been written under the title consists of attempts to prove that a science of society is possible and to evolve the methods by which the subject-matter of such a science should be built up. The case is not hopeless, however: a course in sociology

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can at least discourage the idea, all too prevalent, that the term sociology" can be applied indiscriminately to anything from the boy problem and juvenile courts to charities and municipal sanitation. Desirable as a knowledge of these things is, it may be doubted whether they are in any proper sense part of the subject-matter of sociology. We should be tempted to say that the subject-matter is the theory of society, were it not that the term theory seems to connote something away from the concrete and actual, whereas social theory aims to explain things as they are, and is in this respect somewhat unlike economic theory in its present stage and with its ponderous tho necessary assumption of the static state. A general course in social theory is needed to examine the forces and conditions of social order and social progress. As an undergraduate course, and primarily of orientating value, it should spend little time in worry over sociological method or over the relation of sociology to the other sciences, and drive as quickly as possible to a consideration of the nature of society and to the bearing economic, biological, psychic, and ethnic forces have upon social evolution. Public opinion, social consciousness, imitation, fashion, tradition, custom, conflict, sympathy, selection, contagion, and a hundred other conceptions should be for the student illuminated and illuminating. The facts for such a course are all around him, but their very proximity and familiarity prevent his seeing them in their relations. Whatever the subject-matter presented, however, the teacher of such a course should be less eager to complete a given cycle of lectures or to round out a systematic explanation of society than to stimulate observation and thinking on the realities of social life. Such a course ought at least to bring home to the student a realization of the fact that society is the realm of far more numerous and subtle forces than he ever dreamed, forces which have molded him to what he is and with which he must ever reckon. Perhaps the most important thing the student can get out of such a course is a growing realization of the truism made use of in speaking of psychology—that the individual and society are two sides of the same shield. The undergraduate is most interested in the ethical questions in

volved in a study of society; moreover, he usually becomes eager to go to the bottom of things as nearly as he can: hence the value of a sociology that delves deeper and more fearlessly than the organic analogy or the social contract theory. On the disciplinary side of the subject it is to be remembered that most students come to college with intense prejudices and preconceived notions of the fitness of things. Sociology is an excellent adjunct to other courses to give the galvanic shock necessary to stir students out of complacency, into a broad, healthy scientific curiosity about the world. Eschewing, for undergraduates, a too rigid adherence to any of the a priori and subjectively organized "systems" of sociology, and avoiding entirely the arid reaches of "methodology," it is probable that a stronger educational trinity can not be devised than a course in organic evolution, one in evolutionary ethics, and one in sociology, as here adumbrated.

The teacher of any social science whatever should send his students out not only with larger brains and brains better stocked with knowledge of the world, but also with the habit of healthy curiosity and the habit of letting judgment wait on evidence. Whether the instructor sends his students out with a question mark or a period at the end of their course is a question of pedagogical method, however. We may in any case be reasonably sure that with live people the interrogation point will put in an appearance sooner or later. If an institution can not answer the reasonable demand that it justify its existence, then it should perish, and there is no surer way of ridding ourselves of much old lumber, antiquated rubbish, and many new and evil growths in the economic and social world than to encourage in healthy-minded men and women a fair and open-minded skepticism. It is a vicious plan of instruction that seeks to give the student once for all a closed system of thought, whether in philosophy or elsewhere, and the teaching of the social sciences is no exception to the rule.

Be our opinions what they may as to the attitude of mind which social and economic study should give the student, the basic importance of the social sciences as environmental or

orientating subjects is open to no great question. With them, it may be remarked in passing, a wide study of literature should go, for it is a revelation of life and of society which no "science" can hope to duplicate. We can scarcely hope that all students will be able to take all the courses which we have classified as foundational and environmental, even of the social sciences, but it is at least to be hoped that more will be done to bring to the attention of students the value of these subjects in education for civic and vocational efficiency.

Difficult in some cases as the choice of material for the general foundational courses may be, it is still greater in the matter of choosing courses to follow the foundational stage, in the quasi-vocational group. Remembering on the one hand that the business of the college is to develop potential efficiency, and not trade or vocational specialization, and on the other hand, that efficiency will nevertheless have to be realized mainly as vocational activity later on, and that the student has not time to take an "ideal" college course (which, if taken as a composite of the ideals of the various faculty members, would bid fair to include nine-tenths of all the courses offered) we may see that a weighty problem confronts each department. What courses shall be offered to follow the foundational courses in each subject? From the standpoint of the student the best general answer we can formulate is that given in the tabular classification-advanced and specialized courses chosen with reference to the future calling of the student, but taught also to enlarge the knowledge of environment and to train in the method of the particular subject chosen. From the teacher's standpoint the answer will depend upon his estimate of the resultant of several possible elements of a course the breadth or generality of the environment of which it gives knowledge, its brain-stretching capacity, its necessity or desirability in preparation for technical study, the demands it makes upon equipment and teaching staff, perhaps also to some slight extent its "cultural" value in the narrow sense, and certainly its cultural value in the broad and liberal sense. The relation of the college to the technical and professional schools will also have to be con