idea that these ineffective schools are justified by the argument that they enable poor boys to get a chance in the medical profession; (5) the necessity for a complete revision of the arrangements that now hold as between medical schools and the hospitals in which their clinical instruction is given.

After a brief historical survey, showing that medical education in America, after a favorable start, soon declined to a commercial basis, the report undertakes to set forth the contents and character of an education in modern medicine, to ascertain what must be its preliminary educational basis; what must be the facilities of a good medical school on modern lines in respect to laboratories, hospital and dispensary; what it costs to maintain such a school, how many the country needs, and how the schools now existing compare with the standards thus worked out. It appears that the country is supporting three or four times as many doctors as it requires, mostly trained in inferior schools; that our medical schools are still producing between two or three times as many as can be assimilated; that instead of the 155 schools now existing one-fifth of the number, properly supported and distributed, can produce all the physicians required, much better trained than they can now be.

It is demonstrated that a preliminary training in science is a necessary prerequisite to modern medical training at its best. In the North and West, secondary schools and colleges are already in position to give an education of this kind. Nevertheless, in some states in these sections, notably Pennsylvania, Illinois, Missouri, California, etc., many medical schools do not require even a high school education. In the South, secondary schools and colleges are more backward. It is inadvisable to attempt in that section to require the higher standard at this moment; and medical education must be adjusted accordingly. But the fact that the proper standard cannot be reached is no excuse for the general absence of any standard at all; the low-grade schools with which Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, etc., abound are not

only menaces to public health, but obstructions to the development of the educational system of the Southern states. Throughout the country low-grade medical schools exist only by misrepresenting their own standards. For though all pretend to enforce a definite entrance requirement, scarcely more than thirty of the 155 do so. On a much smaller scale similar conditions are repeated in Canada, where out of eight medical schools three are without enforced preliminary requirements.

The Carnegie Foundation, in this report, takes the position that the training of physicians is not a business; it is a vital social function. Superfluous schools, operated directly or indirectly for profit, should be closed; the others should be generously supported. An attempt is made in a chapter entitled "Reconstruction" to forecast a satisfactory rearrangement on such a basis.

As a matter of course the published report of the Carnegie Foundation on the medical education of America called forth much comment. Many

Comments on the Carnegie Report agree somewhat with the report and just as many more disagree with it. As an illustration of the comment, President Edmund J. James of the University of Illinois agrees with Mr. Flexner, and more. The way to answer the indictment was not, he said, by "trying to defend indefensible conditions, but by putting our house in order and remedying the defects of the present situation. Nothing will be gained by trying to hide our heads, ostrich-like, under a mass of small criticisms and minor corrections, trying to raise a dust of abuse and recriminations for the purpose of concealing the real issue."

President James pointed out that neither the state of Illinois nor the city of Chicago had ever done anything for medical education, and that until the people showed a disposition to support the schools as they should be supported the commonwealth would have just what the report says it has.

Doctor James A. Egan, secretary of

the Illinois State Board of Health, characterized the report as a display of "deplorable ignorance as to what constitutes a medical college."

Others refer to the fact that Mr. Flexner is a teacher, not a medical man. Also, that during his investigations he admitted that he had no standard by which he measured a medical college.

The Boston Transcript gives an idea of the press comment, for in a lengthy and fair editorial it concludes: "It is a peculiarity of this profession that its practitioners are judged and rated by the laity. The average American has no hesitation in saying that Doctors A. and B. are first-rate physicians, while Doctors C. and D. do not understand their business, when he would acknowledge himself unfitted to pass on the qualifications of a man as civil engineer, expert accountant or electrician. The oversight of teachers rests largely with supervisors and superintendents and perhaps committeemen--who have risen from the teachers' ranks. Lawyers do their work under the eye of judges. But the physician's practice seems to depend to a large degree on the personal element; on the inferences as to his success which the people are likely to draw. It is therefore all the more incumbent on public authority or public sentiment to establish adequate standards of preparation. For setting people to thinking in this direction the country is indebted to the Carnegie report.

"It may be quite possible successfully to answer some of these sweeping charges against the proprietary and the weaker medical schools, but conditions have so radically changed that schools once serviceable, according to the standards of their time, and deserving of praise for what they accomplished, have now been distanced in the race. Since the era of teaching clinical medicine by practical methods has come in their didactic equipment no longer serves and that is what is meant by the statement that 'the mere fact that they are old schools is a poor reason for continuing them if they fail to do justice to the student.' Without doubt the study of medicine might be greatly advanced and strengthened were the resources of the many brought together in

the comparative few. That is also true. of many other institutions of learning besides medical schools.

"The controversy, however, between the small school and the large, between wealth of facilities and relative meagreness, cannot be soon settled. Few men today would recommend to their sons the law education which sufficed for Abraham Lincoln. Many of the shining lights in every calling have become so in spite of most meager opportunities in preparation. This will always be the case; the human element is a very large factor. The inborn genius with only book and the log will in life outrank many who have the world's best opportunities. A man is not like a waterpail which can be taken to an educational pump to be filled. And still the greater the opportunities. the better the product; the world too often overlooks the resultant of the mediocre man and the mediocre institution. That is a very bad combination. Many of its results in medicine and dentistry and allied callings, as seen throughout the rural sections of the country, are deplorably in evidence.

"The point which Doctor Pritchett has steadily made in his addresses, as well as in this report, that the country should give itself no concern lest it fail to turn out a sufficiently large crop of physicians, deserves attention. This is not like a frontier settlement which habitually strains a point to get a representative in it of the various callings. The professions are already overcrowded, notably that of medicine, and the best way to adjust the supply to the reasonable demand is to raise the standard."

The climax of the comment is reached in the news from St. Louis that the College of Physicians and Surgeons has brought suit for brought suit for $100,000 damages against Mr. Flexner and President Pritchett.

tion has for its aim just the opposite of this principle. Its purpose is to educate young men and women for life by bring ing them closer to life. Thus Mr. Hubbard-we will attach to him the creditis being answered. But in the education which better fits the rising generation (as well as those who are already up and doing) for life and its problems there is something else to be considered. This something else is the right attitude of mind of the educated toward life, and its problems, and the work that is to be done, and the workers who are to do the work.

When education causes one to shun work and to pull away from workers, then education, and particularly the kind designated as industrial, is robbed of its meaning. When education builds a socalled "better class"-a class which thinks more of white hands than of character and ability-then we will need to make a greater change in our methods of training than has ever before been made. Those who belong to the trades must of necessity now and then be seen with dirty hands and soiled clothing. If the grime of honest toil is to be made a badge of disgrace, then the sooner education corrects the error the better. Mr. Carnegie has said that there are only three generations from overalls to overalls. If this "better class" idea is permitted to spread, we soon will be back to the starting point-back to overalls.

Mr. Edwin G. Cooley, who, until a little more than a year ago, was superintendent of Chicago's school system, has been commissioned by the Chicago Commercial Club to go to Europe to study industrial training. He is expected to bring back ideas sufficient to place the public schools of Chicago in the foremost rank as regards industrial education. At a luncheon given him last month the "better class" idea was introduced.

Mr. George Beaumont, an architect, presented the subject by saying: "I make a practice of chatting with the mechanics who work on the buildings I am erecting. I like to get their views of things. A great many of them tell me they have quit, or are going to quit, the building

trades because the better class of people don't seem to want to associate with them.

"The bricklayer, for instance, comes home with his shoes covered with lime, and the neighbors don't like to see him. living near them. The young men say the nice girls turn them down because their hands are big and coarse, with big knuckles, or are seamed and cracked with their daily toil. The average mechanic doesn't live in as good a home as the $15 to $18 a week clerk, although he earns more money. The average pay in the building trades is 70 cents an hour, but men are scarce. Perhaps Mr. Cooley can explain this."

Mr. Cooley, who already had given. utterance to this epigrammatic statement, "The boy who is to become an efficient workman in any calling must believe it is something worth while and like to do it," admitted that Mr. Beaumont had truly described existing conditions.

"That is one of the most difficult problems of today," he said. "I am in hopes that schools for industrial training may create a different viewpoint toward manual labor. I am in hopes that the domestic science courses will make good housekeepers of the girls, so they will take pride in their own work and respect a workingman who respects his own trade."

Mr. Cooley dwelt briefly with the subject, but he declared more attention was paid to polish than to framework nowadays.

"L'Agenda" is the name of the year book by the juniors of Bucknell Univer

sity. It was recently Greatest Value issued for the year of a 1910, and among College Education other things are the answers of presidents of twelve of the nation's leading universities and colleges to the question, "What is the greatest value of a college education?" This is an old question, but it is ever new. The more the world becomes interested in higher education the more the world is interested in its value.

The presidents whose replies are here

given are Woodrow Wilson of Princeton, A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard, David Starr Jordan of Leland Stanford, James B. Angell of Michigan, James R. Day of Syracuse, W. H. P. Faunce of Brown, Charles C. Harrison of Pennsylvania, Cyrus Northrup of Minnesota, S. E. Mezes of Texas, John Howard Harris of Bucknell, Edwin E. Sparks of Pennsylvania State College, and Russell Conwell of Temple University. Thus we are given the opinions of heads of all sorts of institutions for higher education.

President Wilson-What seems to me of greatest advantage to college students is the discipline of their faculties derived from serious attention to their studies. Incidentally, the contacts of college life. no doubt do a great deal to transform them from boys into men, but they are benefited by college in proportion as they take its duties seriously and subordinate. its pleasures.

President Lowell-I am afraid that the subject of what is the greatest benefit of a college education is too large a one to be answered in a paragraph. It is one that we never cease to discuss at great length and are trying to demonstrate here.

President Jordan-There are a great many possible values of higher education, and I have discussed them from various points of view. Which is the greatest depends on the individual himself, but a knowledge of the best that men have thought and done in the world, a broadminded, generous outlook on things is the greatest part of it. I have also said that the secret of power should be disclosed by a college education. One which does not give that has been a sham somewhere. If any college man is a failure in practical life it is because he is a failure to start with, and because of his false start he has steered his college course badly. A man gets out of college what he comes prepared to take, provided indeed that the college has it to offer.

Ex-president Angell-The greatest value of a college education is to develop one's manhood.

President Day-The chief value of a

college education is in mental discipline. If a man is thoroughly disciplined he will acquire knowledge and have power to use it. A while ago "Who's Who in America" found that of 9,643 men who had made notable success in business, 6,711 were college graduates. This is a conclusive answer to the practical side of college education.

President Faunce-The object of a college course is to enable a man to find himself and realize himself as part of a great social order. The bud unfolds into flower and fruit only when touched by the rain, played on by the sunshine, and stimulated by a thousand energies outside itself. The student may remain shut up in a selfish and bitter individualism unless he, too, is played upon by the subtle restless forces of college life.

Those forces are many; the garnered knowledge of the past, the triumphs of modern science, the beauty of art and nature, the vital contact of inspiring teachers, the daily association with wholesome undergraduates. The college student is not preparing to be a doctor or journalist or engineer or diplomat-but to be a man, so in touch with the finest things and people as to "see life steadily and see it whole."

President Harrison-The first object of such a training should be, of course, to develop the faculties so that a person may think clearly and logically, and that by contact with men and books his horizon may be widened and his joy of living thereby increased. thereby increased. And this, I believe, is accomplished to a large extent.

The actual and permanent good which a student derives from a college training may, I think, be enumerated as follows:

First-Enlarged knowledge of the subjects of thought which have engaged the attention of men from the beginning of history, which may include a fund of general and also more or less specialized knowledge.

Second-Breadth of view, and ability to appreciate and understand the utterances of the best minds of all ages on many subjects.

Third-Associations of great value in connection with friendships, and also acquaintances formed in college among men of different traditions, and from different environments, and from different parts of our own country, as well as from foreign lands. Coupled with this is the practical result which comes from attendance on a college or university course whereby a man becomes a member of a great fraternity of men, with strong bonds of sympathy. A college or university man, simply from the fact that he is such, is possessed of a passport which admits to much that is necessarily closed to men who have had no such associations.

Fourth-A general "largeness" of thought and of life which characterizes the purpose for which universities exist.

Together with the above benefits which accrue from a college or university training, there comes also increased power as a result from knowledge gained from men as well as from books, and a realization that knowledge is power, when it is accompanied by ability to use it in service.

The discipline of faculties is of the greatest importance to the student, if we construe discipline as the resultant of association; for, the period in which the young man is in college the privilege is accorded him of close association with trained men who have made it the business of their lives to learn and propagate the best that has been known and thought in every domain of human interest and activity.

These results, as outlined, come to the great majority of young men in our colleges and universities, and I think they fully answer the question as to whether a college education is worth while.

President Northrup-The greatest value of a college education is to fit a man for a useful life by disciplining his powers and opening to him in some measure the fields of knowledge so that he can do most effectively what he undertakes within the range of his

knowledge and can know where to get more knowledge if he needs it.

President Mezes-There is little value in the education given by colleges with weak faculties and low standards. The greatest advantage to the graduates of strong institutions who avail themselves of their opportunities is the mental training they have secured which enables them to deal effectively with the problems of life as they arise.

President Harris-The purpose of education is character and efficiency. The character aimed at is the man developed harmoniously in all his powers; the efficiency will be the outflow of such character in all the relations of life. Christian education takes Jesus as the type of right character and His life as the guide of action.

President Sparks-To reform boyhood idols into manhood ideals, to replace home control by self-control, to develop will power and an ambition, to learn to estimate men and things at their true value, and to awaken to the fact that cleanliness of body, habit, speech, and thought always characterizes a gentleman-to gain these abiliwhile objectively pursuing a curricuties subjectively and unconsciously lum only a small part of which you will probably ever use-this is the final measure of your college education.

President Conwell-The value of college education lies almost entirely in the discipline of mind which fits a graduate for taking up almost anything with which he may come in con

tact.