SCHOLARSHIPS AT HARVARD.

EDITORS HARVARD HERALD: In your issue of the 9th instant there appeared among the editorials an article which seemed to me so unjust and so positively fallacious in argument as to require some notice. From a statement made by President Eliot before the New York Harvard Club concerning beneficial endowments to the clerical profession, the HERALD justifies itself in attacking the scholarship system at Harvard.

I will pass over the HERALD'S mere general statements of what "past experience," etc., has shown, and consider its more positive statements. The HERALD says: "The system is nothing short of offering a prize to young men to adopt a certain profession." Now, the scholarships here in college are not given to men studying a profession, neither are they supposed or intended to be so given. They are given to men that they may be better educated and better fitted for whatever they shall hereafter undertake. The fact that out of 148 men of the last graduating class, who signified their probable occupation, 54 designated business, or only 17 less than were to enter the professions of law, medicine and the ministry altogether, shows that the scholarships at Harvard do not drive men into the professions to such an extent as the HERALD would imply.

But there is another circumstance which tends to mitigate the "evil efects" of this system of scholarships - the way in which they are awarded. A man, in order to receive the benefit of such aid, must distinguish himself in his studies, and this can he done only in two ways: either he must have extraordinary natural ability, or he must show himself capable of most diligent application. Now will the HERALD insist that a man possessing these qualities "cannot do much to ennoble his profession?" I say the influence a man shall have on his profession depends on the man himself and not upon the manner of entering that profession. The man who attains rank in his profession by "his own native talents and feelings" is not, as the HERALD implies, that one alone who can dispense with the aid of a scholarship, but it is rather the man who is educated by such aid as a scholarship at Harvard gives.

But the HERALD says that a scholarship is not received without "a sacrifice of personal independence." If there were no scholarships many a man must restrain that desire - that longing in some fostered even from childhood - to make himself more fully a man; he must remain the subject of adverse circumstances, and if he enter a profession he must enter it handicapped by those to whom fortune has given an education without the "sting" of accepting a scholarship. If the privilege of a scholarship is open to the same man he can, perhaps, get a college education which otherwise he could not have, or, at least, not without making himself onerously dependent on those of whom, at his age, he should be independent. Which case really gives the more independence?

The HERALD'S chief point against scholarships, however, seemed to be their evil effect on the professions economically. Now the great evil in over-crowded professions is the influx to them of poorly educated men. Indeed a profession is over-crowded only in so much as it is filled up with these inferior men. The moment you give these men a higher place in this profession, that moment you ennoble the profession itself. But we have seen that this is just what scholarships help to do. Scholarships are the incomes of funds devoted to the purpose of general education. Economically they can do no more injury to the professions than can any other funds devoted to the same purpose, - than funds, for instance, appropriated to college buildings, books for the library, or to any other educational purpose.

In the last part of its editorial the HERALD has taken a position which borders upon absurdity. It says: "It (meaning aid by scholarships) fills the profession with inferior men, who make the competition greater and hence reduce the rewards an able man has the right to expect for his labor." Wherein the HERALD is justified in distinguishing the non-scholarship man as "able," while stigmatizing the scholarship man as "inferior," I am not able to find.

Respectfully yours, B.