President Eliot as a Social Thinker.

In order to appreciate properly President Eliot's contribution to the solution of social questions, it is necessary first to consider the real nature of those questions. The labor question is primarily one of hostility between two classes of the community--the employees in large industrial establishments and their employers. This hostility lies deeper than the questions of wages and the hours of labor. Such questions are the most frequent subjects of controversy, but if there were no questions of wages or hours of labor, other issues would be found upon which class hostility would express itself. It is obvious that public officials and courts of law are powerless to deal with this difficulty. They may succeed in keeping the hostile forces within the bounds of law and order, but they cannot remove the hostility itself. With characteristic insight, President Eliot has directed attention to the root of the difficulty.

It may be laid down as a general principle that whenever men are divided sharply into groups there will be jealousies and misunderstandings, if not open war between the groups. Whether the separating barrier be a geographical boundary, a racial difference, or a class distinction, is a minor matter--they are all equally productive of strife. In the case of a national boundary or a racial difference, a part of the responsibility may be laid upon nature, though even a national boundary ceases to be the scene of conflict in proportion as the members of the separated groups come to know one another through travel and commerce. Mutual intercourse tends to bridge the gap which nature established, and consequently to remove the cause of international conflict.

Modern industrial conditions have created a social gap by grouping numbers of men as employees in large industrial establishments, cut off from knowledge of their employers and from acquaintance with them. It is seldom that the owners of such establishments know their own employees, or are known by them. Under such conditions it is as natural that there should be jealousies and misunderstandings between the groups thus separated as it is that there should be sectional and international jealousies where there is little mutual intercourse and acquaintance. It is toward the closing up of this social gap that all effective efforts at the settlement of the labor problem must be directed. President Eliot has done a great deal in this direction by bringing laborers and employers together, by promoting free and frank discussion between them, by taking part in these discussions, and by setting at all times an example of patience and tolerance and of a truly democratic sympathy with all the parties concerned, even the too much neglected non-union man.

Of more far-reaching importance than the labor problem is that of maintaining democratic ideals and the democratic virtues of self-respecting freedom, tolerance and regard for law and the common good. Against the recrudescence of militarism and its accompanying vices of ceremonialism in religion and law, bossism and the demand for "regularity" in politics, and snobbery in social relations.--for these things can no more he dissociated than can snow and ice from winter weather.--President Eliot has thrown the weight of his influence. Though in a position where a man of lower ideals could have amply gratified aristocratic yearnings, he has maintained the higher dignity of democratic simplicity. For this, all those to whom the words democracy and liberty are more than empty sounds must be deeply grateful.

Of still more fundamental importance is the problem of preserving the quality of the race; for upon this depends the permanence of civilization itself. This should be sharply distinguished from such an inapt expression as "race suicide," which has so impressed uncritical minds. There is as much danger of race suicide as there is of famine through over-population. The real danger is that there may be race degeneration through the failure to multiply on the part of those best fitted to improve the stock; that is, those who have shown their talents by their achievements. Obviously, no race can maintain its quality if it practices those methods which stock breeders would adopt if they aimed at the production of an inferior stock, that is, by breeding principally from inferior or mediocre individuals. From this standpoint, President Eliot's observations concerning the size of the families of Harvard graduates are especially significant.