ROOM FOR A REVOLUTIONIST.

Pillars of fire and other projectiles are periodically hurled at the endowed universities for their conservatism; they are ever and anon charged with eating out of the hands of "big business," and are "arraigned" for supposed intellectual subservience. The vitriolic young men, seeking publicity, who make these charges, conveniently forgot that they are often allowed to make their denunciations in college buildings, and then are invited to speak again. They forget also that American "big business" men were as strongly opposed to the retention of certain pro-German professors in the University as they possibly could be to the employment of radical lecturers. Yet the professors were retained.

Nevertheless, honest and legitimate as are the reasons, there is in the University a notable amount of balance and sanity. Although nearly all the men on the University faculty are actuated by large social sympathy, there is no professor in the Economics department who can fairly be considered an upholder of the revolutionary ideas regarding capital and labor. The only known single-taxer in the University is in the Engineering department; and no course on socialism is given by a "real live" socialist.

It is hardly necessary to say that a department composed entirely of extremists would be far worse than one without the leaven of radicalism. The ideal situation would be to have both sides of labor, corporation, labor-union questions and the like presented by men with strong convictions pro as well as eon.

Harvard, steeped as it is in this much-extolled, much-blackened New England tradition, can afford to welcome a few men of openly radical views. Nothing makes a man think for himself more than to be shocked by the expression of some extreme opinion. If a college education can do no more, it can stir up a man's brain cells. The prevailing type of undergraduate, contrary to the supposed condition of youth, is too stand, too conservative, to be carried away by the expression of radical ideas. Should a fortunate student be accidentally bumped from his daily rut, panic would seize him, and the next day would find him travelling the well-beaten path of precedent again. Let us have a few rabid,--yes, flighty, unbalanced, red-flagged,--extremist lecturers. The University can stand them.