Colleges "Finding the Range."

In many an American college the undergraduate seems to have experienced a change of heart upon several matters. He has even discovered, much more generally than he had four years ago, a feeling of interest in questions of broad public moment. In subjects touching his personal future he has found certain issues of more vital concern than the mastery of the latest step in the fox-trot. It is easy to trace the sequence of cause and effect which has been at work here: The boys in our colleges have seen hundreds of their fellows go forth to an active share in the war. Most of them know that their own time for service will not long be deferred. For all of them there is the determining stimulus of their country's part in the war and of its future place among nations. How could they have escaped a new stirring to thoughtfulness under such urging, and how could their quickened thought and emotion have failed to transmit itself into an increased and widened expressiveness?

The fact that the undergraduate mind is enlarging its boundaries has appeared quite conclusively from the changing tone and content of more than one undergraduate newspaper, whether daily or weekly. To columns which had long been filled with little more than the trivialities of campus life, there have lately been coming topics affecting the military drill of the students, the service which college men have been rendering in the war and must render still more abundantly, questions of real preparation for life. Several student editors, notably the editor in charge of the Williams Record, have shown a disposition to give their editorial articles at least this merit--;that they should speak with definiteness and conviction. But it has remained for the undergraduates of the University of North Carolina to lead the way with most significance. There has lately come from this institution a copy of a new periodical called "The Range Finder." It is given over entirely to articles on the war, both as to the world events themselves and as to the influence which they have been exerting on life at the University of North Carolina. It is written with a verve that betokens real interest. Its 14 pages remain somewhat amorphous despite the bright titles which have been assigned to numerous department headings, but it is none the less a remarkable symbol of a new collegiate expressiveness, is thoroughly readable, and provides much instruction concerning the undergraduates' point of view both within the lines and between them.

It is too early to say what length of life this new periodical will enjoy at North Carolina or how far other undergraduate bodies will go in emulating its striking example. It is not too much to say, however, that where such manifestations as these are discovered in the spontaneous life of an institution, there you may know one more American college is of a truth "finding the range," and preparing to forge its way forward into a new epoch of public usefulness. Boston Transcript.