An All-College Plattsburg.

The War Department would do well to give favorable consideration to the suggestion of the Harvard CRIMSON that an all-college-officers' training camp be established this summer. The idea clearly contains merit. Hundreds of college men, now below the draft age, would welcome the opportunity to devote the long vacation to intensive preparation for military service of a kind still greatly needed. To students in those institutions which now have no R. O. T. C. the plan would be particularly attractive, because it would enable them to get a training which conditions at their own colleges force them to forego.

If Harvard's camp of last summer was popular and valuable, why wouldn't a camp established on much broader lines, and conceivably of much larger efficiency, be still more popular and valuable? In asking this question there is neither attempt nor desire to minimize the great service which Harvard has rendered the nation. The men it educated at the Fresh Pond trenches and at Barre made an excellent showing at the subsequent Plattsburg, and they are making an even better showing today as officers in the National Army. But Harvard's camp was an infantry camp to train infantry officers. Artillery, signal corps and engineer officers are just as urgently needed. Let the colleges devoted to these varying interests poor their resources. Let the infantry of Harvard, the artillery of Yale and the engineering of Technology join forces in another great effort to meet the di- verse needs of a country at last seriously at war.

But the plan will depend for its success upon something more than the mere approval of the War Department. To be of the fullest value it must also have Governmental recognition. The argument so often presented in the case of individual college camps that the Federal authorities cannot distinguish between institutions will no longer obtain. Here will be an all-college Plattsburg to all intents and purposes identical with the training camps which the Federal authorities themselves created. If may be too much to expect that the college students attending will be granted commissions on a satisfactory completion of the course, but it ought to be possible to devise some means of letting the men know that their comment of hard work has not been entirely to vain or officially unappreciated.  Boston Transcript