PROVINCIALISM REVISED

There are two kinds of men obnoxious in any community. Both are to be found in our universities, where they reflect a spirit for no value to their country. One is the student, about to offer his services, who regards the little remaining time which he must spend at college as a period in which he need exert no effort. The other is the student who, safe within his college walls, finds life but a daily round of routine and petty pleasure. He reads morning headlines as of passing concern. The evolutions of the day are a kind of motion picture, seen from the comfortable chair of self-complacency. Both these men are equally self-centered; both are provincials.

It times like these nothing could be more unfortunate. We are in a period of vast changes, not only political, but in large measure of infinite social importance. One looking ahead must indeed be over-awed by the very character of those future institutions, revolutionary and beyond imagination as they are--new international status, laws of private property totally unknown, strange governmental functions, unaccustomed relations between men, a society of which we today may have scarcely any conception. A great seething and confusion is about, a melting pot, into which the ideals, the aspirations, the hopes, and the passions of all classes and races of people have been thrown, and out of which will emerge our tomorrow. At such a time we can brook no provincialism. Men must known that if they are to taken their due share in this process of remolding modern society, they must begin now to prepare through thought that upon which they are later to act. These problems are not dreams. They are real in the reality of a Russian revolution. They are as inevitable as life itself. The call upon college men for real thought and active interest in the world's affairs has never been greater than now. May the provincial among us soon be a creature of the past.