CONTEMPORARIES

The great English journalist, Frederic Harrison, was congratulated on his 90th birthday last year as "living among the third generation of his contemporaries." Men often live to be well over ninety; but it is a very rare thing to find a man so active, so vigorous, and so young-minded that it can be truly said of him that the generation of today are his contemporaries.

Such a man is President Eliot. His hand has shaped American university education from the uncertain, hit or-miss days of its beginnings to the well-rounded, highly developed structure of the present time. Whatever his hand has touched has blossomed. His college has become a University, and the graduate branches,--scarcely more than appendages at the outset,--are regarded everywhere as the finest in their fields.

Yesterday in his address President Eliot spoke as no other man living could speak. From the splendid richness of his experience he can look over and beyond the temporary sore spots of today. His speech was colored with all the farsighted liberalism which has been the keynote of his life. In most men's careers it is possible to pick out a span of years, ten or twenty, and refer to it as "his day". President Eliot showed yesterday that "his day", as every college class has felt for the past fifty years, is "now".