VAIN OBLATIONS

That the distinguished dean of an old and famous university should speak with the voice of authority on the subject of "This New World and the Undergraduate," seems as likely to the general public as to the editors of the Saturday Evening Post, in the current issue of which Dean Christian Gauss of Princeton College discusses what is on everybody's mind. In the matter of outlining new worlds, however, Dean Gauss cannot compare with that midwife of future ages, H. G. Wells; nor as a defender of contemporary youth with such an ally of progress as Judge Lindsey. There is only this to be said for the dean, that he is level headed and has no ax to grind.

The "post-war" theory, derived less from life than from fiction which showed the undergraduate wallowing drunkenly in the backwash of the late conflict, finds in him no protagonist. Neither is he of a mind with octogenarians who state in birthday interviews that the present generation ushers in the dawn of a new and marvelous day. He says merely that "intellectually and socially, we have not yet caught up with our own inventions and discoveries;" and belives that, all things considered, the "matter-of-fact acceptance" of the new world by the undergraduate promises well.

What is, to the world at large, the interest and importance of such discussions as this may be known only to those editors who have the trend of timely subjects under their scrutiny. To the average reader it must seem that the long-continued offering of praise and censure and criticism upon the altar of the post-war generation is drawing at last to a close. Companionate marriage may succeed student suicide as a material for headlines, but all such topics begin to have a hollow ring; and when, as in the present instance, they are ignored, and youth is discussed by a competent and seasoned observer, the result is no revelation, but only a personal and far from sensational reaction to a far from sensational state of affairs.