S'IL VOUS PLAIT

In an interview in the New York Times, Booth Tarkington rails against the overeducation of college students, and declares that the only fit companion for a young student of his acquaintance is a professor of Greek. This is manifestly unfair both to the highly learned masses who went no more than through grammar school, and to the professors of Greek. A glance at the human dramas called advertisements among which Mr. Tarkington's stories are inserted should have long since convinced him that the remark about not having to go to college to get an education is no empty aphorism, and that the university men of his acquaintance have reached their lamentable condition through a hopeless struggle to keep up with the more erudite readers of movie magazines.

"Je vois la crayon," calls Jean gaily over the telephone, and Arthur who has been courting assiduously for months is plain stymied. "They give me the cold shoulder," is too often the story of the shipping clerk who is out of it because he lacks the ambition to become at least bi-lingual in the mad search for knowledge. The primitive day of the quoter of Shelley has passed, and John may be forgiven for not saying a word all evening only if he has said it in several tongues, and given it a psychological inference. All this is, of course, a plain challenge to the colleges, a challenge which too probably will be answered by the snorting of the steam shovel echoed in empty classrooms.