Babbitts

The joint endeavor of Harvard and the Boston Public Library in establishing the greatest business library the world has ever known in the new school at Cambridge which Mr. Baker has made possible is of double significance. By this joining forces with the collegians the city of Boston has demonstrated a friendly appreciation of what the university can do for her business interests and a spirit of cooperation in a very practical case that will work for the advancement of both.

But to us this partnership is not important as an instance of town and gown alliance but as an indication of its rapidly increasing interest in economics and as a public recognition of the importance of theory in the practical business world today. This new library rising with the others of the $5,000,000 buildings to teach economics as a business science using the same case system that first made Harvard's law school famous will at once house 150,000 volumes and within five years probably half a million accessible to Harvard students and citizens of Boston alike.

That such an elaborate institution should be set up by the munificence of one of the nations foremost financiers for the sake of a branch of erudition that was considered a vast of energy twenty for the sake of a branch of erudition that vast field of evidence that shows what rapid strides have been made by economics in recent years. It used to be called the dusty dismal science theoretically abstruse aloof from the workaday would. In the present age when the economic is woven with or even dominates the political and social as never before it is a live alert science seeking to deal intimately with the work and the daily bread of the world. The economics courses in our universities today are crowded and the numbers of graduates who attend business school before trying their wings in a very complex world grow savory year. Note too the profusion of fresh current authoritative economic literature that finds its way into the Sunday supplements and such magazines as the Saturday Evening Post.

Before long the old indictment that we are a "nation of economic illiterates" will not apply. Harvard may well be proud of her most recent addition across the Charles and exult in her utter modernity.