WITHOUT LIMIT

Time was when the greatest praise which could be bestowed upon an institution of higher learning was to compare it favorably with the New England college and to predict a maintenance, in its students and graduates, of the New England hierarchy. Harvard, however, although sprung directly from New England soil and built up in her youth by New England zeal and vision, may be said to have widened her horizons until now, in the two hundred and ninety-first year of her existence she is recognized to be so representative of the United States in her enrollment as to be able to claim a national if not international status rather than one simply sectional.

Such a procedure, the natural outcome of the University's policies, would be utterly futile, if, in increasing her appeal and in extending her boundaries she had lost the original soundness and vigor which characterized her founders. If Harvard had rated the importance of quality below that of quantity and consequently directed her efforts toward magnifying the latter, allowing the former to dwindle to insignificance, she would have been guilty of the sin of educational simony. Instead, the governing powers of the University during the period of her most concentrated growth saw that the only New England principles to be discarded in favor of others were those of a narrow nature; those which looked no further than the rock strewn hills and stormy coasts and which subjected the larger interests of the country to provincial considerations. What was best in the small New England college would serve more than adequately as the basis of a large representative university.

New students, both Freshmen, transfers, and men of the Graduate Schools who have come from other institutions, need have no fear that the university which they have chosen and whose residence is perhaps thousands of miles from theirs is unduly influenced by its geographical situation. It is a common saying that all that was finest in New England went to make up Harvard College; those elements have yet to depreciate in value. Since then, since the foundation of what was initially purely a New England institution, foreign ingredients have been introduced and it is the opinion of not a few that these new constituents mingle on equal ground with the original ones. And it Puritan bigotry has been rejected in favor of a cosmopolitan liberalism, the fire of Puritan inspiration burns no less brightly.