ALLYN ABBOTT YOUNG

Nothing seems more cruel than the death of a wise and able man at a time when his powers are most flourishing and his advice most needed. The death from pneumonia of Professor Allyn Abbott Young in London on Wednesday is a loss which will be felt by the colleagues with whom he worked, both here and abroad, the pupils whom he had taught, and the University and the nation which he had served.

The leave of absence which permitted him to go to London for three years was reluctantly given by the University, and with the hope and expectation that the end of those three years would see him back again. Some Englishmen had questioned the right of an American to hold the chair in the London School of Economics which had been held by Edwin Cannan, but Professor Young so won all English economists that he was elected president of the Economic Section of the British Association.

His death seems the more untimely because it is only recently that he has been prevailed upon by his friends to undertake the recording, at greater length than is afforded by periodicals, of his views on many aspects of the world's pressing economic problems. Those writings which he has left, excellent and all-embracing as they are, represent but a scratching of the surface of his thinking. The temperament which made his judgments so wise and so profound has been a factor in costing the world the light which he could have shed upon many problems. Publication so often entails a hardening of the point of view that one of his open mind hesitates to commit himself irrevocably for fear of the disservice he may do the subject.

Reparations and the Allied Debts had been a matter of concern to him since the close of the war, and he, in the role of adviser to President Wilson, was largely responsible for introducing a note of sanity into estimates made at Versailles by the apostles of the revanche. The American observers and officials connected with the operation of the Dawes Plan have retied upon him constantly, for advice.

Those who never knew him will find his writings a small but particularly illuminating glimpse of the man and of the subjects to which he gave his life. Those who had the good fortune to be his intimates will cherish a host of memories of expansive evenings when his singular mind, Greek in its scope and freedom from bias, illuminated and gave new value to a world of ideas.