BEHIND THE THRONE

Announcement of the annual appropriation of the General Education Board for Studies of the Humanities provides opportunity to restate again the advantages of organized patronage of the arts and sciences. A division of the Rockefeller Foundation, this General Education Board is a good example of the intelligent direction of wealth. It is on a basis of such intelligent direction of power that civilization preserves itself.

A commonplace reaction to the work of scholastic specialists in some obscure field of knowledge is an expression of amazement at so much time and labor spent on the dusty and the dead. In answer it must be said that it is by such dusty and often seemingly irrelevant detail that creative knowledge is broadened and the sum of human satisfactions is increased. Without the hum-drummery of fact-finding, Coleridge could never have reared in Xanadu the pleasure dome of the Khan. It is interesting to speculate as to what Coleridge would have made of the masterpiece in question if there had been a Rockefeller to pay the bills.