WELSH RAREBIT

Friends of Scotland apparently intend to carry out no reprisals for the traditional Scotchman's reluctance to part with his cash. Plans have been formed by the American loan Society to raise a ten million dollar fund for the establishment of a Gaelic University in the Scottish Highlands. The university's chief function would be to preserve the Gaelic language and culture.

In the twentieth century world where radios, mass production of clothes and utensils, and the leviathan press threaten to bring uniformity to every continent, some means of preventing the disappearance of unusual and colorful folk customs in welcome. It is certainly rain able to keep alive beautiful languages or arts in any country, and especially so if they are unique.

There could be little point, however, in preserving a culture as a museum, piece. Whether a university can affect the habits of a whole people is doubtful; a purely academic and scholastic survival of dialects and traditions is worth little. Few will hope for a university at which eager students learn the intricacies of Manx, Welsh, and Cornish only to pass on the knowledge to other bookish persons.

If customs persevere naturally, they add something worthwhile to the interest and beauty in the world. Stimulated artificially, they savor of dilettantism. The proposed university of Inverness would be an excellent thing as a general liberal arts college, not as a source of propaganda for Gaelic dialects. The expenditure of ten million dollars simply for the preservation of the picturesque and quaint can hardly be justified.