P. B. H. AT WORK

Two announcements, the Student Council grant of $2,500 and the projected clothing drive annually serve to bring Phillips Broks House before the public gaze. This week both events are once again causing a slight ripple on the placid surface of undergraduate life. The ripple is, however, but a suggestion of the busy activities carried on by this organization.

Genial, spirited Phillips Brooks would have been pleased by the awakened sense of social responsibility demonstrated by many Harvard students. His heart would have been warmed by the increasing number of students volunteering "for active service" in settlement houses and by the thought that Phillips Brooks House, in organization and effectiveness, was was beginning to realize its potentialities.

An analysis of this tendency might trace undergraduate interest to a national awareness of social problems brought about by the depression and undimmed, as yet, by evidence of returning prosperity. But any investigation uncovers more than this. At Harvard the trend is also accounted for by a perfected local organization, a more vigorous personnel, and a desire of budding social scientists, whatever their particular field, to gain their education by actual experience as well as books.

The significance of personal contact with Boston slums and settlement houses, where boys and girls with a minimum of opportunities are encouraged to improve their minds and bodies in an atmosphere of social cleanliness cannot be exaggerated. It is one of the few forms of practical training that college life can offer. In social work a man tests his power of leadership, his ability to pit his ideas against keen, youthful opposition, and his skill in solving complex problems. It is valuable self-education, broadening an individual's social knowledge and directing his thinking into channels unrelated to himself.

In this drama Phillips Brooks House plays its part and plays it well. Many a future citizen at Harvard finds impressive the fact that the juvenile crime rate soars dangerously where no settlement house is located. He is concerned, and not in the tea-cup manner, about the people who live on the rim of existence. Today it is possible to find in the well-organized Phillips Brooks House clothing drive merely one outward manifestation of vigorous internal life and social usefulness.