of American citizens of the right sort, who have shown themselves to be both capable and honest, and have therefore provided efficient and honest government. Can we see a reason for this intelligent selection of governors made now by eight or nine American communities, this selection of competent and honest servants? I think I see this reason for the successful selection,— universal suffrage has never before had anything like so good a chance to elect or select good administrators. The ballot for a commission is very short,-only ten names on it as a rule. Consequently the voters can make an intelligent discrimination. Moreover the elections are all at large, and ward elections are totally eliminated. Still we can only say that this is an intelligent and promising experiment. Cities that are satisfied with their present government will not try it; but any city that is dissatisfied with its present government may reasonably try this new experiment. The results of inquiry all point one way-there is reasonable hope for the success of this experiment which was started in the South. That was one of the reasons why I wanted to go to Texas this winter.

I expect to report on the subject when I go home, because I am sure that the people of Massachusetts are going to take general and lasting interest in the matter of municipal reform. Indeed, wherever I have been in this country I have found a similar interest. Perhaps you wonder how I started on this particular study. The subject seems at first a little off my beat; but to encourage a spirit of economy, efficiency, and honor in governmental administration, has seemed to me to be a part of my duties and functions as a teacher; and, moreover, I thoroughly believe that education covers and should cover all our lives; that it should not be conceived of as limited to the period of childhood or youth; that much of the most effective education we receive, for good or ill, is received after adult years through the ethical or unethical conduct of the great national industries, and through the right-doing or wrongdoing in our political business. Particularly, it has seemed to me that our people are led towards good or towards ill very much by their institutions of municipal government, and by the conduct of the masses of the people in regard to municipal government. The good done to young men in schools, colleges, and churches may be rapidly undone, if they

encounter, when they begin to vote, wrong methods in politics— deceit, lying, cheating, stealing, and robberies, such as have gone on unpunished and unrebuked in most of the large American cities. I feel that the interests of our people are deeply involved in procuring correction of the great municipal evils which we have suf fered in every State of the Union from one ocean to the other. I remember that James Bryce, in "The American Commonwealth," said that free institutions in America were suffering more from municipal misgovernment than from any other cause; and he said later that he felt that the United States must remedy these great evils in municipal government if it would secure the future of free institutions in America. These are the reasons why I have felt it desirable to study this matter, and to discuss it before such audiences as were open to me at home and abroad. To be sure, I approached it in the first instance through a necessity I met of studying school conditions, and the conduct of school boards in the different American cities from which young men were in the habit of coming to Harvard University. It is a fact that the great movement towards municipal reform began with the re-organization of school boards. Cleveland made a very valuable contribution when it set up new school authorities; and St. Louis, a still better one, when, the government of the city being very corrupt and the school board singularly inefficient, just a few citizens of St. Louis went to the legislature and procured a new organization of their Board of Education. I took cognizance of that action, and watched the doings of the new Board and saw the great improvements it made in the schools of the city within three or four years. So I began this study from a purely professional motive. It is a cheerful fact that Americans will take a greater interest in the constitution and doings of a school board than in any other department of a city's government. Such a board has extraordinary means for promoting public welfare.

I can't help feeling, gentlemen, that there are men enough in this room, and intelligent and moral force enough, to effect reforms of the utmost consequence in this State, and in many of the smaller communities of this State, cities and counties. One of the great lessons that we have learned in Massachusetts is, that very small groups of men may bring about reforms which require legislative action. As an example, I take the adoption of the Massachusetts

Ballot Act, the first one put in force in this country, which was procured in two sessions of the legislature by a group of young men, mostly Harvard men, that never exceeded eight in number. The first year, those eight men, and they alone, wrote in the papers, and appeared before the committee of the legislature to which a bill they had drawn was referred. They received from this committee a report giving leave to withdraw their petitions. This is our way of refusing such requests. Now these eight men had simply agreed that they would dine together once a fortnight, and talk over the Australian Ballot Act, and the English Ballot Act, and the means of getting some such act adopted in Massachusetts. The very next year both houses adopted the new Ballot Act, and the governor signed it. The reason was that both of the two machines (we have two machines in Massachusetts, and they are very much alike) thought they saw something in the act for themselves; so it went through the legislature with a rush. Is not that a cheerful instance of the smallness of the group of public-spirited men that can bring great things to pass? I commend this cheerful example to your consideration, and, as I said before, there is force enough in this room to do anything in the way of reform, or of new measures for promoting the public good which you make up your minds is desirable in this State. That is the kind of service that Harvard University expects of all her

sons.

We are always struggling towards the ideal which the Pilgrim and Puritan communities set out with when they planted themselves on the shores of Massachusetts Bay. Those men believed in civil liberty, and believed in religious liberty, in their fashion. It was not a fashion, however, which commended itself to either the Quaker or the Baptist. But out of their organization has sprung the best part of our institutions for the protection of both civil and religious liberty, and their ideas have penetrated the imagination of races which seem in their beliefs and in their habits of thought to be very unlike the Puritans. I should like to mention an instance of this penetration. Four years ago a very small group of men, really one man with a few assistants, procured a new statute granting to the city of Boston a much better school committee, a committee of five. (We had had a committee of twenty-four). This new committee was to be elected at large

in the city of Boston. We have three large Catholic elements in the population of Boston: the French-Canadian, the Italian, and the Irish, and the majority of voters are of the Catholic faith. Now, how was that committee of five made up religiously? Two Catholics, when they might have elected all five,-two Protestants and one Jew; and this constitution is maintained until this day, and this year the Jew is the chairman of the committee. Isn't that a good instance of the outcome of Puritan ideals? Those ideals have affected profoundly Catholic races working in Boston through universal suffrage. There is a good place to begin, gentlemen, with the school board, if you want to bring about a better management of the schools,-though I am inclined to believe, from the evidences I have seen in North Carolina, that you have good management of your schools in most of your communities.

I shall go home with the sense that I never in my life spent two months better than I have spent the last two months, that I never learned more in so short a time, and that I never acquired before so much new confidence in the future of our institutions and of our whole country.

President Eliot and the South

BY WILLIAM P. FEW

Dean and Professor of English in Trinity College

President Eliot of Harvard University, after forty years of service in the cause of American education, has announced his resignation to take effect not later than May 19 of the present year, and his successor has been elected. Almost simultaneously with the announcement of his resignation there came from the press his "University Administration," a volume which is the result of forty years of successful experience in educational reform, and which is sure to abide as an authoritative handbook on the subject.

*

President Eliot's resignation and the publication of "University Administration" may be said to mark the end of an era in American higher education. He has made of Harvard a true American university, and, at least in so far as university organization is concerned, it is apt to have an increasing influence throughout the entire country. And this influence will not be confined to the management of universities. President Eliot has not only undertaken the task of educational reform from top to bottom, but he has given his attention to many of the great problems of American society. To all these educational and social questions he has brought wide knowledge and keen analysis, and also the unmistakable purpose to be of service to his country. For his ability and his service in the cause of education and in many other good causes, he is today justly ranked among the most influential citizens of the republic.

We have lately had the enheartening spectacle of a Presidentelect of the United States choosing to spend in a Southern city the months preceding his inauguration, in order that he might study at first hand our conditions and come into close contact with our people. Now we have a foremost private citizen of the country, as a sort of crowning event of his professional career, making a tour of the Southern States. That Mr. Taft should

*University Administration. By Charles W. Eliot. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1908,-266 pp.