1919.

"Educational activities: Roughly there are 209,000 students embraced in this scheme. Ten thousand are at A.E.F. University at Beaune, some 7,000 are attending French universities. 3,000 attending British. There are roughly 130,000 men at Post Schools, which correspond to our elementary schools in United States. 55,000 are attending the Divisional Educational Schools, which correspond to our High schools. In addition there are approximately 58,000 men in specialized vocational schools where they have full shop facilities of A.E.F.

"Athletic activities: Athletic activities increasing daily in scope and popularity. Figures for February show 6,500,000 individual participants in games. In addition to mass athletics, unit championships are being played in football, basketball, soccer, boxing, tennis, swimming, tug of war, golf, track and field.

"Entertainment activities: Reports of entertainment officers show monthly attendance for A.E.F. of between eight and ten million. Moving pictures, professional talent from United States and particularly soldier shows being utilized in all parts of army and have done much to take care of leisure hours of troops. Horse shows have been held in nearly every division of A.E.F. and have proved very popular. Amount of all this work now being carried on is little short of stupendous."

The following paragraphs from a personal letter are particularly significant as coming from an officer of the regular army, who when he was in command of one of the cantonments in the United States was genuinely alarmed lest the War Department had not lost its sense of proportion, and was creating parlor ornaments instead of fighting men:

"I served in the Army of Occupation in the Philippines and in China after the Boxer campaign, and I want to tell you that the discipline and ésprit de corps of these troops in Germany is incomparably better than anything I saw there.

"I think nothing has so contributed to this result as the welfare work and the educational work undertaken. We have every reason to be proud of the fact that we had people in command of the army who had the vision to see what result this work would bring.

"I took command of the —th Division in the Army of Occupation in December, and up until the present time I never worked with a happier or more contented lot of men. Of course they all want to go home, and we wouldn't have much use for them if they didn't, but an intensified military course of training in the morning, schools and athletics in the afternoon, and study and entertainment in the evening have made their days so full that they have been perfectly contented to stay until their boat comes in June.

"This has been the experience of all the divisions up here in Germany, and their enthusiasm, I fear, when they get home, may be taken for pro-Germanism."

The War Department has learned so much in this great laboratory experiment in human conduct that the impious wish sometimes arises in one's mind that we might promptly try it all over again for the chance of profiting by our mistakes. Thank God we can't do that, but in our daily contact with these same men restored to their communities we can to a certain degree carry on the work, and in so doing we can learn much from the successes and failures of the Army.

In planning for the immediate future, there are some things which we mustn't forget. In the first place, we mustn't expect these young men (or any humans for that matter) to be capable of remaining at concert pitch indefinitely.

For a while, in dealing with the soldier who has returned from overseas, real ingenuity will be required to make much impression upon his mind. Not only will ordinary life seem tame but, frankly, he is likely to have been overhandled and overwelfared. If, however, we have erred in this regard, it has been on the right side.

May I venture still another suggestion, and that is to be careful and considerate of the soldier who, despite his earnest desire, failed to get across, and for the matter of that, of the young man who didn't get into the Army at all. The morale of these two groups will need our particular care.

In closing, however, we should not end upon a note of warning, but rather upon one of exultation; for the war has taught us, if it has taught nothing else, that, given a great cause and a cross-section of our heterogeneous American population, the resulting revelation of the power of human endurance, human courage and human accomplishment comes pretty near to proving objectively the divinity of man.

FOOTNOTE:

THE WAR AS A PRACTICAL TEST OF AMERICAN SCHOLARSHIP[2]

It is a difficult task to attempt to define the American scholar of to-day. If any of you doubt it, let him try it as I have tried. Scholarship, like many another broad term, has no sharply marked edges. It is hard to define anything that lacks definiteness; and, after all, the task is relatively profitless, because we all of us recognize what is at the center of the concept. I think we all recognize that the scholar is an expert in some particular field or fields; but he is more than the expert as such, in that he knows enough of other matters to see his particular specialty in its relation to things in general. He must, to this degree at least, be a philosopher. This very general conception of scholarship is fairly constant, but the fields which the conception includes are broadening day by day and almost hour by hour. We cannot to-day limit scholarship to the polite branches which were all that it embodied when this Society was founded or even when this Chapter was established. The scholar of the old-fashioned type must now accept as his fellow the man who has helped to flatten the trajectory of the 16-inch shell, or to control the birth rate of the cootie. Later on I shall suggest one other element which, in the light of the test which American scholarship has undergone in the past two years, it seems to me should now be included in our idea of the typical American scholar.

We Americans are proud of being called a nation of inventors; and most of us have made, or almost made, private discoveries of an inventional nature which, for some reason, have never come to fruition. The scientific boards in Washington during the war received more than sixty thousand suggestions in some mechanical field; and I am told by those who ought to know that of all these not more than five of those coming from untrained minds were of any practical value. Even from the trained minds there came, I am told, no fundamental discovery in science as a direct result of the war conditions. Suggestions of improvements in detail and valuable suggestions there were in plenty, new applications of known principles, but application of a fundamentally new idea, no. That is only to say what we already know, that discovery is not made to order. In each case the idea had already been born in the mind of some intellectual pioneer and worked out