scholar has not wholly been in getting things done. Perhaps an equally important side was in keeping impossible or unprofitable things from being attempted. When time was of the very essence of the whole program, the man who could say "No" and prove the validity of his objection, performed a positive work of great value. One of our associates at Columbia had a leading share in devising tests for candidates for the flying school, which, by rejecting the unfit at the outset, saved many lives from the time of their adoption and many, many thousands of dollars; for the training of a flyer who cannot be used when the time comes is a very costly piece of national extravagance in both money and men.

Our scholars did not confine their activities to the battle of Washington. Not only as engineers and doctors, but as geologists and geographers, as meteorologists and sanitarians, they went with the troops to the front, and their counsel as to actual military operations was welcomed and followed. One of them, a bachelor and doctor of this University, died in the service in France. The scholar, like the soldier, stood ready to step forward to fill the gap in the ranks as he saw it, regardless of whether something more dignified might be found for him to do. Our own Barnard, Professor of Education, took what he was pleased to call his vacation in applying his scholarship to organizing an educational program for the wounded men in our hospitals, as a therapeutic measure. Being a scholar and not merely an expert, he saw the broad human aspect of his specialty; that the first thing to do with the man who is blinded, or otherwise maimed, is to make him realize that it is worth while to get well; that he can have a life which is worth living; that if his old job is no longer possible, there are others for which he can be trained. One of America's most distinguished philosophical chemists settled down to the humble but very essential problem of making mixed flours rise and bake with a crust—and solved it. The war services of a past President of this Chapter, now, alas, no longer with us, and those of our present President have been as useful as they have been inconspicuous.

The need for the scholar was not only qualitative, but quantitative. But for the general distribution of chemical knowledge in France and England, and the presence of men capable of promptly applying that knowledge to combat the gas attacks launched by the Germans, the war would have been lost before we could possibly have rendered the slightest assistance; and on our side of the Atlantic when the armistice was signed, there were two thousand trained chemists engaged in the problems of gas warfare alone. Our country, in a word, needed not only to have some men with the requisite training, but men enough to meet simultaneously many needs in many fields, and these men were drawn in large measure from our academic faculties. While one must not press the identity between the scholar and the professor too hard—for a number of reasons—the fact remains that the teaching profession provided the main reservoir from which the country drew. One of my friends in the Chemical Warfare Service has summarized the relation between the academic scholar and that branch of the army activity. Both chiefs of the Chemical Service Station were college professors, one of them a member of this Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. Of the fourteen heads of the Research Division, eight were college professors. It was the college professors who made fundamental improvements in gas masks on the one hand, and who devised new gases to test the German masks on the other.

As a nation, we did not realize at the outset, as Germany did, the importance of the man who knows, and of knowing who he is and where he is; and here, perhaps, lay our most fundamental unpreparedness. What this cost us may be judged from a single instance. A code message from Germany directing the dismantling of the German ships lying in our ports was intercepted. If we had known that there was a professor of English in the University of Chicago who, in the pursuit of his medieval researches, had developed the power of reading ciphers almost at sight, that cable from Germany could have been promptly deciphered, we could have forestalled the sabotage, and something like six months in the use of these ships for the transport of our troops and munitions could have been gained.

The job of getting the man who knew into the right niche was not an easy one. The scholars could not all be spared; for, after all, education and research are essential industries, and, fortunately for our institutions of learning, for our reviews and scientific agencies, and fortunately for the country as a whole, all of our scholars did not rush immediately into government work. The less thrilling task of keeping the lamps burning in our lighthouses was never more important than during the stormy days which we have just gone through. Furthermore, the scholar is a modest person, though he has his human vanities, as we all know who have seen our colleagues in uniform; but usually some one had to know about him and invite him to his place, a very sharp contrast to the business men and lawyers who came down to Washington by the trainload to impress us with their capacity to do any job which involved a commission of properly high degree.

In general, I should say that the individuals in the universities met the test better than the institutions themselves. The latter did not, it seems to me, as institutions, grasp the situation. Very few studied the question of the assignment of their specialists as a problem in conservation as well as in publicity; and as far as the use of their facilities in the training of soldiers and sailors is concerned, the War Department and the Navy Department had literally to teach them how to meet the war conditions. Such help as came from organized bodies of scholars came rather from the learned societies than from the academic groups.

Then there was a further difficulty, particularly among the younger men, though not wholly among them. The expert's job, and hence inclusively the scholar's job, is relatively safe so far as the immediate risk of death is concerned, though not the risk of shortening life through overwork. One Columbia man, well over the draft age, told me frankly that he would gladly give up an important public office he held for the privilege of fighting with his hands, but he could not be tempted by an opportunity to fight with his head. Through this same impulse many and many a man attempted to conceal his special knowledge in order that he might fight in the line. The Army Committee on Classification of Personnel, which was in itself a beautiful example of scholarship in practical application, was able, however, in most instances to pluck out the expert from the line and set him, whether he was willing or not, at the task for which he was particularly adapted and particularly needed.

What, from the point of view of the non-scholar, can be said as to the general usefulness of the men and women (for the women did their share) who came forward or were brought forward to take this trial by fire on behalf of American scholarship? First of all, the scholar must be a real scholar; he must have the natural ability and the long and rigorous training necessary for accurate observation, and observation of the kind which, if I may be forgiven a most unscholarly metaphor, includes the ability to distinguish the blue chips from the white; his deductions must be relentless, and his inductions must be luminous. That is asking a good deal, and it would be