units, and liberal allowances will be necessary in the case of individual pupils. Colleges will do wisely to accept young men and women who give promise of ability to carry undergraduate courses, without looking too carefully into the actual content of their preparatory work and we believe such a liberal spirit will be shown.

To sum up, what then is the status of this movement which promises much but which may come to a deferred and partial fulfilment? There is a widespread interest on the part of American colleges to welcome Mexican students to the United States and a fair liberality in material offers. There is also a cordial interest in the whole proposition on the part of college men and women generally. On the Mexican side there is an equally cordial expression of interest but as yet no actual candidates have presented themselves and it is not likely that students will enter our institutions until the beginning of the next academic year, 1917-18.

Undoubtedly there will be great need of financial aid to bear the travelling and living expenses of individual candidates. Many of the students who may come to this country are amply able to provide for themselves, but others who most need the inspiration and help of our American institutions, will also need financial assistance. Contributions, and even foundations, to this end should prove of great value. There is still greater need, however, of insight, sympathy and tact to enable us as a people to overcome the deep-seated prejudice against the United States on the part of Mexicans. We must not forget that this prejudice has been a matter of our own creation very largely, and that it is a growth of a hundred years or more. The injustice and aggression of the United States toward Mexico culminated in the Mexican War. It is not surprising, therefore, that the popular Mexican conception of the Americans, based unfortunately on long experience, is the ruthless, business man seeking by unscrupulous and even sinister means to exploit the national resources of their country, and to gain rich concessions at the least possible cost. They come in contact with few Americans of the best type, and American travelers and residents are all too frequently supercilious and insulting. The Mexicans feel this attitude keenly and cannot overcome in a short time the influence and convictions of generations. The Mexicans are suspicious even of such efforts as the one now under consideration and some of the educational leaders, because of their correspondence with such committees as that having this work in charge,

have been accused in the public press of interventionist tendencies and the desire to Yankeeize Mexican institutions. Mexicans have a sturdy self respect and a stubborn pride; they refuse to be patronized, yet they are sensitive to true sympathy and generous impulses and respond at once to genuine and disinterested friendship.

In what other ways can the college women of the United States help in this movement? By getting in touch with the devoted men and women at present conducting the educational work in the Protestant Schools throughout Mexico, learning through them of promising and ambitious pupils, finding scholarship openings for such pupils in institutions well known to them and then becoming personally responsible for their reception and care while in the United States.

It was hoped that there might be a visitation during the summer of 1917 of a selected body of Mexican educators who could inspect colleges, universities and institutions of various sorts, stopping in a number of our leading cities for a few days and learning by observation of our educational achievements and ideas. Such a delegation will come in other years, if not in this, and their reception and cordial welcome will have much to do in establishing better educational relations.

The work of the committee organized by President Charles William Dabney of the University of Cincinnati is also of great value and importance. That committee has published within the last two months "A Study of Educational Conditions in Mexico, and an Appeal for an Independent College". That study is the most comprehensive and authoritative report yet made on educational conditions in Mexico and from it have been drawn many of the facts in this present article. It can be obtained from President Dabney by special request, although the edition is limited. It is hoped that the movement he has inaugurated may not end until there is established in Mexico an institution that can do for that country a work similar to that of Robert College in Constantinople.

There has recently been organized in New York City a Society on Mexican co-operation, with a strong executive committee, to unify and promote the work carried on in various parts of our country by independent committees, and to further movements along educational and philanthropic lines, for the good of Mexico. The secretary of that Society, Mr. Paul Kennaday, 70 Fifth Avenue,

New York City, will be glad to learn the names of any persons interested and willing to help.

If this movement becomes organized and if year by year a number of Mexican students, both men and women, come to our country, it is hard to estimate the influence that will flow from such intercourse. Through the efforts of American college men and women Mexican students should feel a cordial welcome and learn to know the spirit of our American homes and our American institutions. Then they will return to their own country as messengers of a new international life; friendship and good will will develop from these beginnings, and the suspicion, ignorance and prejudice of the past will give place to cooperation based on a knowledge of each other and on mutual respect.

THE DEPRECIATING DOLLAR AND UNIVERSITY POLICY

Professor H. J. Davenport, formerly of the University of Missouri, now professor of economics in Cornell University, has pointed out one method at least which endowed colleges and universities, provided they have the courage, may bring about partial compensation for the shrinkage of their endowments by reason of rising prices. The address, which was delivered informally before a small group of Professor Davenport's colleagues on the occasion of a dinner in his honor, deserves a much wider hearing than it has yet obtained. An excellent digest of it, prepared by Professor Davenport himself, was printed in a recent number of the Cornell Alumni News and it is through the courtesy of that publication that we are able to present it to our readers. Editor's Note.

A rise in general prices is essentially a shrinking of university endowments. The rise which has already taken place during the past two years, together with an almost certain further movement in the same direction, is the most severe blow so far received by endowed education. A half billion of free reserves created by the new reserve banking law and 800,000,000 of new gold imported from Europe have furnished the basis for an enormous credit inflation. The marketing of several billions of corporate securities and of war bonds by the warring nations has furnished the incentive and the occasion for this credit inflation. The result has been an increased circulating medium of a sort to explain a rise in general prices of approximately forty per cent.

But the rise which has occurred may not be more than a beginning. While the gold holdings of the country increased by ap

proximately forty-three per cent over two years ago, and clearings by forty-two per cent, it is easily intelligible that the cost of living should have risen in something like the same proportion. The dollar grows cheap with increasing supplies of circulating media. But the utmost possible employment of this $1,300,000,000 of new reserves would permit an increase of loans and derivative bank deposits of upwards of twenty-four billion dollars, as against a total of circulating media before the war of approximately eleven billion dollars— a sufficient basis for an all-round rise of prices of over 200 per cent. There is, then, no prospect that the cessation of the war will bring about an appreciable and permanent lowering of prices, unless and until the European nations move to re-establish gold redemption through the retirement of their inflated credit and paper money circulations—a remote contingency and probably an unwise policy. The prospect, therefore, is for a still further and greater reduction in university resources.

What, then, can be done? The universities must now do what they ought long since to have done, irrespective of any compelling emergency. They must decline further to lavish their resources on students, who, by lack of ability or industry or interest, are not qualified for the educational process. These endowments are a sacred trust scrupulously to be protected from waste by students who are not interested in the intellectual life, who neglect to take seriously the offered opportunities, who treat their residence at the university as merely an opportunity of boarding for several years away from home. Educational investments should be restricted to "pay dirt." Standards both of interest and of accomplishment should be raised to the end of making the university a place of severe and strenuous intellectual effort-no one permitted to enjoy the privileges of the university except those who are glad-not merely willing but glad-to meet the conditions imposed. The attempt to educate those who do not care for education is as irrational as it is hopeless. The limited funds that can be made available for affording education at some one's else expense should be zealously guarded from waste by those who cannot or will not profit by them-saved for the exclusive use of those who worthily and profitably use them. Even were the funds adequate for anything else, they should be employed for nothing else. The minimum requirement should be the accomplishment of average ability working at a high degree of industry, rather than that of average ability with merely average industry-however low that average of indus

try may be. With the shrinking financial resources, it must be either the worthy or the unworthy student who must go, unless all are to suffer the worthy to receive less good, the unworthy, increased harm. The facilities, which are always inadequate and are now becoming increasingly and menacingly meagre, must no longer be dissipated. It is easy to denounce as rascal and grafter the man that plunders the public treasury, but it is something still worse to waste not merely the funds but the boys and girls. If ever the endowments for education were not narrowly scant, if ever there were no pressing needs unmet, if ever the support could be generous enough to make rigid economy and elevated standards unwise—that time is not now. We have no choice but to restrict the numbers among whom the university shall apportion its gifts of privilege and of opportunity-to make our choice between those who shall be eliminated and those who shall remain.

In actual fact, even though the worthy student did not thereby suffer, it must be a mistaken philanthropy that tolerates the incapable or the uninterested student. Not caring for what the university can offer him, the poor student gets rather harm than good from his attendance, learns to be skillful in getting along without doing, acquires the art of side-stepping and of going around, achieves weakness and idleness and inefficiency instead of power. His own welfare demands, therefore, that he find somewhere a thing that he may do with a will. On any other terms the university process is one of wasting his own time, together with the money from his home, the resources of the university, and the strength and vitality and scholarship of the institution. And worse than this: he is wasting the time and the opportunity of the serious student-lowering the quality of the work in severity and subject matter, in training quality and in interest. The bright man is discouraged at the barren routine of courses adapted to students who have neither the capacity nor the disposition to learn. Interest flags in the absence of serious effort. The fundamental educational truth is not that one must be interested in order to study, but rather that one must study in order to be interested. Standards which practically all students can meet mean waning interest for all students. With the subject matter of a course lowered to the level of easy acquirement and with the methods of teaching adapted to those who have not the will to learn, all educational values vanish. Work that any one can do is work that is not worth the doing of anyone. That some fail-that all fail who have not worked with