The following extract from President Eliot's article on the elective system is of immediate and significant interest to every Harvard man. The public will doubtless receive it as an official outlining of the future policy of this university; indeed it is substantially a statement of her present policy; and if Harvard were in need of any justification of her present system, in the discussion on this subject now going on in the public press, this might serve for that purpose. President Eliot says :

"It is plain that by the steady expansion and improvement of the elective system, the American college is to be gradually converted into a university of a new kind; not an English university, because it will not subordinate teaching to examining, or enforce any regulations by means of bars, gates and fines; and not a German university, because the elective system does not mean liberty to do nothing, and no American university has absolved itself, as the German university has done, from all responsibility for the moral training and conduct of students; but a university of native growth, which will secure to its teachers an inspiring liberty and an unlimited scope in teaching, offer its students free choice among studies of the utmost variety, maintain a discipline adequate to the support of good manners and good morals, but determined by the quality of the best students rather than of the worst, admit to its instruction all persons competent to receive it, while jealously guarding its degrees, and promote among all its members a productive activity in literature and in scientific research."