It is becoming quite evident that if the Harvard faculty is to retain longer any title to the description of it given by a well-known man of letters, as "the best body of teachers in the United States," some decisive measures must be taken to insure the continued excellency of its teaching. With so many of its most efficient members absent from duty next year, with the present vacancies that exist in several most important positions still unfilled, and the probability of one or more vacancies to come, and finally with a teaching force diminished and otherwise restricted on account of lack of funds, it would seem as though any prospect of a betterment of its present facilities must be very remote indeed.

The college cannot afford in any way to endanger the efficiency of the instruction of the freshman year; and yet it has been rumored that it has been deemed best to make retrenchment in that direction. Now while Oxford has just stated afresh her doctrine that her professorships are established primarily for purposes of teaching and not for purposes of research, it would seem to be poor policy for Harvard to take measures for economy in her teaching force in preference to economizing in her expenditures in the cause of original research first. A truly liberal policy would call for attention first and foremost to the main objects for which the university was established, as long as those objects are recognized in the least by her policy, namely, collegiate instruction, and only secondarily to the higher university departments of instruction and learned investigation.