Lately in the Advocate Mr. C. H. Barrows declares that if Harvard is to lead among our colleges, her graduates must be leaders among men, must be reformers. "The call," he says, "is for those of high culture to be pronounced, generous, and self-sacrificing." Few can doubt his words; for Harvard's reputation is the reputation of her alumni. They must be worth something in the world to make her worth anything. Yet that Harvard may send out such men, it is needful that she herself stand as an example of what is the best; she must be for us an ideal. In part, to be sure, she does fulfill this calling; but in part she fails. As the oldest college of our country, more sentiment and tradition has gathered around her name, than around any other. She has come down to us as a heroine out of the past. For two centuries and a half she has stood for something of the greatest worth; and we believe that in time to come she will be the same.

Yet if she is to give us the highest ideals of living, is to teach us to see what is right, and to stick to it unflinchingly, she must care more for the right than for money and popularity. It would be better for her to make men out of a few, than to give a parchment degree to thousands. Moreover, we must hear less of expediency and inexpediency. We must not be told that Harvard is afraid to take the stand for perfect religious freedom, because she fears unpopularity among certain classes. A church and a university can always afford to strive for the highest.

In one of his essays Matthew Arnold writes: "Who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection? Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so romantic! Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!" To-day such words are only partly true of Harvard, though less true of any other college in our land. Yet if we are to have that feeling of love and reverence for her, which the Englishman has for Oxford, she must become, in some sense, a "Queen of Romance" to wage war against the sordidness around; she must become a "home of lost causes, unpopular names, and impossible loyalties."