The plan of an Intercollegiate Debating Union now bids fair to be successful, and if proper mangement is given to the movement, we see no reason why it should not reach a thoroughly firm basis. It meets a need of the times, and the ready cooperation which has been given by other universities evidences how general is this need. University men are becoming conscious of a certain lack of proportion in the attention given to their different pursuits and are seeking, in various ways, to obtain the needed balance.

We believe firmly that nearly every thoughtful student here recognizes that there ought to be something of a change in the comparative amount of attention given to the development of the body and the development of the mind. The only legitimate object of the time and money spent at the university is to fit students better to take their part in the activities of the world. Now universities, being separated to a great extent from the world, are always in danger of not accurately adapting students for activity. In old days, the university product was too often an overloaded and pedantic mind fed by a sickly body. The reaction came: the public declared that this was all wrong, that without health, knowledge was of little account. The needs of the body were made prominent, the student turned athlete, and now the university product is too often a heavy and powerful body feeding a diminutive mind.

The pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. Neither athletics nor scholarship are wholly good or wholly bad. They are good when they occupy just that amount of attention needed for rounded development, and bad when they occupy either more or less.

We hold it to be very deplorable that there is such misunderstanding and even latent antagonism, between men who uphold the claims of the body and those who uphold the claims of the mind. There is no call for it: both lay emphasis on a different means, but both really have the same end in view, and would find, if they threw away their hostile feelings, that the different means were not incompatible, but that all are needed. So long as men insist on their own views and present inclinations, the University will tend to go from one extreme to the other. There is a great need for a willingness on the part of all kinds of men to see the truth in other men's positions as well as their own. Thus only will the best university be formed.