In arranging for the lectures by Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson and ex-President Andrew D. White of Cornell, the Harvard Union shows commendable activity. Addresses by such successful speakers and prominent men as Col. Higginson and Dr. White will not only be of great interest and value to a student audience, but will help to strengthen and make more lasting the already wide-spread and genuine interest in public speaking at Harvard.

The interest in debating has rapidly grown strong within the last two or three years, although it has always been a calm steady reasoning interest rather than a fiery enthusiasm, firing up one day and dying away the next. It has been based on the growing conviction that the ability to speak well in public is not only desirable but necessary for the proper and complete equipment of an educated man. Anything that will deepen this conviction, and so increase the interest in debating and public speaking, is to be welcomed; not only because it will be an aid to success in the intercollegiate debates, but because it will help to broaden the field and increase the good results of Harvard's system of instruction in public speaking, in which the intercollegiate debates are but attendant events of minor importance, not the ends in themselves of that training.