The Harvard CRIMSON has lately raised the question of proper provision for the shifting population of students among American universities. By shifting population we mean those students who owe no true allegiance to any college but derive their four years education piecemeal from Siwash to Missouri. Of late years statistics show an increase in these intellectual wanderers. The question arises whether this type of education is thoroughly beneficial either to the universities visited or to the peripatetics themselves. We would answer with a very definite negative.

In the first place a university has the right to demand from its students some reciprocal benefit. It is indeed more blessed to give than to receive, but, in the case in point, continued giving and no adequate return impoverishes the intangible fund of character and tradition that is the mainstay of a successful university. For such itinerant students take all the intellectual benefits they can assimilate and return nothing in the form of loyalty and enduring "carry on."

The student himself gains without doubt a varied and valuable education--but an education that is founded upon books alone. And a high stack of books with no supporting substance will topple and lie inert in heaped confusion. For the application of book facts to life is the true value of an education. Such value is only found in four years of college life among the friends, traditions and ideals of a single institution.

These remarks do not apply in any sense to men who have transferred not only their intellects but also their loyalty to Yale. There are a number of such men in college at present who are doing much for the University. Such men we want, for they bring to the campus an outside viewpoint, and will leave in the University history periods of which we may be proud as they. The argument, however, stands. Since the universities derive no benefit from such educational peregrinations and the students themselves lose all the true significance of college life, the practice should be relegated to the scrap heap of discarded educational experiments. Yale News.