The lukewarmness, not to say hostility, of the educational forces of the country toward the educational provisions in the proposed Department of Public Welfare is readily understandable. School men know from experience what happens to education when it is made a subordinate bureau in a miscellaneous department. They have witnessed the comparative helplessness of the present Bureau of Education, even when directed by capable professional leadership and under such a Secretary of the Interior as Franklin K. Lane. General Sawyer is reported to have said: "We will get the best man in the country" to head the Education Division of the new Welfare Department. He should know that during his term of office Secretary Lane offered the post of Assistant Secretary of the Interior, in charge of education, to leading educators, but one after another they all declined it.

There is one very real difference between the proposal for a separate Department of Education at Washington and the proposal for a Department of Welfare. The first is a perfectly definite plan which has grown out of a long history of increasing Federal activity in educatioin; the second has no such history behind it. The educational measure is not the discovery of any one individual, but a plan gradually matured after a century of experience. Literally millions of citizens, through such organizations as the chambers of commerce, the American Federation of Labor, and the National League of Women Voters, have asked that a Federal Department of Education be created and a seat given to a Secretary of Education in the Cabinet.

The substantial character of the argument for the Department of Education is indicated by the fact that President Harding uses this argument almost solely in his advocacy on the Department of Welfare. It is the programme of national activity in education worked out in the Sterling-Towner bill that gives any basis at all for the creation of a new department. Then why not accept this programe and incorporate it with the welfare proposal into a combined Department of Education and Welfare? This is not ideal, but at least it offers a common-sense way of satisfying the demand for a closer organization of the welfare activities of the Government and at the same time takes a step forward in national leadership and encouragement of education. Congressional leaders interested in education are agreed upon such a compromise; General Sawyer has said he would accept it, and it should not prove difficult to convince the President that if there must be one department, with welfare included, it should at least have education as its primary concern. New York Evening Post.