No recent development in higher education has been so characteristic of modern America as the college "drive" for endowment. It began as a means of relieving the hard necessities of professors. Presently a new need developed. In consequence of the wider diffusion of prosperity the number of students doubled and redoubled; there was insistent need of more professors, more material equipment. Institutions already struggling desperately to maintain themselves were in danger of being submerged. One after another they appealed to their alumni, to love's of learning in general. A summary of sixty-eight such drives shows total receipts of $149,391,142 no inconsiderable sum. Harvard leads the list with $13,931,780. Princeton is second with $9,902,904 and is closely followed by Northwestern, Hampton-Tuskegee and the University of Chicago. The average of the sixty-eight drives is $2,196,928. This sum is less impressive, but the shock comes with the analysis of separate contributions, which is thus summed up. "Alumni do not play as important a giving part as sometimes believed."

The survey, which comes from a firm of professional drive managers, concludes thus: "We are impressed pretty, strongly with the fact that these charts show twice as many alumni givers as public givers but an average public gift 75 per cent, higher than the average alumni gift." Who are these public givers who play so "important a giving part"? Deponent sayeth not. Yet they can only be successful men who regret their own lack of an alma mater elder members of that new group of Americans who are so largely the cause of the need of more endowment. If confirmation of this were lacking, it would be supplied by the fact that "the appeal for stadia" so potent with the loyal graduate, has net struck as does as the appeals for educational endowments and buildings.

In no other nation is appreciation of learning so widespread either in the ambition to partake of it or in the generous will to provide it for others. It was doubtless in the light of this truth that New York University, with a present endowment of only $3,720,000, of late launched a drive for $73,000,000 over five times the sum achieved by Harvard. Yet it is impossible to ignore the comparatively unimpressive showing made by college graduates, which is quite of a piece with the declining number of marriages and of children. Not so much the will as the means is lacking. If Harvard, with all of its inherited wealth, were limited to sons of its graduates, it would have virtually no students in six generations. New York Times.