One manner of proving the merits of a university has for some time been to cite the fame of its graduates. There are a hundred ways in which this fame is captured, and with no small amount of justice, reflected to the further glory of the institution which nurtured its early sprouts and buddings. The shadows of a president, a handful of scholars and a score of captains of industry suffice to keep almost any university in the benignant and dignified seclusion of accepted reputation.

Harvard has many such towering figures in her past. Among the blackrobed figures that filed out of Appleton Chapel yesterday afternoon, there are propably men who will endow Harvard with the indirect approbation of their fellows. But in any Quinquennial Catalogue of Harvard graduates there are to be found names which are not inscribed on walls and gates, names which are suffixed by no honorary degrees, yet names which embody much of the best that Harvard stands for. And he who is optimistic about the future of Harvard College, he who believes it to be more today than an outmoded survival of Puritan New England need wish for no better argument than the certainty that in each graduating class today there are more men whose undoubted fame in after life will bring little conventional credit to the University.

Such men are those Harvard graduates who have returned to China to lead a great national movement against the policies of American and foreign financiers and concessionaires. With them should be classed such a modern Marco Polo as Fan Noli '12 that strange Bishop, General, ex-Premier, soldier of fortune and scholar of Albania. Yesterday's Associated Press dispatches carry the news that he has originated and signed a Bolshevist manifesto, which may embroil the Balkans in one of their periodic convulsions. But what is seldom mentioned in such dispatches is the fact that he has for more than a decadated the struggle of a harassed and impoverished country for peace and freedom, that he has completed the first translation of the New Testament into Albanian, and that he is one of those few who have striven to carry the fruits of a new continent to the old Mediterranean. No less an infamous graduate of Harvard is John Silas Reed '10. He has been officially read out of membership in his class at Harvard, but under the walls of the Kremlin in Moscow, beside the gray stone tombs of Lenin and the leaders of the 1917 Revolution, there is a stone a little higher than any but Lenin's, which records the part played by this man in a great struggle.

These men will have no tangible immortality in Harvard's traditions. Their names will no more be inscribed on records of Harvard's fame than will the names of those three dead Harvard graduates who gave their lives to the German cause in the Great War. Sometimes, as in this case, with the proposed building of a new memorial chapel to the Harvard dead, the question becomes embarrassing. But far oftener, the names of these infamous graduates are suffered to remain in the dust of newspaper morgues, known to few and acclaimed by none, while their spirit moves on, unchecked, endowed with succeeding generations of their unwitting heirs.