It is not surprising that in a prolonged depression like the present there should be a revival of talk concerning the financial burden imposed upon the city of Cambridge by the presence of educational institutions with large amounts of tax-exempt property. The proposal that Harvard and M.I.T professors should contribute one-tenth of their salaries towards the cost of city government in lion of taxes upon the property of those institutions was perhaps suggested by the "voluntary" contributions already collected from Cambridge public school-teachers and other city employees. Such a proposal, however, in turn evokes other suggestions. One is that the whole problem of the distribution of expenditure and revenues within the metropolitan district needs reconsideration.

Cambridge, like Boston, is merely one municipality among the many which compose the metropolitan district. This district, as defined by the U.S. Census authorities, comprises an area of 1,022 square miles, and contained in 1930 a total population of 2,300,000 persons. The city of Boston occupied less than 44 square miles and had a population of 781,000. Cambridge with a much smaller area, numbered 113,000 inhabitants. The population of the district as a whole grow during the preceding decade at the rate of 14.9 per cent., but that of Cambridge grew no more than 3.6 per cent., while that of the rest of the metropolitan district outside Boston grew at a rate of 21 per cent. It is evident that Cambridge labors under some special disabilities. The real problem for the people of Cambridge is not that of altering the settled policy of the Commonwealth to encourage education by tax-exemptions of educational property devoted to public use, but rather that of ascertaining what is the proper relationship under the conditions of the modern world between their city and the rest of the metropolitan district. Perhaps what is now needed is a wider sense of community than that appropriate for the simpler age when the existing municipal divisions were originally laid out. --Harvard Alumni Bulletin.