It appears to be the aim of President Conant to make Harvard a real "national university," as Oxford may be called in England. This will be an additional recommendation for Boston and Cambridge--for Harvard is now quite as much a Boston institution as it is a Cambridge institution. But to Bostonians it seems, a queer idea that during the experimental period of the new fellowships all the holders must come from the States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota. Why should New England be shut out, even for a time, from this opportunity? Or Massachusetts at the least? And why Minnesota rather than Iowa? Iowa is much more the child of Massachusetts than is Minnesota. Iowa is also much less foreign in population than is Minnesota or Wisconsin. Evidently these States are chosen to provide this scholarly elite because they constitute a section which is now very much to the front in the furnishing of native American scholars and writers. The Middle West! It is the newer New England. But no State is more "Middle West" than Iowa. It is typical. Governor and Senator Cummings used to tell us that Iowa is characterized by the highest level of general welfare of all the States of the Union. No great city there, no congestion of population; universal high living conditions, total absence of poverty, high level of educational opportunity for every child, maximum conditions of cultivation of the soil, well-to-do people everywhere. Slums or degradation nowhere. The ideal place from which to derive bright boys and girls. Whatever State is left out of Dr. Conant's scheme, one would say that it would not be Iowa.

But for some reason, Iowa seems to have been left by general national opinion in a secondary position intellectually as compared with Wisconsin. Is that just one more American Intellectual injustice, or has this matter of foreign population, supposed to work in favor of Iowa, been counted as against it? Wisconsin is much more German, much more Scandinavian, than Iowa--and that seems to confess the German stock stronger than the Yankee. And now Minnesota, with its strong Scandinavian content. That State has already a Norwegian college--an American center of a purely Norwegian culture. No doubt we shall have some Norwegian "fellows" at Harvard, in the new sense of the word as we already have them in the American. Well, nobody will object to them. We shall extend to them the right hand of fellowship, in every sense of the word.

When an American college student or schoolboy speaks of "the fellows," meaning thereby his companions, the other boys, he uses the word in an older sense than the Oxford man does when he speaks of the English "fellows." A "fellow" was a companion, a comrade, a mate, before he was a holder of a share in a college, an honorary scholar. In Bible times, the significance of the word had passed, in its general use, into the sense of a partner, or sharer, as in "Why smitest thou thy fellow?" and "a fellow also with Jesus," but it also has the sense of a trivial or disreputable person, as in "this mad fellow," or "this is a postilent fellow." In later English literature, this last sense became quite prevalent, as in Pope's line. "Worth makes the man, and want of it the fellow." But the ancient sense remains common in this country in the sense of the companion or mate--though the "good fellow" is happily the commonest fellow of all. Whether the new fellows at Harvard will ever be commonly so called we do not know. But they are a welcome institute: and these Middle Westerners are greeted as good fellows even before they have arrived. The Nomad in The Boston Transcript.