POLITICAL SCIENCE.

EDITORS DAILY CRIMSON. - There appeared in the Nation for February 4, a very suggestive letter by Mr. F. A. Carpenter, '85. The subject was a comparison of the so-called schools of political science in this country with the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques at Paris. He advocated the establishment of a school at Washington, similar to the Ecole Libre; and he showed why the existing schools in this country could not take the place of the proposed one. "Such a school" he says, "ought to be situated at the national capital, where is the center of administration for all the higher grades of service, in order that the bulk of its faculty could be drawn from those actually engaged in the public administration; and its courses ought to be arranged with the greatest possible attention to definiteness of aim, and to practicalness of method, in order to be saved from any danger of doctrinairism."

Our present schools of political science are utterly inadequate to fill the place of the one proposed. Of the three, that at Columbia is probably the best. If we compare it with the Ecole Libre we not only find it less thorough in the subjects taught, but we also find that there are many important topics which it does not touch, for example, there is no instruction as to the duties of the consular service. Such instruction could best be given by one who had been in this service, and this person could most easily be found at Washington. There is another very important omission from the Columbia school curriculum - Comparative Commercial Law and Commercial Treaties.

There is, moreover, one great advantage to be gained by the establishment of a good school of political science at Washington, which Mr. Carpenter has not mentioned, that is the better training of our very highest officials. For from the time that Jackson laid down the principles of international law during the Seminole War, until the time that Blaine in his South American policy developed a new and startling theory of diplomacy, our Presidents and Secretaries of State have been guilty of the most egregious blunders in their dealings with other countries.

A good school would copy very fully, in at least one respect, its Parisian model; it would instruct its pupils well in the history of the diplomacy and international law, of which subject our leading statesmen are lamentably ignorant.

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