HARVARD AND FOREIGN TRADE

Harvard men are went to sit back in their chairs and believe that their University is known all over the world, and that the nationalism and internationalism it represents are unassailable. These assumptions are not as correct as such people believe.

Only the European and the most advanced of the Eastern countries know of the predominant place that Harvard occupies. In South America Pennsylvania, by means of the explorations carried on there by the professors of that university, is the best-known of North American educational institutions. In the Far East Yale has more men connected with the foreign trade of the United States than Harvard, while Cornell with a demand for its engineers which never ceases is represented by a number of graduates greater than those of Harvard and Yale combined. As the number of college men permanently or temporarily resident in foreign countries nearly represents the ratio in which their respective institutions are popularly known, one can readily see that Harvard no longer has an international margin due to numbers alone. There are millions of people who have never heard of Harvard. It is to these that the name of the University must be introduced, if the latter is to maintain her lead, for did not Pennsylvania show from her registration books that she draws more students from a greater variety of countries than we?

What is the remedy? Instead of spending a year or two in continental countries acquiring culture men should go abroad and spend the same period of time engaged in the foreign trade of the United States, for the foreign trade of this country is as certain to develop after the end of the present war as the present war is to end.

Not only will the trader gain the broad intellectual outlook that only life abroad can give, but he will acquire a knowledge which may some day culminate in the founding of a successful domestic industry. He will be able to given the nation an international point of view, the lack of which has recently given us so much difficulty, he will be able to make his mind go across the seas and consider the policies of those whom he has actually seen and whom he knows, and he will give cause for the further growth of Harvard's democratic ideals among the already rapidly growing family abroad.