SUMMER WAR SERVICE

It is not too early for undergraduates to consider what service they can give toward the prosecution of the war during the long vacation. No able-bodied man need be idle this summer in face of the demand for hundreds of thousands of workers from farms, railroads and shipyards. There is no reservoir of skilled labor to fill the needs of these trades. Unskilled men must be trained and of these the college man is best fitted on account of his education to acquire quickly the necessary ability. But a partly finished college education is no "Open Sesame" to a position of command. College men who can be employed but a few months must face the dirty, disagreeable tasks of production along with their less favored brothers. Incidentally, there is no better clarifier of the college man's theories about capital and labor than a few months' hard work at the bottom of the industrial ladder.

Other colleges in New England are making a survey of the industrial capabilities of their students and canvassing the needs of employers engaged in war work with a view to placing their men in the vacation war service for which they are individually fitted. Such a survey should be made at Harvard. There are many men here willing and able to give valuable service whose lack of acquaintance and connection with business concerns will prevent them rendering it. Such men, without an organized survey of capabilities and needs, are likely to drift into comparatively unimportant summer employment for which they may not be especially fitted. To be sure, this undertaking would entail considerable expansion of the College Employment Bureau or the creation of a new organization. But the labor or two thousand men for four months is net an insignificant item in the present crisis. Its effective distribution is worth all the effort it would cost.