COMMENT

One is not old so long as one can go upstairs two steps at a time, is a saying attributed to Dr. Eliot. It is difficult to believe that he ever went upstairs at such an intemperate pace even in youth.. It is remembered by one who knew him many years ago that even then his intellectual attitude was suggested by the question. "What is the next step?" but took it always deliberately, serenely, fearlessly. With all his remarkable achievement, he did not take two steps at a time. Yet, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said of him when he was a young President of Harvard, he "turned the place over like a flapjack." It is not surprising that Theodore Roosevelt, born when Dr. Eliot was an Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Mathematics at Harvard and dying when his college President was still in the vigor of his age, should have said of him: "He is the only man in the world I envy."

It is not Dr. Eliot's mere living on that brings congratulations from all over this land and form other lands as he takes the first step in his nineties. He faces the nineties with all the zest of mind with which he fronted the tasks of his forties and fifties and sixties. A few years ago he gave, in a summary of his educational experience and advice, what some one called his "last will and testament," but it was only a few days ago that he added a codiell to meet the changes in outward conditions and to mark the progress which his own mind has made. And those who are aware with what keenness he confronts new political, social and moral problems and plans new battles know that this is not his last word. That he has lived to give such advice as his own habits permit him to offer at 89 to others should help to lengthen the lives of those who come after him and make life happier while they are living longer. May he be able to add not only to his years, but also to the debt under which his serene but adventurous spirit has placed his own country and the world. He declined an Ambassadorship to Great Britain, but he has been for years an unofficial American Ambassador at-Large. New York Times.