TWO VOICES ARE THERE

Although Anglo-American relations have in the past suffered no more serious strain than the familiar differences that trouble the best of navy experts, excusable in the absence of a God-given standard for the value of a dreadnaught in terms of destroyers, such an innocent ignorance cannot be ascribed to the English critic of America. The thoughts of the educated Englishman of 1853 and of 1928 on the Harvard of each year have a certain piquance of their own, as they spring from the minds of Emerich Edward Dalberg, Baron Acton, who visited the University in the year of the great New York Exhibition, and John A. Benn, young Englishman who studied a year at Princeton before writing his study of the American college curriculum, "Columbus Undergraduate".

"Is English literature better served in any British university than it is at Harvard?" This is the question that Mr. Benn asks and himself answers, in the negative. Although to a handful of Stevensons and a score of Bertrand Russells Americans may seem no more than parts of an unnatural existence that works like a Ford factory, and although the majority of previous visitors have agreed that the American college is guilty of complicity in this great stifling plot, Mr. Benn denies that the training at Harvard either hammers out a conventional type or ignores the necessities of existence in a common sense world.

Aside from the happy freshness of such a belief, there is savor in comparison of Mr. Benn's convictions with those of Baron Acton, who, according to the current Commonweal, seventy-five years ago wrote in his diary of the Harvard curriculum:

"Nothing is studied for its own sake, but as it will be useful in making a practical man: thus rhetoric is cultivated, as each may be called upon to speak in the course of his life. ...Mathematics and sciences are pursued because they correspond to the utilitarian character of the country. ...The studies are as languid as in England, and the discipline as loose as in Germany.

"Learning may become desirable some time or other; I should not wonder if this were to happen out of vanity; more men may have leisure after a time, and will be able to devote themselves to occupations which are their own reward."

The futility of answering a diarist so long gathered to his fathers as Baron Dalberg makes it possible for Harvard to rest its case upon the ideas of Mr. Benn, the youngest seizer of the forch that the Baron once wielded. It is sufficient to say that the predictions of the Baron have been fulfilled, but in most curious fashion. It has probably happened, as the Baron suggested it might, out of a kind of vanity. Whatever the impetus, it is a fact that learning is desirable at Harvard, and yet that curiously enough, fewer men have leisure than ever before. Still the utilitarian character of the country remains, but still, as Mr. Benn says, its taint has not infected the Harvard curriculum.

The admirable coincidence of publication of the twin comments on Harvard sheds peculiar illumination on the nature of much criticism of America and her educational methods. The competence of the Englishman to judge a national problem of education that has neither parallel nor similarity throughout the world, is seriously to be questioned. It is fortuitously true in the present instance that an English student who spent a year at Princeton has signified faith in an achieved progress that seventy-five years before could only be hoped for by another Englishman who was, to say the least, conservative in his hopes.

Few blights more terrible could fall upon the Symphony Halls of the seaboard cities than to deny admittance to the English lecturer, or to thin the great richness of his subject matter by elimination of the educational question. But his contemplative eye should early learn the difference of the American problem, a problem that is at once as great and young and changing as the Manhattan skyscrapers that first greet him.