TWICE BLESSED

To the ordinary mind it seems that Philanthropy delights in scattering its pearls with much the same blindfold abandon that marks the scale-handling of the sister virtue Justice. One, and almost the only, great exception continues to be the Rockefeller Foundation, which, through its many ramifications, encourages the most varied forms of culture without rousing any lay opposition to its work as unnecessary or futile. The endowment granted to the Fogg Art Museum a few weeks ago may well become a classic example of sensible generosity; and the awards of the General Education Board for literary research of importance, while not announced with the explosive force that accompanied the earlier huge gift, are along similar lines of a practical value that only the most hardened Philistine would deny.

For the type of publication made possible by these awards is just as vital to Harvard, the college of Liberal Arts, as the aeronautical experiments carried on further down the river by means of the Guggenheim Foundation. Indeed, the resemblance is far deeper than this mere similarity of proportion, since the modern study of the humanities is really in the scientific manner. The archaeologist, the philologist, the historian must be quite as definitely and concretely trained in his own work as the student of chemical research is in his, and, what is more important, must be nearly as well equipped financially. The possibilities of the cloister as the best milieu for academic life were exhausted some centuries ago; the modern man of letters must be actruly modern man, and if for no other reason than that of keeping in communication with the progress of men similarly engaged on the other side of the globe, he cannot live in monastic seclusion. As hostile to the American mind, trained in Hoover individualism, as clerical support is a public system that might be scented with State Socialism. Beside private philanthropy, there is no other means in this country for the man born with the ivory tower mind but without the ivory tower; and a sane method of guiding such philanthropy is extremely important.