THE UNIVERSITIES IN WAR TIME*

RALPH BARTON PERRY

If you want fully to appreciate the blessings of life in Berkeley, I advise you to lead up to it-to prepare for it as I did. We are always making weather records of some kind in New England. This winter we had the coldest December officially recorded, with five successive days in which the thermometer was well below zero. It rained some time early in December, that rain froze solidly on the sidewalks, and we slid and shuffled and floundered about on that same ice for about four weeks. I do not know that it has melted even yet. If you were fortunate enough not to break your leg, or get frost-bitten, at any rate you ached from lying flattened under heavy layers of wool and cotton at night, and from carrying about all the clothes you owned on your back by day. This year, of course, the coal gave out and the money you would have gratefully surrendered to the coal dealer for warmth you found yourself compelled to hand over to the plumber for repairing frozen water pipes and saving you from flood. Every day you had to submit twice to the keenest torture, when you got out of your warm bed into a cold room, and when you got out of your warm clothes into a cold bed. You found yourself debating whether it wouldn't be better either to stay in bed all day or to sit up all night.

* An address given at the University Meeting in the Harmon Gymnasium on February 1, 1918.

In view of all this it is difficult to understand that selfsatisfied Boston woman whom St. Peter admitted at the gates of heaven. He asked her, you will remember, how she had been spending her life and she replied that she had lived in the Back Bay, that she had attended concerts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Opera Company, that she had gone to courses of Lowell Lectures and to the Cambridge Conferences, that she had visited the museum of Fine Arts, that she had read the Evening Transcript, that she had belonged to the Browning Club and had spent her spare moments at the Public Library; whereupon St. Peter is said to have replied, "Well, of course you can come in, but you won't be satisfied."

He might so easily have taken a different tone and said, "You poor thing! Come in and get warm."

Now to get an appetite for Berkeley, start with a month of New England weather-and then meet a blizzard somewhere between Buffalo and Chicago, have your train freeze up, get out at Toledo and wallow in snowdrifts looking for a hotel, catch a bad cold, miss your connection in Chicago, and then after a last Arctic touch in the crest of the Sierras, plunge down into the heart of sunny California! You will not wonder that I am not yet able wholly to sympathize with those pampered natives who are complaining of the sun, or who allude to the subtly irritating effect of the north wind or who call this a cold snap. I am still in that stage in which the climate is too good to be true. I've seen pictures of such a climate, made by Maxfield Parrish and others, but I had always supposed they were imaginary. And even now I am constantly expecting to wake up-to wake up to ordinary, everyday, human weather!

All this would seem to suggest that if one is fortunate enough to find any respectable and life-sustaining activity in such a place, one requires no further justification. But alas! we are living in a time in which one does need an excuse for being comfortable. Indeed, I do not believe that any imaginative and high-spirited person can get much

satisfaction out of mere comfort in these days. There are great events stirring, the greatest that you and I are to see in our lifetime. A new epoch is in the making—and it is inglorious not to be there, as near the front, as directly taking part, as possible. The luckiest, most enviable and most admirable man of all just now is the fighting man, who is dealing the blows. But, as you have heard a thousand times, this extraordinary war is not a war of armies and fleets, but a war of nations. You cannot line the whole of a nation up in the front trenches. It would be like trying to make a fighting man out of his bare fists. The fighting man needs a stomach, a heart, a pair of lungs, and a brain, behind the fist. So a nation at war needs its vast and intricate organization of resources in order that the fighting line may be perpetually recruited, effectively supplied and intelligently directed.

Almost every activity and institution has its part to play-and among the foremost the educational institutions. So I thought it might be worth while to remind you of what education means in war time-of some of the ways in which it can contribute to success in war. It may help you, as it helps me, to be a bit more reconciled to the relatively inglorious part that for the present some of us are compelled to take. And it may help us to put more heart and conviction into our tame academic pursuits. The universities may, I believe, be depended upon to contribute largely to the morale, efficiency and wisdom, of our conduct in war.

First, morale. Last fall in Cambridge I witnessed a football game in the Harvard Stadium between a team representing the naval reserve at the Boston Navy Yard and a team representing Camp Devens, the National Army Cantonment at Ayer, Massachusetts. It looked very much like an old time, peace-time, intercollegiate football game. The Navy had one side of the field and the Army the other. The girls were on hand in force. There was organized cheering and there was organized singing, with the same leaders gesticulating and prancing up and down in front.

There was the same sportsmanship and eager rivalry, the same generous and youthful enthusiasm, the same heroworship that has always been characteristic of American football. So far everything was normal and as usual.

But then it suddenly dawned upon me that these opposing teams contained men from nearly every prominent eastern college, and that these cheering and singing crowds, led by college men, were not only from many colleges, but from every calling and station in life. They were united by an absolutely new bond, the bond of the uniform and the service. The same leadership, enthusiasm, sportsmanship and loyalty that were formerly merely features of play, were here going into the sweetening and the strengthening of our national life. Ever since I ceased myself to be an undergraduate I have felt that undergraduates were a rather young and frivolous group of persons, living in a nursery and occupied with playthings. And as you know, there is an opinion out in the world among the vulgar, that the "rah! rah! boys" are not to be taken very seriously. But now I can see how what we call "college life" may well become one of the saving forces of the nation. It isn't merely that in college, men learn to lead and to be led and to give themselves up to generous loyalties and enthusiasms; though that is much. It isn't merely that in college, men learn a code of fair play and squareness and general, all around decency, though that is much. But in college men learn that differences of origin, of station, of ability, of race, of aptitude, and of prospects need not prevent participation in a common life, in which all serve a common cause together, and help one another in a brotherly spirit. Now if anything will help us to win the war, it is that. And if anything will help us after the war, to avoid a bitter and prolonged class struggle, it is that. Fraternity, a sense of mutual dependence, and an ability to coöperate in an open, manly, courteous way with persons wholly different from one's self-that, I think, is the great moral need of our society, which alone can give us in place of the sus

picion and distrust that so poison our national life, that confidence and tacit pledge of friendship that shall enable us to find our way together.

It scarcely needs to be said that a modern war is a war of brains, and that for efficient warfare a nation must be educated, especially in science and in the trades. I doubt, however, if many of you realize how far this is true. The composition of a modern army largely duplicates that of civilian industrial life. There are the engineers, with their forestry, quarry, highway and mining companies, and their units for railway construction, operation and repair; the quartermaster's corps with its bakery companies, supply companies and remount depots; the signal corps with its wiremen and telegraphers, and all the skilled mechanics required in the aviation section to keep in repair and operation thousands of aeroplanes of different types, each carrying various and delicate instruments; the great ordnance shops with thousands of workers in iron and steel; the medical corps with nurses and laboratory attendants; and all the varieties of modern artillery requiring the care and handling of experts. It is estimated that at least one-half of a modern army must be composed of skilled artisans or scientific experts, of men who need to use in the army some form of mechanical skill or trained proficiency that they have acquired in civil life. Even with the comparatively small forces which we have so far raised the demand for such skilled men already runs up into the hundreds of thousands.

On top of this there is research, which enters into every branch of the service, not merely in engineering and applied science but in pure science, medical, physical, chemical, even psychological. Indeed, if one were to name in detail the forms of research which contribute to military efficiency, it would be necessary to give a very nearly complete inventory of the scientific and technological fields of study.

Now all this, as you can readily see, is not to be supplied by trade schools and technical schools alone. It requires a