universities in the United States, with an enrollment of degree candidates running well over twelve thousand, it has remained, by comparison with such polyglot and unco-ordinated assemblages as Columbia or California, a closer corporation of integrated members. In manner and in manners, in orientation, in general state and attitude of mind, in savoir faire, the student body seems to move and have its young being more in the academic Eastern key of Cambridge, Princeton, or Williamstown. This detachment has long been recognized or apprehended by the younger sister insti

tutions, as the songs of the Illini, composed at the rival seat of football and learning in Champaign-Urbana, indicate:

Don't send my boy to Harvard,
The dying mother said;
Don't send him up to Michigan,
I'd rather he were dead.

So runs one of the chanteys; and another one goes:

Sing me a song of college days,
Tell me where to go:
Northwestern for her pretty girls,
Wisconsin where they row;
Michigan for her chappies,
Purdue for jolly boys, etc.

Another difference is the separation of the Agricultural College from the University of the State. At Wisconsin and Illinois farm educational interests and academic and scientific foundations are closely identified and administratively united, and so they are at Minnesota even though there physically far apart; but at Ann Arbor they are kept entirely distinct. Whatever the compensating disadvantages, this segregation makes for greater solidarity and homogeneity. Neither is there here by comparison, for example, with Kansas or Wisconsin, so great a diffusion of the University's vitality over the entire commonwealth in the various departments of extension work, though the central administration at Ann Arbor, with the same teaching personnel, does maintain outside courses for workers in the neighboring city of Detroit and elsewhere, corresponding to the establishment of University College in Chicago, but with no separate buildings or plant.

The important thing to appreciate in these related facts is the sense and the reality of detachment which Michigan enjoys beyond the State universities with which it is grouped in sports or affiliated and associated in origins and educational purposes. State law emphasizes this detachment by providing two separate Boards of Regents, one for the "U. of M." and another for Michigan State College (of agriculture). Moreover, the University Regents are not, as in the case of Wisconsin, appointed by the Governor, but are elected at large by the voters of the State for overlapping terms of eight years each. Accordingly, Michigan, to its great material and spiritual advantage, has always been able to keep aloof from political influence, whether it be in the form of intermittent partisan squabbles, as in the regrettable case of Kansas, or in the interpenetration and use of "Old Bob" La Follette's Wisconsin. Additional freedom comes with exemption from the provisions of the Morrill Act which has saddled the other land-grant universities of the Northwest Territory-according to their consciences -with either the duty or the noblesse oblige of military training. The working majority of public opinion in the State of Michigan, "sold" on automobile ideals, backs up State law and local tradition in decreeing "hands off" from their self-starting automotive university.

This was the kind of healthily and inspiringly independent State institution that Marion Burton inherited from his four predecessors in office. Materially it was a challenge; morally, spiritually, it was a mission. He accepted it in both senses, but in the rapid and impressive

accomplishment of the more obvious building the less obvious molding was for the time being obscured. Let it be said, therefore, in justice to him and to the alumni who loyally stood with him, that, very rarely among American institutions, Michigan has doubled in size without a corresponding loss of relative values. This University belongs to the very small class of popular enterprises which has responded to the urge for quantity production without radical sacrifices of quality. None of the five Presidents of Michigan were handicapped by submergence in a great municipality. Only a short hour's railroad journey from Detroit, the University community is nevertheless the very antipodes of the motor metropolis. Almost near enough geographically to catch on an eastern breeze the smell of lacquered tin, philosophically it is far, far away from Ford.

Like Hanover and Dartmouth, the town and gown of Princeton, or the Columbia of "Missouri," Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan are identical, coeval, coterminous. A delightful treearcaded residential town of faculties and fraternities surrounds the inner city of learning that the State and the alumni, its benefactors, and its great-spirited President built wherein to house their idea of a university. There are hills and a great hospital; a river winds through the valley down below. Fry Field bulks up as big in the landscape as modern intercollegiate "sport" with its publicity bulks in the day's work. Yost's Field House, where an entire football gridiron. is laid out indoors, bears tribute to many championships and to the healthy influence in undergraduate life exercised during twenty-three years of continuous service by a famous coach. Everything pertaining to the University centers in a comparatively small area in Ann Arbor. President Burton and his predecessors had the advantage of dealing with a close corporation and a closer neighborhood.

This advantage the new President, Dr. Clarence C. Little, inherited when he took over the executive responsibility of one of the finest educationál plants in this country at the time of his inauguration in October. What is he going to do with it? A biologist, an athlete mentally as well as physically, at thirtyseven a very young man for his office, he finds his hands left free. In his hands, however, burns the torch handed on by his predecessor, the torch of what President Burton called in his last Annual Report to the Board of Regents "the Vital Factor in University Life."

Photographs can give a very inadequate idea of the beauty and great pro

priety of the Lawyers' Club at Ann Arbor. In these American Inns of Court a Michigan law student finds all that is most dignified and venerable in the background of his profession combined with. great comfort and convenience. The place looks as though merely to live there place looks as though merely to live there might be a liberal education. With the exception of Hart House, at the Univerexception of Hart House, at the University of Toronto, no university social center can well compare in service size with the Michigan Union, with its more than sixty guest rooms; its banquet-room, where last summer the American Bar Association, 450 strong, plus their wives.

and relatives, sat down to luncheon at one time; its thousands of graduates and undergraduates comfortably at home in it every day. These are merely two of the many outward and visible signs the model high school, engineering shops and laboratories, University Hospital, Dental College, physics laboratory, Literary College, Clements Library, Yost Field House, Medical School, and new gymnasium of President Burton's constructive stewardship, the striking real estate substantiation for that statuette with the hammer in its hand.

But what President Burton would have

cared most to be remembered for are the measures that he took to counteract or, rather, to fill the buildings that rose up during his administration of the University and will always be associated with his name.

"Buildings in themselves," said he, "are valued very little by the, officers of this University, who have been so much engrossed in the erection of new structures. The building is merely the effective tool necessary for carrying on the task of education. Only because it is an indispensable tool are we concerned with the whole subject." For instance, he founded the Fellowship of Creative Art and got Robert Frost, its first fellow, to live and move and have his inspirational being for a year at Ann Arbor. Then he asked Robert Bridges

U

from Oxford, and now Jesse Lynch Williams holds the same fellowship for the current year. Robert Frost comes back to stay on a permanent basis, occupying a newly created chair of Letters. Cooperation with the International Institute of Education brings distinguished lecturers and demonstrators across the seas, and the School of Music presents to the University community music and musicians of the highest living quality. Available salaries of vacant chairs or of professors on leave of absence are devoted to productive use in bringing to Ann Arbor men of outstanding accomplishment in various fields, such as Dean Kalaw, of the University of the Philippines; Eliel Saarienen, of Helsingfors, the Finnish creator of original ideas in architecture; and Sir Paul Vinogradoff, of Oxford.

Marion Le Roy Burton, who might have been Governor of the State and Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, preferred to remain a missionary of a hope that has become in the National life, if not forlorn, at least in great measure forgotten.

"In the name of democracy," President Burton wrote in the valedictory Report to the Board of Regents already mentioned, "we owe it to one another, to the students, and to the world of higher education, to give increasing recognition to the vital factor of university life-a persistent emphasis upon the higher values. Various methods will prove helpful in realizing such a purpose. These methods must not be mechanical, for nothing but the spirit of man will make a true university."

By DON C. SEITZ

too alarmed.

NCONSCIOUSLY, through capitalization, communism is capturing the United States. Under our war-scare laws, "Reds" are rigorously excluded from our midst if they strive to come in by importation, yet, without the least alarm, we are accepting the communizing of capital, and the President of the United States is urging that we do it some more. This he does with a straight face and his back against the European door.

"Communism" is supposed to be the fearful foe of capitalism, but it fits in well with capitalization. The two things are widely different. "Capitalism" is concentrated wealth, made potent in a few hands against the common interest. "Capitalization" is the selling of earning power to the public at large, so that it may both provide and earn the profits. This has been going on in America on an enormous scale since the beginning of the World War. Huge corporations and combinations have absorbed most of the country's capital and a lion's share of its earning power.

This process was once regarded as a menace. A Sherman Anti-Trust Law was passed to prevent it, and cartoons of the trusts were used liberally into scaring the common people to vote for Bryan. Many did, but not enough to bust the trusts, which are now quite safe because of the new communism.

Outside of Henry Ford, who is solus. in his corporation and, by playing a lone

hand, has made himself the richest man (visible) in the world, other magnates have parted with their holdings in a great measure and passed them into the pockets of the public, out of which come their earnings and back into which, in a great measure, they go.

This is peculiarly the case with public service corporations, beginning with the greatest, the American Telegraph and Telephone Company. Its capital is around $2,000,000,000, its earnings colossal in their total-seven per cent in distribution. This is guaranteed. Rates can be legally raised by its subsidiaries to keep up the dividend requirements. It constantly requires new capital to extend its lines. Formerly this was acquired by flotations through bankers. Now it is secured in the greater part by sales to subscribers. The ownership of $1,000 worth of stock provides a return sufficient to cover the average telephone bill. In effect, therefore, the user owns his phone. He receives the service and his dividends replace its cost. This is the perfection of communism.

The same practice is coming to prevail among other public service corporations, of whom there are 21,113 all told in operation, including those engaged in transportation. But few approximate the A. T. & T. in size, yet some are gigantic, as they must be when fortyfive of them divide $706,835,314 of the total profits of $1,257,409,856 accruing to the 21,113.

Manufacturing corporations are likewise saturating the public with securities. The big fish are few, but of krakan size. The Internal Revenue Department credits 85,199 such concerns with a net earning in the aggregate of $4,271,899,449. Ninety-eight divided up $1,257,409,896. Fifty-five per cent of the grand total went to 598 companies.

It will not do to say that this vast sum found its way into a few pockets. It did not. Through the communizing of capital the greater part was widely distributed.

Further examples could be found in all fields of industry. Even the ownership of real estate is communistically subdivided under the capitalization system, through the operations of the mortgage companies. Concerns loan well up to full value and leave to the theoretical owner the gamble of squeezing his profit from a phantom equity based upon earning power.

Herein lies the rub of the whole system. Supercapitalization, such as has been going on, depends, not upon investment, but earning power. This is apt to operate oppressively in two ways: (1) By maintaining high prices in order to pay dividends; or (2) by failure to earn these, causing loss to the investor, the margin of property behind the security being too small to cover depreciation through lessening of earning power.

Examples in point may be found in