INTELLIGENT GIVING.

In his annual report, President Nicholas Murray Butler, of Columbia, points out the need for intelligent giving for educational purposes. He deplores the habit which too many well-intentioned donors have of locking up their bequests in certain specified projects. "What the university most needs", he says, "is gifts which will aid it in its doing better work which it has already undertaken, and not gifts which compel it to assume new obligations that in turn make an additional drain on its already over-taxed resources. . . ."

This would no doubt seem very strange doctrine to many prospective benefactors of Harvard College today; and it is certain that it would have seemed incredible to the early donors. To look upon a gift under any circumstances as a burden seems at first thought an anomaly. But gradually it is coming to be recognized more and more clearly that the wisest of all gifts to educational institutions are those given unrestricted and "without strings." Of course, if a man is to choose between perpetuating his name by erecting an expensive mausoleum and by founding in perpetuum a series of lectures on a contemporary problem, he is surely wiser to choose the latter. But wiser still is the man who, realizing that his own judgment as to the needs of the next century are not infallible, gives his gifts subject only to the careful distribution of those who are best fitted to know the most pressing need as it arises, and to give that need only its proportionate share of funds. Too often a restricted gift proves to be an "embarrassment of riches."