A MEMORIAL OF SERVICE

The sight of Massachusetts Hall, with its charred woodwork, its broken windows, and the surrounding litter of lathes and plaster gives that building a prominence which it has not enjoyed for seveveral generations. Massachusetts Hall has become a harmonious part of the landscape of the Yard. Like the elms, and the columms on University Hall it looks very nice in etchings; but its practical value has undergone a sad decline.

Massachusetts has become the attic of the University,--a place for tattered and unsightly odds and ends. Cluttered together in a maze of clapboard partitions and sagging stairways are the offices of the chief janitor, the headquarters of the college police, the carpenter shop of the 47 Workshop, and, in the left, the shabby offices of a few tutors in the department of Economics. Commendable institutions, unquestionably,--and yet they seem a trifle unworthy of the oldest and most beautiful building in the University.

That Massachusetts Hall, after two centuries of service should be put to such menial use shows a strange lack of appreciation. The building deserves a peaceful and honorable old age, certainly not one of ignominious drudgery.

There has been much pleasant albeit futile talk about a War Memorial for Harvard's dead in the World War, and sketches and models have been submitted of monstrous obelisks, carillons, chapels, and what not. But a memorial of truer devotion and fuller sincerity would be the restoration of Massachusetts Hall to its former beauty. The rubbish of flimsy offices and temporary staircases could be cleared away. Instead of this gloomy miscellany, a colonial interior would be furnished with old-fashioned furniture, old books, and portraits, perhaps, of the founders of the University. Here, too, could be kept the relics of the earlier University, now for the most part buried unknown in the vaults of Widener. Massachusetts Hall might become inside, as it now is without, typical of the founders of Harvard; its rebirth and refitting would be a more significant and suitable memorial of Harvard's dead than any conceivable monument.