THE PUBLIC SERVICE

That period of commencement day addresses which continues throughout June is already upon us. Everywhere prominent men are drawn back from the arena to the cloister for a day to exhort with the Senior suddenly become Freshman again. Too often these sermons from high finance, high politics, or high poetics, are stodgy, or sentimental, or pluto-patriotic, or even cheap pamphleteering. Mr. McAdoo, for instance, has taken advantage of his position as commencement orator to wave the black flag of the Anti-Saloon League and then attempt to pull a Houdini on his audience by telling them it is identical with the American flag. Such political truckstering is hardly a pleasant foretaste for the graduating Senior.

Two Commencement orations were reported yesterday, however, which emphasize a point deserving of more attention from the college man than it now receives. The manifold opportunities for the university graduate in one or the other of the branches of the Public Service are usually brushed aside in favor of some private enterprise. They should not be. The responsibilities of government now rest largely upon the stupid, the untrained, the men of ward mentality. Certain members of the present administration at Washington are eloquent testimony to this condition. Many men today graduate with a natural aptitude for the Public Service, only to lose it in a downtown office a few years later. These men in Germany or in England would be public men of importance. Here the tradition of government service is dangerously weak. It should be built up by more such addresses as those given yesterday by Mr. Dawes at Washington University and Mr. Aldred at M. I. T. The Vice President dwelt upon the diplomatic, consular, and state department services. Mr. Aldred happily called attention to the horizontal extent of the Public Service by speaking of the industrial and municipal engineering research in relation to city planning, water power development, conservation, and flood control. The City, the State, and the Nation need the college trained man as insistently as do the professions and the business world.