training for graduate responsibilities would be peculiarly valuable.

3. As a direct corollary of the other two comes the third premise: that no alumni effort can be really helpful which is not based upon a thoroughgoing sympathy with the educational aims of the institution, and which does not consciously seek to support the university administration-the president, the governing body, and the faculties. This of course is far from implying that the alumni should not have an independent voice upon matters in which they are concerned and upon which they are qualified to speak with understanding. Nor would I imply that, upon occasion, they should not express themselves upon the most fundamental problems of university policy. The alumni often have a fresher, broader, and more practical view, based upon their activities and contacts in other fields, as well as what might be called a practical idealism, which the faculty man sometimes loses in the daily attrition of the classroom. Moreover once the gap is bridged, the university man is ready to welcome the practical spirit with which the alumnus approaches many of the questions laid before him, provided that with it is revealed both a willingness to consider the educational problems involved, and a sympathy for the specialized point of view of the university man.

All this points to the development of a more constructive programme on the

part of the university in its relations with the alumni, and an effort on the part of the alumni to "keep their pictures of the university up-to-date." It must be granted that many manifestations of alumni enthusiasm are footless and unintelligible, but as a whole the alumni, as a body, can be neglected only at a loss to the spiritual as well as the material welfare of our American universities. There are limits to the degree and kind of participation in university questions open to the alumni, but these limits are freely recognized by the right-minded graduate. The university's endeavor must be to bring it about that all alumni become thus minded. It cannot merely assume a receptive attitude as regards its graduates, looking for manna from heaven; it must develop an active policy which will incorporate them into the great fellowship. The alumni are doing their part through their organizations. The next move is up to the universities. In the alumni associations, alumni councils, in the network of alumni clubs scattered all over the country in any city of any size, in the graduate publications and the alumni funds, great instruments are being forged which can offer efficient support in enabling the universities to develop far beyond anything that we know at the present time. How far these instruments are to be used for the best interests of university and graduate alike is a problem which must be studied and solved.

CABINET minister here in Washington told me only the other day, with a show of exasperation tempered by a twinkle and a twisted smile, that it seemed to him our handful of American colonists claiming Russia's discarded Bear Cub as a home could "raise more diverse and persistent howls than the joint populations of ten decent States. What does Alaska want?"

Although that question is a hard one, maybe I can give you an inside answer because I have been living literally inside Alaska for so many years-in its most interior section, as far in as you can go without starting out again! I can at least suggest some immediate reasons for the "why" of those howls, by giving you three concise definitions of my own, describing what Alaska really is. "Alaska: a bear cub; a growing boy; a group of American colonies." Any one of these VOL. LXXXI.-45

rôles gives Alaska a perfectly legitimate right to howl.

Our own avuncular Samuel adopted Russia's cub when it was a very helpless small bear indeed, giving solemn promise, couched in high-sounding, sacredly attested documents of state, that if only its rather unnatural daddy would withdraw entirely from the vicinity, for keeps, and renounce all claim of paternity in the waif, Uncle Sam would himself henceforward and hereafter protect and cherish the same as one of his very own brood. An insignificant matter of money changed hands in this transaction, merely enough to cover some necessary expenses, make the affair legally tight, and save the rather shamed Muscovitic face.

Seward had acted as go-between in this deal, my grandfather's own old York State neighbor whom he loved and admired above all men save Lincoln's self. When the great secretary was retiring, after that arduous pilotage of the ship of state, they asked him what act of all his half-century of public service he himself

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stirring then, all of which seemed rather more vital to the men of the upper sixties. The Atlantic cable had just been laid successfully, and men's minds were already expanding with the intoxicating idea of the earth and the fulness thereof, the sea, and all that in them is, as tractable things to be controlled and bound. They were busy even then binding the continent with its first twin threads of steel, to be completed at Promontory Point early in the next year. Who had any time or thought for Alaska?

But even in neglect this tough-fibred creature kept on growing, developing, feeling out its youthful strength. American colonists sought Alaska and made their homes there, among them my grandfather's granddaughter. We have come to love and prize our adopted land with a fierce and intense loyalty. But when we return to the States and are asked, as I

tinct political and economic units, although the good people back in Washington do not apprehend this.

Strictly speaking, the term "Alaska" has significance to-day as a geographic unity, but carries little real homogeneity of meaning in other fields. I could tell you pretty clearly what the Fourth Division wants, for that comprises the great empire lying behind the mountains where I myself have been living; and I could tell you, from travel and observation and the trusted words of friends, something of the individual wants of the Second and Third Divisions; and even, perhaps (though God forbid that I should have to, for that includes our Capitoline Juneau), what the First Division wants. But unless you will promise to carry with you some notion of this quadruple cleavage, it will be very hard indeed to explain in any understandable detail what Alaska as a whole wants,

what point in the familiar colonial cycle have these isolated communities now reached? The early exploratory period has long ago slipped by, the days of first settlement are now over. The land has been spied out and the knowledge of the backing of a richly endowed continental hinterland has been painfully acquired. The older generation of the pioneers, whose past lay elsewhere, is fast taking the Nameless Trail. The younger generation knows only the newer soil. And all fixed historical data plot the curve for the next swing of events along the lines of intensive self-consciousness, the swift and not always wise or equitable development of resource and political institution, coupled with a searching inquiry into the bases of relation with the mother country.

We have a dozen close parallels to warn us that foster parents and mandatory governments have a way of being vastly pre

Yet here we have again a group of colonies setting out to occupy a continent; colonists mainly of north European stocks thinly settled along a length of sea-line much more extended than the coast of all the United States combined; a little developed transmontane area appealing always to the more adventurous and imaginative; with a climate scorned by the folks back home as far too rigorous for the comforts of permanent living, but one upon which the pioneer himself thrives and grows lusty. Here we discover again a willingness on the part of the mother country to exploit this continent-colonies' raw materials, but a great unwillingness to admit its human constituents to anything that approaches political or economic fraternity. Once more there is growing up a policy, if any, on the part of our Lords of Trade and Plantations, to the effect that Crown Lands or Public Domain exist solely for the good of

the mother country and of the empire. Also we are hearing repeated the hoary colonial argument that "government costs too much per capita and in relation to the taxes collectable." "There are not enough people there to warrant all this expense of maintaining courts and bureaus and the various machinery of administration. There are only a few thousand whites, and they don't pay sufficient taxes for their keep."

And eloquent congressmen from Massachusetts and from California, on the superficial bases of a few days spent skirting the fringes of The Great Country, rise in our national legislature and wax vocal in their belief that "this wilderness" should be allowed to revert at once to primeval desuetude, since it will never in the world amount to anything; forgetting entirely that their own now proud and sovereign States themselves, in their time, passed through similar periods of depression and underappreciation, when they too were colonial thorns in the flesh to a distracted home government, and were quite seriously deemed hardly worth their keep in government expense, in view of the wilful and rebellious nature of the wild radical backwoodsmen who inhabited them!

I wonder if any territory has anywhere been opened up and pioneered, without this cry of the visionless being heard in the land? To date, over a billion and a quarter in exports have come from these misprized American colonies of the North -gold and copper, silver hordes of fish, the rarest furs that the continent provides. But because these values do not pour directly into the Treasury of the United States, but exist only as indirectly taxable output and increased general luxury, our legal guardian has never seen fit to check these items off as credit to our account against the original $7,200,000 he paid for title to this wealth, or the relatively paltry sums above direct tax revenue which he expends upon it yearly in board and keep.

The rather vital fact that only 2 per cent of the actual real estate here is privately owned, and hence taxable, is conveniently forgotten, for Uncle Sam himself is still master of the remainder. But a much more potent consideration lies in the fact that most of the really large com

mercial companies operating in Alaska are incorporated in States "back home" paying elsewhere the whole of their federal tax on profits here derived. Hence the real and apparent values of Alaskan exports, as national revenue, remain literally wide seas apart. It is another case where bare figures, uninterpreted or misinterpreted, can only lie.

Beneficent Uncle Sam, who expects his children to clear his wilderness and solitary places for him, to gamble with death, to face the loneliness, to suffer the depreciation of hard-won placer golds, to send him back yearly treasure of copper from the mountain and fishes from the sea, and still pay him goodly tribute and all-sufficient overhead, in taxes!

The very best answer to any congressman's proposal that Uncle Sam should definitely turn his back to-day upon the colonies of Alaska is a Yankee counterquery: "What did Britain ultimately lose in the original Thirteen?" Here we have an area of equally great diversity, truly a continent in itself, in acreage exceeding the present boundaries of those former English colonies by the sum of presentday Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Louisiana, and with a climate quite as varied. Is there no parallel? And if you doubt the climatic statement, remember what was falsely reported of the inclemencies of New England, in the old days; and remember also that last winter there was actually colder weather on the southern edge of Georgia than in any spot on the southern edge of Alaska. Basic facts like these remain, and are easily verifiable, in spite of reporting and counterreporting, minimizing and maximizing.

But although one might expect, in the two generations since Seward's day, some truer valuation of the goodies still held within his much-scorned, bargain-bought "ice-box," our adopting parent has so far notably failed to analyze the dynamic and socio-economics of this growing land—a lack of vision very disturbing to those who know Alaska intimately. For the framework here is almost identical with that of the earlier colonial situation. In the concluding paragraphs of his "Founding of New England," James Truslow Adams states: "In their broader features, the constitutions granted by Congress to organ