and limits of academic freedom. If the new association performs its work properly, it should help to give increasing dignity and independence to the position of college and university professor. Several of the speakers seemed to be morbidly afraid that the association might be popularly misconceived as a labor union. Almost they did protest too much. A union of professors must differ essentially from a union of wage-earners, but the new association is seeking none the less an object analogous to that of an ordinary union. It is seeking increasing independence for its members by means of organization and community of spirit.
EX-SENATOR Bourne of Oregon calls himself a progressive; but like many other progressives, he makes at times the most utterly reactionary proposals. At present he is much exercised by the amount of time and attention which the President and the Senators waste upon the distribution of patronage; and he proposes to relieve them of the burden by imposing on the local electorate the work of choosing their postmasters, collectors of customs, United States attorneys, marshals, land-officers and the like. The proposal has always been popular with "old-fashioned" Jacksonian Democrats. They would have liked eighty years ago to disintegrate the national administration just as they disintegrated the state administrations, but the Constitution was inflexible and they were obliged to devise the spoils system in order to accomplish a similar result by easier extra-official means. Mr. Bourne pretends to be doing away with the spoils system, but in truth he is seeking to achieve more effectually the object for which the spoils was devised—the object of subordinating Federal officials to local political dictation rather than to that of their official superiors. There is one simple and far less reactionary way of relieving the President and the Senate from the onerous burden of appointing and confirming the higher Federal office-holders They can be made part of the permanent civil service.
IT seems a foregone conclusion that the immigration bill base don the literacy test will soon become law. Even if President Wilson vetoes the measure, a two-thirds vote in House and Senate will doubtless be forthcoming There is not much enthusiasm for the exclusion of illiterates, since men without education have not proved the least valuable of our immigrants, but Congress and Americans generally desire to lessen the total volume of the inflow, and the literacy test seems on the whole the least undesirable. it is a vast experiment, which will be watched with acute interest, and the law about to be passed will perhaps prove eventually to be only the first step in a progressively restrictive policy. Whether we further restrict or not, however, we should not rest content with a purely negative policy, but should work out the larger program of internal immigration, intended to protect and guide the immigrant during his difficult first years in a new country.
ONE feature of the Immigration bill, as amended in the Senate, seems to us peculiarly vicious It is the provision excluding from American shores all future immigrants of African blood. The urgent necessity for such a proposal is not obvious. In 1910 there were only forty thousand foreign born negroes in the United States, of whom less than five hundred had come from Africa. The amendment applies particularly to the few thousand Jamaican negroes who annually arrive in America, and soon find themselves employed as elevator boys in New York apartment houses These men are for the most part law-abiding, industrious and with a natural courtesy, which is surely not an undesirable importation, and they are the same men upon whom we relied to work for the Panama Canal. It would be singularly ungracious to signalize the completion of this great work by gratuitously insulting the men who accomplished it. But there is a wider significance to this proposal. It is a new insult flung at ten million Americans, who because of their color are for the most part voteless and deprived of fundamental civil and political rights.
MR. WHITMAN'S first words as Governor implied that state economy means less expenditure. Fortunately at the end of his message he proposes the only method by which "economy" can be made intelligent, and some distinction drawn between good spending and bad spending. The Governor ranges himself beside those who advocate the budget system with executive responsibility for financial policy. If that system is established, future governors in their inaugural addresses will be able to use "figures" as "warnings" without violating common sense.
THREE million dollars a year, it is estimated, are lost to the poor in this country because of the expense and time of ordinary legal action. No one can afford to sue for a small amount, and the poor cannot afford any of the delays incident to litigation. To meet this situation Kansas has put in an operation of a small Debtors' Court, having jurisdiction for amounts up to twenty dollars. John S. Dawson, attorney-general of the state, conceived the idea, and Judge Nirdlinger first put it into effect in Leavenworth. This court permits no at-
