When library reading is assigned, it is not of the kind to stimulate investigation of a wide range of material, but merely the requirement of certain pages or chapters in a specified book; and so it is not in any sense research, but only more expanded textbook study. The instructors in junior colleges, though sometimes better pedagogues than those who handle freshman sections in a great university, are seldom scholars in any real sense, almost never productive scholars. Faculty contacts are thus less stimulating, and study and teaching more superficial. In just those years when intellectual habits and interests should be awakened, when the student will - if ever learn to think for himself, he is lulled into acceptance of third-hand information and ideas. The young assistants at the university who teach freshmen may be inexperienced pedagogues and unfinished scholars, but they are scholars in the making; their ways and dreams are the ways and dreams of scholarship.

The faculty strength of the average junior college is also hampered by the method of appointing instructors. In four-year colleges and universities the department head selects his own instructors, or, if the department is organized as a committee with a rotating chairman, appointments are canvassed in department meetings. In either case the approval of the president is largely formal. But instructors are chosen in public junior colleges, not by department authority, but by the president, or even by the city superintendent of schools. This opens the way for the entrance of . persons without the special expertness which a department would demand, enables an executive to pack the faculty with personal supporters, gives the superintendent and board members an equally vicious patronage, and, by a

divided allegiance, prevents the esprit de corps characteristic of a wellorganized university department.

Not only do faculties thus tend to be weakened, but the range of ideas and discussion in the junior-college classroom is restricted in ways unknown to the university. The local institution is too near its public, and this public exercises an interfering and sometimes demoralizing control. Too many local pastors scrutinize the reading lists; too many parents are frightened by the theoretical radicalism of exploring youth, and want the mental traveling curtailed. State universities complain of popular pressure, but the longdistance pressure they protest is nothing to that of father-on-the-spot!

Finally, the value of a genuine college experience comes, not alone from books, but from the social and. intellectual contacts of student life. In the university, students have developed activities in which the theory, of the classroom can be tested independently in which the student can experiment with life and make instructive mistakes without those tragic practical consequences which the real world inflicts. The junior-college faculty, habituated to the detailed supervision of extracurricular interests proper to the secondary school, employs the same method with these older students, with the result either of killing interest in extracurricular affairs or of depriving them of developmental value.

The average graduate of the junior college, when he enters the university, is thus immature in life, work, and thought; and, unless methods in the junior college change, the universities will one day be swamped by these immature juniors from without. University training is bitterly criticized on the ground that it fails to stimulate intellectual initiative in its students.

What will be the effect as junior colleges multiply and prolong the intellectual childhood of American youth for two more years? The Association of University Women and the Association of University Professors - as the two national bodies most vitally concerned with college education - might well devote themselves to this problem before present errors harden into institutional practice. If American education is extended to offer added years in the university — so that our university degree may approximate that from European institutions - we must see to it that the added years represent added education and not just added time. And this will not be true if junior college consists merely of heavier high-school work.

I that

One hears it said that junior colleges ⚫are peculiarly adapted to handling the masses who seek higher education without capacity for absorbing it, and that they form a protective sieve for the universities, which will be thus saved from lowering standards to the 'mob level. But we have no assurance that, by junior-college aid, such students will not go on to the higher institutions in greater numbers. And what of the brilliant youth caught in the junior-college trap? The student of superior mentality is now passed through the lower schools with greater rapidity. He is ready for college young. His parents fear to send him away. He is placed in a local junior college. There he starves intellectually, and grows warped and bitter under administrative repression. I read recently with some curiosity an account of strife in a Western junior college where the leading students seem to have been driven into unseemly revolt. How, I ask myself, did they 'get that way'?

The same difficulty presents itself in a minor form in the junior high

school, which has been an offshoot of the grade-school system and manned pretty largely by teachers and principals elevated from the grade-school force. Many high-school teachers testify that sophomores entering from the junior high are as irresponsible as the old high-school freshman, and need another year to train them to any sort of self-direction in their work.

The previous line of educational growth in the United States has been a settling downward in the system of subjects and of method. The high school of to-day is the college of yesteryear. But the junior college, reversing this process, bids fair to turn to-morrow's college into a mere grandiose high school. Time alone can show whether, as the two new educational institutions become established, they can develop suitable personnel and standards of their own, or whether the blight of their origin is ingrained in their very make-up and the already thin substance of American education is to be diluted this much further. There is an heredity in institutions as in individuals, and the junior college was born in the high-school family. Certainly if junior-high-school positions are to be forever the reward of grade-school excellence, and if juniorcollege jobs are filled indefinitely from the high-school ranks, then higher education in America has received a body blow. Whether the city boards of education under which the two-year colleges increasingly operate can resist the inevitable pressure toward this course remains to be seen. And one also wonders whether, in the present state of popular sentiment that makes possible the frequent proposal and occasional passage of the so-called anti-evolution bills, it is safe to expose college training to the short-range public scrutiny which is the lot of any local junior college.

As the head of the Department of Commerce, and thus charged with such responsibility for our game fisheries as weighs upon the mind of the Federal Government, I wish to state a fact, to observe a condition, to relate an experiment, to define a proposition, to offer a protest, and to give the reasons for all.

The fact I refer to is that our game fishing is decreasing steadily and rapidly. The condition is that the present method of rehabilitation through hatcheries and distribution of fry and fingerlings is a failure because of high infant mortality. The experiment in the case indicates that artificial hatching can be made successful if the fingerlings are carried through infancy to childhood. The proposition is further to extend these nurseries in coöperation with the Izaak Walton League of America and all fish clubs. The protest is that even this is useless unless we can check pollution of our streams. The reason for it all is that fishing is good for the soul of man.

I

Man and boy, the American is a fisherman. That comprehensive list of human rights, the Declaration of Independence, is firm that all men (and boys) are endowed with certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - which obviously includes the pursuit of fish. America is a well-watered country, and the inhabitants know all of the fishing

holes. The Americans also produce millions of automobiles. These coördinate forces of inalienable right the automobile and the call of the fishing hole-propel men and boys to a search of all the water within a radius of one hundred and fifty miles during week-ends alone. They extend it to a radius of five hundred miles on summer holidays. The radii of operations of all these men and boys greatly overlap. All of this has overworked the fishing holes, and the time between bites has become longer and longer, and the fish have become wiser and wiser.

Some millions of fishermen have invented thousands of new lures of seductive order and devised many new and fearful incantations, with a host of new kinds of clothes and of labor-saving devices to carry them about.

We have indeed made stupendous progress in physical equipment to overcome the mysteries of fish. We have moved upward from the rude but social conditions of the willow pole with a butcher's-string line, fixed with hooks ten for a dime, whose compelling lure is one segment of an angleworm and whose incantation is spitting on the bait. We have arrived at the high state of a tackle assembled from the steel of Damascus, the bamboos of Siam, the silk of Japan, the lacquer of China, the tin of Bangkok, the nickel of Canada, the feathers of Brazil, and the silver of Colorado - all compounded by mass production at Chicago, Illinois, and Akron, Ohio. And for magic and incantations we have

progressed to application of cosmetics to artificial flies and to wonders in special clothing with pigeonholes for varied lures and liniments, and to calling a bite a 'strike.' Nor do I need to repeat that fishing is not the rich man's sport, even though his incantations are more expensive. I have said elsewhere that all men are equal before fishes. But I ask you if, in the face of all this overwhelming efficiency and progress, there is less time between bites.

However, our fishermen can put in many joyous hours at home, polishing up the rods, reels, and lures, discussing new flies, when the imponderable forces of spring begin to move their bones. They could not get such joy out of a collection of live angleworms, and that is all a part of what we are trying to get at anyway recreation and soul

satisfaction.

But I am off the track, because the Department of Commerce deals not in the beatitudes but in statistics. Moreover we must also maintain the economic rather than the biologic method in discussion or some other department of the Government will accuse Commerce of invading its authority. Nevertheless I may say, as an aside, that the fishing beatitudes are much amplified since Izaak Walton, for he did not spend his major life answering a bell. He never got the 'jumps' from traffic signals or the price of wheat. The blessings of fishing include not only Edgar Guest's 'wash of the soul' with pure air, but they also now include discipline in the equality of men, meekness and inspiration before the works of nature, charity and patience toward tackle makers and the fish, a mockery of profits and conceits, a quieting of hate and a hushing to ambition, a rejoicing and gladness that you do not have to decide another thing until next week.

To return, then, to the economics of

this sport. Having done everything to improve the tackle, lures, and incantations, we must conclude that the distance between bites has been increased because of rising ratio of water to fish. In other words, there are fewer fish.

From the number of fishing licenses issued in licensing states the Bureau of Fisheries estimates that ten million people went game fishing in the year 1926. Any calculation of twenty years ago will show that not one million went fishing in a year. But I have no sympathy with attempts at disarmament of the gigantic army which every year marches against the fish, nor do I suggest any limitations on its equipment of automobiles, tackle, or incantations. I am for force more force and more fish.

Despite the statistical efficiency of our department, I do not know how many fish each one of the army captured last year. Judging by my own experience, the number was not large. I spent several days searching fishing holes at various points between Chesapeake Bay and the Pacific; I tried to find some spot where not more than six automobiles were already camping, or where the campers did not get up before daylight and thus get the two or three fish which were off guard at that time of day. The State of New Jersey secures an accounting from its licensees of the number of game fish caught. It averages about 4.5 fish per fisherman per annum. Fishermen are not liars, and therefore I conclude that even in that well-organized state it was heavy going.

Now I want to propose an idea. I submit that each fisherman ought to catch at least fifty fish during the season. I should like more than that myself, but that ought to be demanded as a minimum under the 'rights' as implied in the Declaration, provided

it includes one big one for purposes of indelible memory, conversation, and historic record.

And at once I come to a powerful statistic, that is, fifty fish times ten million men and boys, the purpose of which I will establish presently. This minimum ideal of a national catch of five hundred million game fish is of fundamental importance if we as a nation are to approach a beatific state for even two weeks in the year. And, as we are thinking nationally, five hundred million fish divided among one hundred and twenty million people is not so much as you might think at first, for it is only about 4.1 fish per person and it includes the little ones as well, and each of us is supposed to eat 1095 times a year, less whatever meals we miss while fishing.

At this point someone will deny that we have ever taken five hundred million fish in a year. I agree with him that we have not attained any such ideal average in long years. If it had been true, the moral state of the nation would have been better maintained during the last calendar year. There were lots of people who committed crimes during the year who would not have done so if they had been fishing, and I believe that the increase in crime is due to a lack of those qualities of mind and character which impregnate the souls of all fishermen except those who get no bites. Unless we can promise at least fifty fish per annum per person, including that occasional big one for recounting and memory purposes, we may despair of keeping the population from further moral turpitude.

II

Nearly fifty years ago the game fishermen in certain localities began to complain bitterly to their Congressmen about the expanding distance between

bites, which in economic terms is called the 'lag.' As an equal opportunity for fishing must be properly considered by any great government as a necessity to public tranquillity, measures were at once taken. The great government said: 'We will now add artificial means to those of the natural birth and distribution of fish.'

Thereafter the Federal Government built forty game-fish hatcheries. The state governments built 191 hatcheries for game fish, and private enterprise constructed sixty more. In these massproduction works, the maternal carelessness of laying eggs out loose in the water to be eaten by cannibalistic relatives and friends was to be halted, and the eggs were thereafter carefully safeguarded in glass jars and troughs and temperatures. The baby fry and fingerlings thus born in security and reared up in comfort to half an inch long or so were then placed in private railway cars and distributed back to the streams, being thereupon started on their happy way to be eaten by the same relatives and friends, as fresh meat instead of fresh eggs.

We have steadily increased in zeal in these endeavors to beat the lag between bites, until during the last few years these 291 hatcheries, working on fifteen species of game fish, have turned out an annual average of one billion, one hundred million infant game fish to be duly launched into life among the cannibals.

In addition to these paternalistic and maternal endeavors on the part of the Government, I am aware that Mother Nature has herself been busy also. Private enterprise, in the shape of responsible mother fish, is working upon the same problem; it is probably doing more than the paternal Government, for all I know private enterprise usually does. One thing we do know: it takes a host of fingerlings to provide for the survival of a single fish