Into this volume Dr Lowell has gathered the most important of his writings and addresses on education, including his Inaugural Address and extracts from many of his Annual Reports as President of Harvard. Valuable though they are as a running commentary on recent educational history, they are even more important as the revelation of the basic principles underlying his long and brilliant administration. Here will be found, with the added emphasis of collective presentation, those progressive ideas that must always be associated with his name: his scorn of pedantry, his impatience with the building-block conception of education, his insistence that the student, not the course, is the only real unit and that a higher type of scholarship than has hitherto prevailed in America should be provoked in the college and in the graduate and professional schools. In all this there is food for thought and discussion for many years to come.

George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are honored for doing entirely different things: Washington because he successfully carried out a war for independence, Lincoln because he successfully crushed a war for independence. As in these two outstanding instances, a principle absolutely correct within certain limits may not be so under other conditions. In the field of public affairs and social relations, principles equally good in their place often come into conflict; and it is there that the student of political science finds his most interesting problems. President Lowell has observed such conflicts with the wisdom that comes from long experience and has discussed them in a book that will stimulate thought, arouse discussion, and lead to a reconsideration of many questions.

For twenty-four consecutive years the graduating class in Harvard College asked President Lowell to address them at their Baccalaureate Sunday service, a request which he never refused. The ardent friend of all college men everywhere and a devoutly religious man, he preached of the heart kept with diligence. As his religion was universal, there is in his sermons nothing denominational or sectarian. Above all else it was practical, and the principles of right conduct which he drove home year after year he believed should be the commonplaces of every man's life. These sermons are the unpretentious words of a man of action with a strong religious conscience saying farewell to a group of men who had enjoyed extraordinary privileges and owed a corresponding debt to the public. His language is so simple as to be almost deceptive, but the substance is deep, thoughtful, and moving, and as appropriate now as when the addresses were delivered, particularly those delivered during the First World War and post-war periods.