Article October 2, 1937 Issue

Signs of the Times

Topic: The Aim of Knowledge

with contributions from James R. Angell, Walter Lippmann, J. C. Smuts, W. Hamilton Fyfe

[Dr. James R. Angell, retiring President of Yale, as quoted in the New York Times, New York]

I doubt whether educated men of your generation have any more compelling task than the effort to salvage that remnant of the freedom of the human spirit which is still alive in the world, and to build upon it once more a decent and stable social order. ... We are told that democracy is safe in this country and that freedom is thus also assured. But as long as great continental nations, with a cultural history of centuries, are ready, as they now do, to blaspheme against the whole conception of liberty on which our nation has been nurtured, neither that liberty nor the democracy in which it is enshrined can be wholly safe. ...

Real and lasting progress can come only by slow and thoughtfully considered measures which, resting on those elements in the existing order that are sound, seek one by one to eliminate those which are evil and replace them with such as are wholesome and just. To accomplish this is the portentous challenge your generation has to face, but it is one which offers a matchless opportunity to bring a sick world back to health.

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