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General One you unid.

Excl. 5-1-1928

Limary

Dedicatory

The establishment of this Commonwealth Review as the publication agency of the community and commonwealth service movement instituted under the auspices of the University of Oregon offers a fit occasion for some acknowledgment by the University of obligations due for the generous response throughout the State to that venture. The University would express most sincere and cordial appreciation to all who have cooperated during the past seven years toward bringing this activity to the position of promise it now has.

An opportunity seemed open in this western commonwealth for an agency intent on securing better organization and coordination of the forces of progress and social betterment, and on furnishing the conditions inducing greatest activity by those inspired by highest social purposes. Here in Oregon was a people who themselves, or their immediate forbears, had been brought to this borderland of civilization through their spirit of adventure and enterprise. They were divesting themselves, to a normal degree at least, of the trammels of tradition and were politically exhibiting a measure of real daring. The environment they confronted, too, is unique. It is rich in diversity of mountains and valleys, and in the combination of humid and semi-arid areas, with a mild and equable climate over all. The people of Oregon in undertaking to build here the home of a worthy civilization were, however, under the handicaps of comparative isolation from markets and centers of world enterprise generally. They represented a sparse population bearing the weight of a fully developed civil establishment and there was but a meagre accumulation of capital. This combination of factors-the human that demanded bold strokes of advancement, and the environmental that called for a high degree of associated effort to ensure success-made the problem of development distinctively one of stupendous complexity. The situation was and still is one that to a peculiar degree challenges all who cherish the ambition of making the human factor count more largely and more nobly in accelerating the pace of progress. The Commonwealth Conferences were initiated by the University as the first steps toward

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meeting that challenge. They were received with eager welcome. Those who sacrificed time and effort in their cooperation with the University in this work placed high confidence in the University's fitness for this rôle as coordinating agency in commonwealth upbuilding. They aided in the beginning of a movement which we trust shall be an ever larger factor in the making of the best possible Oregon, and to them this quarterly Commonwealth Review is dedicated.

Through the provision of this Review, the efforts put forth in this movement will, for the first time, have full advantage of being cumulative and consecutive in time, and largely relieved from the handicap of separations by distance. The creation of the mind of the public of Oregon may be hoped for.

Vol. I

The Commonwealth Review
of the University of Oregon

JANUARY, 1916

No. 1

A Commonwealth Organization of Progress

NEW INSTRUMENTALITIES FOR PROGRESS SHAPED
IN THE UNIVERSITIES

The University of Oregon, through its Commonwealth Conferences and the system of organized effort of which they are the voice, is advancing to meet more adequately the higher responsibilities of a State University to a progressive constituency. Through this new rôle of distinctive commonwealth service, this institution is simply taking advantage of the large opportunity that twentieth century American conditions have created. It would have been strange, indeed, if all the study and research in the field of the social sciences prosecuted in the halls of the universities during the last quarter of a century had not developed light and purpose, and shaped instrumentalities in the universities available for large public and social service. At the same time among the masses there has been a growing divine discontent calling for a larger realization of the ideal of democracy, and for a stronger imbuing of our industrial organization with the spirit of Christianity. If this condition of potentiality in the University, and this sense of need in our social order have not, as yet, brought forth a "Macedonian cry" from the discerning for direct University help, they, at least, establish the probability of a new sphere which the University should occupy with promise of great gain for the commonwealth at large and a revitalizing of the institution's powers with the youth in its charge. The Commonwealth Conferences conducted under the auspices of the University during the last seven years have been gradually discovering this new realm of mutual aid and ennoblement for the State University and its public. It is a statement of the larger meaning of this new reciprocal relation between them that is here proposed.

THE UNIVERSITY APTITUDE

Essentially, this movement for community and commonwealth service under the auspices of the University is an effort to bring the human factor, the mental and spiritual forces, to largest effectiveness in the making of Oregon. It means a new and direct university contact with the life and affairs of the people of Oregon in their associated plans and policies. What can the University presume to accomplish in thus lending a hand of aid to the people in their struggles for a more abundant life? Manifestly, the only possible form of help it is fitted to give the outside world is that which is the counterpart of its main service to the youth within its halls. The power and light brought to these come from its libraries, its laboratories, and from the contact of mind with mind in the discussions of its lecture rooms. In the library, the student gets his grasp of the thought of the past and of the present, of their perspectives, and their relations and tendencies. In the laboratory, he gets the methods which yield insight and power of certain detection of the cause and effect relation. In the discussions of the class room, the results of his reading, experiments, investigations and thinking are clarified and organized. How can this peculiar university method of procedure, and the skill and power it gives, serve, when brought to bear in an associated effort with the students of the outside world upon their practical problems? What saving or efficacious factor does the university supply?

LAY AND UNIVERSITY FORCES MUST JOIN TO AID ASSIMILATION BY THE MASSES

This distinctive university influence can best succeed in penetrating the mind of the commonwealth at large through the medium of university cooperation with responsive personalities and agencies throughout the State in developing constructive ideas and plans for social progress. With university and lay forces joined, using the best resources, methods and aptitudes of each, highest efficiency will be attained in surveys, investigations, discussions and recommendations. The full force of normal and best tendencies of thought and aspiration

in the university will be brought into active alliance with the corresponding aims and aspirations in the different communities and in the State at large. Hitherto, the purposes and endeavors possessing those inside the university walls have had but scant opportunity for fertilizing contact with like aims of social uplift cherished by those who are bearing the brunt of the actual struggle outside. The commonwealth service movement, instituted at the University of Oregon, has in view the bringing of these into relations that will insure largest fruitfulness of realized progress.

WITHOUT THE CONTENT AND THE SPIRIT OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, THE BEWILDERED WORLD IS LOST

The sciences of economics, politics, psychology, sociology and jurisprudence are mankind's newly acquired but richest store of wealth. Their content furnishes concepts and facts for guidance that our bewildering present-day environment demands, and their spirit breathes highest social purposes. They will yield only the most infinitesimal fraction of their potential good so long as no adequate medium and organization exists for using them directly to meet the higher but most exigent needs of the people. In these modern humanities is the richest supply of service and satisfaction for the human head and heart. The demand for them, though still largely latent, will become commensurate with the supply as soon as there is provision of adapted means of communication between the students devoted to them and the masses. Through the medium of its commonwealth service activities, the University of Oregon proposes to transform this demand, now largely latent, to an active state, and to make readily available this incalculable supply of the means of human welfare.

NEITHER THE BUSINESS OFFICE NOR THE LIBRARY ALONE CAN INSURE SOCIAL SAFETY

Any energetic business or professional man, completely denied the point of view of the student of economics and sociology, almost certainly falls into that fierce pursuit of private gain that renders him largely unconscious of the great ends of

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