of the ridiculous. When did we first grant some
small corner in our hearts to the Chinese? It was when we were introduced
to Bret Harte's gambler:

For ways that are dark and tricks that are vain,
The heathen Chinee is peculiar.

The natural history of the racial or professional joke is easily written.
At the outset it is crude and cruel, wholly at the expense of the group
represented. In time the world wearies of an unequal contest, and we have
a new order of jokes, in which the intended victim acquits himself well.
This, too, gives way to a higher order, in which race, nationality or
profession is employed merely as a cloak for common humanity. The
successive stages mark the progress in assimilation, induced, in large
measure, by laughter. There is no other social force so potent in creating
mutual understanding and practical fraternity of spirit; in establishing
the essential unity of mankind underneath its phenomenal diversity.
Setting bounds to laughter: why, this is to indenture the angel of charity
to the father of lies and the lord of hate.

_A Post Graduate School for Academic Donors_

At a recent meeting of an University Montessori Club the case of donors to
colleges and universities was reported on by a special committee. The
majority report drew a pretty heavy indictment. It was shown that the
givers to colleges and universities seldom considered the real needs of
their beneficiaries. Donors liked to give expensive buildings without
endowment for upkeep, liked to give vast athletic fields, rejoiced in
stadiums, affected memorial statuary and stained glass windows, dabbled in
landscape gardening, but seldom were known either to give anything
unconditionally or, specifically, to destine a gift for such uninspiring
needs as more books or professors' pay. The result of giving without first
considering the needs of the benefited college or university, was that
every gift made the beneficiary more lopsided. Certain universities were
almost capsized by their incidental architecture. Others were subsidizing
graduate students to whom the conditions of successful research were
denied. Still others were calling great specialists to the teaching force
without providing the apparatus for the pursuit of these specialties.
Others preferred to offer financial aid to students who were poor--in
every sense. Donors apparently without exception had single-track minds.
They saw plainly enough what they wanted to give, b