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Rh are in some respects strong institutions; moreover, education, philanthropy, and politics have become so interwoven that they make a combination too intricate to be readily dissolved.

The state is without an educational system; and the legislature has recently refused to pass a bill aiming to organize the common, secondary, and normal schools of the state. Ordinary educational values are therefore still obscure and confused. Though the last legislature improved the law regulating medical education to the extent of making a four-year high school course or its equivalent the legal minimum, the educational disorganization of the state makes its enforcement problematical.

There is still another source of apprehension on this score. The real standard depends on who evaluates the "equivalent." The agents to whom this function has been officially delegated in the past have conceded much to the wishes-real or supposed - of the schools. The Pittsburgh representative has been extremely lax; his "equivalent" to the four-year high school education has not been equal to a two-year high school education. The present incumbent at Philadelphia is newly appointed; conditions described in the text refer to previous years. Finally, some of the schools have been using their own judgment in dealing with credentials, referring only such as they did not accept themselves. It is impossible to ascertain how those referred were distinguished from those accepted in the medical school office.

If, now, a genuine four-year high school standard is enforced, out of the eight undergraduate schools in the state only two will avoid very serious damage: the University of Pennsylvania and the Jefferson Medical College, the former already beyond the standard in question, the latter probably strong enough to stand the shrinkage which would result,—for a large part of its enrolment now meets the requirement. The University of Pittsburgh is fully alive to the necessity of procuring endowment in order to meet the inevitable deficit, and will stand or fall on that issue. The other five schools have no future; their enrolment is so largely the make-believe equivalent that enforcement of a real four-year high school standard will seriously threaten their existence even at their present level of efficiency; progress would be altogether impossible.

The situation so far simplified by an actual entrance standard, another topic presses for consideration. The state of Pennsylvania has for years been engaged in distributing large sums to private and semi-private charities. These largesses have enabled several of the Philadelphia schools to build and partly to maintain their own hospitals. That this policy is thoroughly objectionable and demoralizing is beyond dispute. The state has neither right nor business to make presents to private corporations that it can neither regulate nor control. And the level of civic life in Pennsylvania has been greatly lowered by the log-rolling and favoritism that the possibilities of "pull" have created. One would be perhaps not over-sanguine to expect that the bounty and subsidy system will one day be replaced by strict payment for services rendered,—so strict, that the hospitals will, as in New York, lose rather than gain