The annual meeting for the award of distinctions, held last evening in Sanders Theatre, was a great success, largely due to the speech by President Hadley of Yale University on "The Obligations of the Prize Winner." Deturs were awarded to about twenty scholars of the first group who had never before received this form of academic recognition, and the names of the principal prize winners and scholars of the past year were read.

Dean Hurlbut in a short address explained the purpose of the meeting, and introduced President Hadley as one who while an undergraduate had won the highest honors his university could award and whose career as a writer and administrator has shown the wisdom of the choice. Most important of all, he is president of that university with which Harvard is most closely allied.

President Hadley began his speech by defining a prize as an opportunity, its value lying in the use made of it afterwards. There is a greater responsibility than that of the prize winner for his own career; it is the responsibility of all prize winners for the place that learning is to command in the judgment of their fellow-countrymen.

Two generations ago the successful debater was the intellectual idol of our colleges, and the art of ex tempore speaking was cultivated by all classes of students. Towards the end of the nineteenth century all this changed very suddenly. The man who a few years before would have been the intellectual idol of his fellows came to be regarded with indifference, if not with suspicion. Now it is no longer success in oratory, but success in sport, that is over-idolized. There is no doubt that we should be a great deal better off if public attention were more largely fixed on the intellectual prizes and less upon the athletic ones.

The best way to make the American people more interested in scholarship than in athletics is by proving that our prize scholars, even more than our prize athletes, represent the type of men for which there is public need. The competitions must be so arranged that the prize winners justify the selection by their subsequent life. But have our prize winners done as much for the public as it has a right to expect? That the men who have won scholastic distinction at Harvard have later won more than their proportionate share of honor in the outside world has been shown by Professor Lowell's investigations. Though this is equally true in other colleges, the proportion is not nearly so decisive as it should be.

If the prize winners of the college today are the strong men of the nation tomorrow, the strong men of the college tomorrow will all want to be prize winners. When that consummation is reached, and not until then, will intellectual ambition and life come to its own as the dominant element in a university of free and self-directing students, anxious to prepare themselves for the citizenship of a free and self-directing state.

The complete list of awards is given on another page of the CRIMSON.