The 200

At Williamstown, Mass., 200 persons, including not a few personages (TiME, July 28), were ushered to seats of privilege in Chapin Hall. There was just room for them all. Some were bearded, some were bald; all looked interested. They were the chosen few of more than 1,000 who had applied to Chairman Harry Augustus Garfield, President of Williams College for membership in the fourth annual session of the Institute of International Politics. How, why, by whom the 200 were selected were matters for conjecture. But there they sat, wise men from far and near; and Dr. Garfield mounted the platform to welcome them.

It was not theirs, said he, to inaugurate a program, nor to wield the stamp of approval on others' programs. It was theirs to help the U. S. decide whether or not to " pursue the old paths of local, so-called national self-interest or to venture upon the highway of international cooeperation."

The first to speak was Sir Valentine Chirol, onetime foreign Editor of The London Times and Royal Commissioner on Indian Public Service. His theme was The Reawakening of the Orient. Said he: " Never before has the white man stressed the color bar as he does today -- never before has the Orient denied his claim to racial superiority as it does today. . . . Hostility to all foreigners has never been so deliberately and insolently displayed as it is today."

Richard Henry Tawney, economic henchman of Ramsay MacDonald, reviewed the British Labor movement: "We may be on the verge of another watershed, analogous to that of the Reform Bill, whence new streams will descend to carve English political scenery into new shapes."

Using figures that curled into space like the tail of the mouse in Alice in Wonderland, Dr. Henry Pratt Fairchild, social economist of New York University, speculated with his hearers upon the world's population at the end of the 20th Century, at the end of 100 centuries.

Louis Aubert, onetime political Editor of the Revue de Paris, spoke of seeing new days for Europe just ahead-Russia recognized, French political genius by U.S. intervention, Germany reinstated.

Between orations in Chapin Hall, the members went off in little knots to put their heads together over Round Tables.