Middlebury register. (Middlebury, Vt.) 1886-1937, 1913-11-21
THE NEW VERMONT.

gives long and interesting account of
DR.. Thomas's Baccalaureate sermon of
last June. This plan for giving new
life to the Green Mountain State seems
to have aroused well-deserved attention
and the speech of President Thomas is
evidently being widely discussed:
John M. Thomas, president of Mid
dlebury college at Middlebury, Vt, has
quietly launched plan for social bet
torment which in scope and breadth of
vision is among the most interesting ex-
periments of the kind ever undertaken.
From the institution of which he is the
head, from "the little college among the d,
green hills" has already started slen-
der stream of young manhood and young
womanhood on a definite course, the
outcome of which may be nothing less
than the revtalizing of an entire Com
mon wealth.
Only handful of the recent gradu-
ating class of Middlebury have volun-
teered to begin the work in reponse
to an appeal made by President Thomas,
in which he analysed the conditions as
he sees them in Vermont. But he is
far from disappointed, for he recalls the
historic fact that little more than a
century has passed since a group of
students met beside a haystack near
Williamstown, Mass, to dedicate their
lives to carrying the Gospel to the IN
| e
augurating the foreign missionary
movement which has grown to vast
proportions in spite of what seemed to
be impossibilities at the outset.
He recalls further that something
more than fifty years ago the great
army of young men in the city of Lon
don who were employed in mercantile
and industrial establishments fired the
imagination of George Williams, and
that as a result Young Mems Christian
associations are found to-day in every
city of the world. The poverty and vice
of the Whitechapel district of the Eng
fish metropolis called forth the sacrifice
of the life of Arnold Toynbee, young
J Oxford graduate, and in hundred great
cities of the world social settlements are
to-day carrying on their uplifting work.
The millions who never entered
: church gripped the heart of William
{ Booth, and with his message he enlisted
an army which has covered the earth in
! its fight for the downtrodden.
: The president of Middlebury has de-
scribed the conditions in Vermont, es-
believes demand permanent remedy.
One of the oldest of the United States,
q State rich in agricultural possibilities,
one which holds exalted place in Ameri-
, can history, DR.. Thomas finds to have
been not merely standing still in popu-
O laton but for many decades retrograd-
: ing in matters of common education,
o spiritual development, religious effort
h and general uplift.
O He finds that in community after
community old homesteads have fallen
q inco decay, that many thousands of acres
of land once cultivated are now going
to waste, that there is no adequate edu-
n cationa training for the children and
that in such localities the people have
4 fallen into a state of apathy and almost
9 helpless encouragement.
o Notwithstanding such conditions, how
- ever, he looks below the surface and
% life are as solid as in the days of
= l775, when Ethan Allen and his Green
Mountain boys, unfiinchingly marched
. into Fort Ticonderoga and demanded
that the British surrender lin the name
4 of the Great Jehovah and the Cont
! mental Congress" He finds the spirit
b of Vermont life as unselfsh at bottom
"A as it was in the days of 1861, when it
~ contributed to the Union army greater
proportion of volunteer troops in re-
"a spect gifts population than any other
State. Confident of the sterling worth
of the people of Vermont and with full
knowledge of its latent wealth in farm
IS land, timber tracts, quarries and stock
X raising possibilities, President Thomas
lie is going forward with every hope OF
% success for the social service effort or
lie statewide basis, which he has in,
augurated at Middlebury.
III Census reports show that large
er proportion of.Vermont towns have wit
r messed aldiminution of population since
lie $780, Seven-eights of the municipali
n ties of the State have fewer people il
lie them to-day than they had at some
Is previous time. In ia towns, about
tn two thirds of the whole number, there
was larger population in 1850 thar
to in 1910. The entire State has had ar
lie increase of only about $4,000 people ir
1t the last eighty years, and whatever in
r. crease the State as whole has hat
nt in the lastf half century has been du.