A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
T AM very glad to see the appeal of the retiring Vice- .1 Chancellor of Cambridge for the establishment of a Chair of American History at Cambridge. A historian himself, Mr. Benians speaks with special authority on such a subject, and he recalled a pertinent but generally forgotten fact when he mentioned that Cambridge, at the instigation of Dr. Alfred Marshall, included the history of the United States as a com- pulsory subject in the first part of the newly-founded Economic Tripos, but that without endowment for the necessary lecturers the project had to be abandoned. Oxford, thanks to Lord Rothermere's vision and generosity, already has such a chair, but it should be as essential a feature of both universities as the chairs of Ancient or Mediaeval or Modern History. Cam- bridge, moreover, which sent out John Harvard to found the university which bears his name in another Cambridge, has special reasons for making its full contribution to Anglo- American understanding—and anyone who thinks the Americans of 1941 can be understood without knowledge of the Americans of 1641 and 1741 and 1841 is calamitously mistaken. There is no better purpose to which that part of someone's private wealth at present producing income taxed at 19s. 6d. in the Li might be diverted.
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