Feather for Harvard

Proud is Harvard of sons who have become famed financiers and economists, stalwart foundation piles of the U. S. timocracy and foreign financial affairs. Among them are: John Pierpont Morgan (1889); Thomas William Lament (1892), onetime Harvard Overseer, Morgan partner; Banker George Fisher Baker Jr. (1899); Frank William Taussig (1879), political economist; Thomas Nelson Perkins (1891), U. S. alternate at the Paris Reparations Conference (1929); Seymour Parker Gilbert (LL. B., 1915), Agent General for Reparation Payments (since 1924); Jeremiah Smith Jr. (1892), League of Nations Commissioner General for Hungary (1924-26) in charge of its financial reconstruction. Last week was added another feather in Harvard's economic cap: Oliver Mitchell Wentworth Sprague, Harvard graduate (1894), Converse professor of banking and finance, sailed quietly abroad to confer with Governor Montagu Collet Norman of the Bank of England. Expected upshot of the visit: Professor Sprague may become the liaison officer between the Bank of England and the German Reichsbank, the Bank of France, the U. S. Federal Reserve Bank, the Bank of International Settlement.

Although not a practicing financier, Professor Sprague has served as a Federal Reserve Bank adviser. Last year he bitterly attacked the Federal Reserve system for its failure to make a more substantial raise in the rediscount rate. During the War he advocated direct taxation so that the inflation that follows wartime borrowing might be alleviated. In 1918 he went to Washington with the Council of National Defense to work out reconstruction problems.

An authority on the historicity of finance, he has written History of Crises Under the National Banking System, Banking Reform in the United States, Theory and History of Banking. From 1905 to 1908 he was a professor of economics at the Imperial University of Tokyo.

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