The Rock Island Argus And Daily Union

Greenwich and Public Service.

Announcement is made of the acceptance of a $1,000,000 endowment offered by Charles Garland to The American Fund for Public Service. It is stated that the fund is to be administered by a group of Greenwich villagers. Little in the way of public service has come out of Greenwich village except bobbed hair and a mysterious fire that destroyed some of the tea houses. Some worthwhile works of art had their inception there and a few were finished within the Bohemian confines of the district. The worst feature about the endowment fund is its origin. Garland became a free-thinker at the age of 22 to meet the exigencies of his conduct after he had deserted his wife and two children because they failed to welcome a soul mate into his home. Tainted money is an obviously foolish phrase, but money that comes with a sentimental heritage is likely to be used in furtherance of doctrines that caused its donor to give it away.

The group's beginning is not auspicious from another standpoint. The incorporation of the organization to administer the funds was secured in Delaware, where, according to the founder, the laws are less exacting than those of New York. A supposedly philanthropic organization that is forced to go outside its own state to get the blue sky has much to explain. Greenwich village, with its follies and foibles, is doubtless a good place for adolescent artists and thinkers who weather a certain radical storm in their lives. Their serious work, however, probably will be done in an apartment house in town or on a farm in the middle west, far from the distraction and intellectual always of a Bohemia that depends upon a philosophy of laissez faire in morals and art.

The acceptance of a $1,000,000 fund by Greenwich for Greenwich villagers looks like a piece of publicity that will make