THE SPIRIT OF SUPPORT.

Such a display of irresistible enthusiasm as we witnessed last evening at the football mass meeting in the Union is one of the best possible omens for the success of the team against Yale on the ninteenth. It was unusual, spontaneous, convincing, exactly the sort of driving spirit for which many of us have long envied our greatest opponent. Indifferent, indeed, must be the graduate or undergraduate who was not literally lifted off his feet and swung into the spirit of the meeting by the stirring speech of Coach Haughton.

Yet nothing could have been better timed than the warning there voiced. As Mr. Haughton said, "The present situation is very serious for the Harvard team ... in that up to the present we have continued to win our games by a safe margin, while Yale has twice been defeated and once tied." Judging from comparative scores and an impartial consideration of the two teams at present, clearly Harvard's greatest enemy at New Haven will be over confidence.

But the Yale team which will face Harvard on the nineteenth will, in all probability, be composed of vastly different material from that which line up against Brown or even the team which will oppose Princeton next Saturday. This fact alone ought to suppress over-confidence. When we add that Yale has been known time and again to "come Back" even as late as the second half with the score 10 to 0 against her, there should not remain the least suspicion of overconfidence.

What we do need, however, and the more of it the better, is the spirit of support which characterized the mass meeting last evening, a spirit which cannot help making the team feel that the whole College is behind it, trying, as it succeeded in doing in 1908, to make the coaches "feel the success vibrations on the "sidelines." This sort of spirit is bound to win at New Haven.