Temperance a Personal Question.

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Does not the question of beer at class smokers call for a little more discrimination than some of your correspondents have employed?

The men who protest against the beer are not engaged in a vigorous attempt to keep from drinking it themselves. They could do that without all these letters. Obviously they are trying to reform their neighbors, and to force all the members of the University to share their own abstemiousness. Granting that beer is harmful, there would remain some question of the wisdom of this proceeding in a University that attempts to train men for a life where most people are necessarily run by themselves and not by various self appointed supervisors.

But when to all this is added the fact the prohibition in question would not even discourage, let alone prohibit, with Boston seven minutes away, the wisdom of the proceeding seems more than doubtful. It is commonly believed by those who ought to know that the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, with the best intention in the world, caused a great increase in vice and drunkenness in the United States Army, by securing the abolition of the "canteen."

Why not try to make beer-drinking a virtue, rather than a vice? Perhaps we should find it not so harmful that way, after all. I hasten to claim disinterestedness by adding that I loathe the taste of beer. W. '15.