University's Attitude Defended.

(We invite all men in the University to submit communications on subjects of timely interest, but assume no responsibility for sentiments expressed under this head.)

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

In your columns of yesterday Mr.Isadore Lazarus 1L rises to the Wilsonian cause with much enthusiasm, if perhaps with less judgment. Gaily starting with three premises that perhaps even the most sanguine practical Democrat would admit of doubtful possibility, he arrives at a conclusion which condescendingly damns the whole University as an object of national ridicule. That Harvard has been damned before by more powerful and more virulent critics than Mr. Lazarus, and still exists in what we who are fond of her are pleased to believe it a most flourishing state, is perhaps some consolation.

Mr. Lazarus finds in the recent balloting in the University for Hughes a "strange distinction" from the results throughout the country. If Mr. 'Lazarus had followed with even the most cursory eye the results of other straw ballots held in colleges and by journals throughout the country, he would have been not so ready to state universally that all results had been in favor of Wilson. Results have varied with the section of the country, pretty much as those who are somewhat wiser than your correspondent of yesterday realize they must vary when the final test comes. No all-embracing Wilson victory may be postulated, no, not even by Mr. Lazarus.

His second premise, that Hughes sentiment in the University is "pronouncedly militaristic and pro-Ally," whereas in the rest of the country it is pro-German, is less than the pro-Greman, is less than the proverbial half-truth. If by militarism he means an adequate state of national preparation against the calamity of war, then he is right. But pro-Ally sentiment is in no manner of means associated with the Hughes cause in Harvard. They may overlap; they are not co-terminous; they surely have no relation. That is a fact so patent that it scarcely needs statement, and I am sure that a much less acute observer than Mr. Lazarus believes himself to be would see that. The statement that Hughes draws his support throughout the country from the Anglophobes is plainly taken from the New York Times, which persists in an outworn myth in spite of the activities of some Hughes supporters, as Mr. Roosevelt, and in spite of the fact that it has no political significance, either practical or ethical.

That Hughes advocates in the University are urging "every subject on earth" but the question of a high protective tariff might well go back to 1896, and the good old days of high tariff and low. If Mr. Lazarus seriously believes that the "sole visible and apparently eternal" question of a high tariff is the only one with which the community is concerned in the present campaign, then it were far better for him to take up his political primer, his newspaper or his train of common sense, and learn what confronts the country. Let us hope that there are few men of the requisite age and the supposed discretion for voting, either college trained or not, either Democrats or Republicans, who believe that the sole issue is that of tariff. Shades of Jefferson Davis! Why not drag up states' rights?

On these three premises Mr. Lazarus builds, like an edifice of straw or a house of sand, the conclusion that "Harvard University, judged by its majority, is exposing itself to the ridicule of America by taking a political stand based on puerile prejudice, mob imitation and unreasoning ignorance of economic history." These the premises! This the conclusion!

The majority of Harvard University may be well pleased that the portion of America represented by Mr. Lazarus finds itself and object of ridicule by him. J. T. ROGERS '18.