Exit Athletics.

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

The Student Council has an excellent opportunity to support its recent appeal for the Reserve Officers Training Corps. At the same time it can, by a single act, do more to crystallize sentiment in the College behind President Lowell's appeal of Tuesday night, than it could by weeks of exhortation. It can, moreover, set an example to the country at large that may be greatly needed in the future. And it can provide more convincing evidence to show our support of its plea for universal military service than a hundred delegations to Washington could furnish.

The Student Council should immediately pass a resolution suspending all athletics at Harvard and cancelling all engagements for intercollegiate contests until the "imminence of war" is past. In the Faculty did this it would be considered unwarranted oppression, and would fail of its intended moral effect. If we do it ourselves it will add, directly and indirectly, more men to the training unit than any other possible action, and its example will be felt throughout the country. It is easy enough to call others to make sacrifiees for their duty--it is simpler, but rarer, to make the sacrifices oneself.

It is clearly impossible for a man to do justice to his studies, the training unit and athletics as well. The authorities have done their part by crediting us for the academic work of Military Science. They might well have insisted that we first sacrifice our "outside acti- vities"; but what they did not see fit to demand we should freely grant.

Unless we do our share now, when we have the opportunity to be of most service, we shall have as little right in the future to call others "slackers" as we had in the past when we talked of the English football players who should have been at the front. It is a clear case of "put up or shut up" for Harvard.

As Mr. Britling says: "What the devil are we doing at hockey? We ought to be drilling and learning to shoot."  R. L. WOLF '15.