MANHANDLING SIMS

"Begs Cambridge men not to mob Sims", reads a caption in yesterday's paper. But the circumstances are not so alarming as they might seem; the Admiral is not threatened with the fate of "Pussyfoot" Johnson. If he is manhandled at all, it will be because the over-enthusiastic Englishmen of Cambridge have once again forgotten their sense of propriety. The Senior Proctor, who, it would seem, is the University's chief guardian of manners, has written to an undergraduate weekly, reminding the students that two years ago they "did in fact cause inconvenience and embarrassment to certain distinguished soldiers and sailors by pressing on their procession, clambering on their carriages, and manhandling the most distinguished of them." He asks them merely to offer "a welcome altogether dignified and altogether appropriate."

Evidently American and British hospitality are not so widely divergent after all. We have always been taught to think the British reserved and non-committal, and have rather prided ourselves on cur furious hospitality and careless assumption of familiarity--the traits with which Dickens drew Colonel Diver. The "man on the street" may still up-hold these traditions, but with the colleges it is apparently otherwise. The supposedly staid Cantabrigians are the ones who clamber over carriages, while with all its Americanism Harvard has never been known to cause its visitors any strain other than that upon the eardrums. In spite of the "inconvenience and embarrassment", however, over-hospitality certainly has its advantages. Admiral Sims, or any other famous American who goes to Cambridge cannot help but feel flattered by the fact that British enthusiasm has taken its mask off to welcome him.