THE DEVIL'S ADVOCATE

In the days when the great schoolmen of the thirteenth century waged hotly contented theological battles through the monasteries on the number of angles who could dance on the point of a needle or the physical relation of Hell to Heaven the proposed canonization of a pious son of he Church always required the appointment of a "devil's advocate" to take up the verbal cudgels for the unpopular side of the argument. This until the connotation changes, will be much the position of the Conservative wing of the newly formed Harvard Debating Union. The present generation shied at the word conservative as a skittish horse from a piece of newspaper, and with as much reason.

But unpopular or not the Conservative Club and the Debating Union, of which it is one unit, if big enough in outlook and broad enough in foundation, have the opportunity to render a great service to the university and to the country. The time is past when college men can sit back above and apart from the rest of the world, to graduate and "go into" cotton, or steel, or architecture.

Mr. Edison has expressed in no uncertain terms his opinion of the college man in overalls; any ward "boss" will be equally frank abut the college man in politics, and both are in large measure justifies. The men with A and B minds who are content to slide comfortably through college with a "gentleman's mark", C Taking interest in their activities their athletics and nothing else, are the same men who will be equally content twenty years from now to slouch comfortably at roller-top desks behind six-inch cigars.

To expect revolutionary changes of the Debating Union is of course absurd. It is handicapped by the lack of tradition and precedent which has more than once proved fatal to undergraduate innovations. But its foundation gains strength from the formation of two opposing wings entirely outside of American political party affiliations. The Liberal side, represented in the Progressive wing, has already been successful in arousing interest. It remains for the Conservative wing so to organize its efforts, that it will draw out the support of the large group of natural conservatives in the University.

The success or failure of the Debating Union will depend entirely upon the strength or weakness of its support. But if it succeeds only in stirring up a few of the undergraduates who "find they haven't got time to follow the papers", it will have been well worth the attempt.