COMPULSO BY SOUP

Row many children have wept at the sight of poor little Oliver Twist dragging his emaciated shanks across Dickens's pages to plead for more soup! Or have wailed to see Jackle Coogan doing the same across the silver shest. The modern Oliver asks once and if the soup is not forthcoming, he lets drive at the cook with the soup bowl. At Yale there are five hundred modern Oliver in the freshman class. For some time they have been writing polite protests against the rule that freshmen must eat at the Commons, along with complaints about the quality and quantity of the food. Politeness availing nothing, they finally resorted to force and sabotage. Since they had not enough bread, they hurled what they had; since dishes were bare, they broke them. Finally they raised their Jolly Roger, a sign on which a skull and bones had been drawn with the epitaph underneath: "This man ate at Commons." While one must make liberal allowance for mob contagion and the human weakness for kicking, yet when five hundred students join their voices in the chorus of woe there must be something to cause the ferment.

The burthen of the outcry seems to be: "Down with college paternalism." Yale's Dining Hall has been one of its irritation-points. A year or two ago it was renovated; an effort was made to popularize it again with all the students; and the compulsory Freshman Commons became a corollary of the much-heralded plan to bind up the fragments of the first-year class. Apparently the plan has not been received with complete enthusiasm. With antiauthority-interference thickening, the New Haven atmosphere, it is natural that complaints should be raised against the prescribed physical diet as well as against a spiritual or a mental one.

But after all, the well-fed man is a well-contented man, and the abstraction of personal freedom would hardly have been sufficient provocation. It was probably a bread-riot as much as a revolt against tyranny. Side-long glances may be expected from the management of our own Freshman Dining Halls. The Yale precedent is not reassuring. A plate of tepid soup, like a more famous dish of tea, contains the germs of revolution.