ICARUS & COMPANY

Actions and reactions make up the day's work, and also it would seem, constitute life's handicap, which is the necessity of choice. Yet it is possible that the series of alternatives makes for general satisfaction.

Close on the heels of the Bok Peace Plan, pacifism, and Sir Harry Lauder's plea for international friendship comes the opportunity to prepare for war in the offer made to undergraduates by the naval flying station at Squantum. That it is a generous offer there is no denying. It is also a wise one, from the point of view of preparedness. It aims to fit educated men as officers, and this can do the service no harm. It was only too obvious during the war that it was as impossible to make gentlemen by Act of Congress as it is to make Congress act as gentlemen. And if the thought of preparedness were limited to this there would be no clouds.

Yet it is evident by the signs that the world, in its intense modern fashion, having, due largely to Mr. Bok, just gone through a "Think-about-Peace" week is entering on a "Consider-the-next-War" week. Coincidently one reads that the army is about to test a new plane that carries enough bombs to demoralize a whole city; that the British air ministry is leaving nothing to chance in the perfection of the air defenses of London; and that the American navy is conducting manoeuvres on a grand scale.--All of which may be magnificent, but it is not peace.

What will follow next week? Possibly more peace--due this time to Premier Macdonald who rather milleniaristically states that the nations must disarm. Yet all points to another competition. The race is on. History sticks to its bad habit of repeating itself--and the punishment fits the crime.