WITNESS DESCRIBES CONDITIONS

"Before you I stand, a student, starving while attending school. Starvation has forced me to pick from garbage cans pieces of herring, and to eat hay and pieces of paper to satiate the guawing pangs of hunger." Professor S. Ralph Barlow '08 of Smith College yesterday gave a CRIMSON reporter the above state- ment, made to him by a Russian student, as an illustration from his own experience of the plight of students in European universities. For ten years Professor Harlow was a professor in Smyrna, and during the last three years he has been in charge of the Student Friendship Fund in Asia Minor.

In describing the conditions which he has observed, Professor Harlow said: "I have seen countless students, many of them dressed in patched and tattered army uniforms, with clothes fit only for the warmth of a summer day, all through the countries of the Balkans, central Europe, and Asia Minor. Their faces are usually pinched with cold and hunger; in many of the student countries I have found tuberculosis prevalent. In Russia alone last summer there were more than forty thousand students and professors lacking warm clothes or sufficient food to keep them, above the starvation level. What must be their condition today in the middle of a bitter Russian winter?

"It seems to me that for the young men of America who have escaped so easily the stern and cruel demands which the long war years and the cruel days that have followed have brought upon the students of Europe, there is a challenge to sacrifice and to share somewhat these terrific burdens. This is a duty which Harvard men must not continue to deny as she has in the past three years.