STATESMEN TRAINED AT OXFORD UNION; SOCIALISM UPHELD HERE TWO YEARS AGO

Although the Harvard team will be upholding the negative side in the debate tonight in Symphony Hall, the University has gone on record, in the only other debate held here on the same question in recent years, as being Socialist in sentiment. In the spring of 1924, by a vote of 26 to 19, those present at a meeting of the Debating Council in the Union, held that Socialism is the goal of economic evolution.

The debate two years ago came on top of open discussion in the CRIMSON by University professors of the merits of Socialism as an economic theory. Professor O. M. W. Sprague '94, Edmund Converse Professor of Finance and Banking in the University, declared that "Socialism makes a most unsatisfactory subject for a debate, in college or elsewhere. The subject is altogether too large and too vague to be covered adequately in a debate."

Socialists Called Rebels

"What I favor," said Professor A. B. Hart '80, in a similar statement to the CRIMSON, "is open discussion of a Socialistic Community. For socialism cannot stand up against open discussion." Professor T. N. Carver, David A. Wells Professor of Political Economy in the University, sided with Professor Sprague and characterized as "temperamental rebels" those people who advocate the establishment of a Socialistic form of government, or who contend that Socialism is the goal of economic evolution.

Moving Towards Socialism

"It is much safer to observe than to predict," said Professor A. N. Holcombe '06, Professor of Government, when asked for his opinion on Socialism, "but we seem to be moving in that direction. Three hundred years ago it would have been regarded as the product of an extremely socialistic imagination, if one were to predict a government like the present one in this country."