SPARTA, ILLINOIS

Last night's "Transcript" contained an editorial commending in no uncertain terms the virile, even Spartanesque plea of the "Chicago Tribune" that the next Army-Navy game be played in that city. "Chicago is becoming a center of organized pacifism . . . which works against the military training camps, undermines military training in these schools and colleges: it has a sentimental disregard for the real causes of war, but it is effective." Thus speaks the old army spirit in the middle west. And the "Transcript" echoes the following:

"It is to counteract this insidious propaganda that this patriotic journal would take these young men west and exhibit them as an offset to the cheap jeers and unintelligent opposition' which characterize pacifist procedure." Thus it is evident that at least two prominent American journals see in a "boast of heraldry" and its accompanying "pomp of power" the renascence of middle western morale. Yet does not this savor a bit of "unintelligent opposition" to the active desire of the people of the western world that there exist a real appreciation of the vitality of peace.

There are extremists is every cause. And pacifism has gained a connotation too far removed from that which it should unquestionably possess. But this parading of the West Point regiment and the mid-shipmen also bears the stigma of a certain false valuation. Not by parading either war or peace, but by understanding both can the citizens of the lake city improve their morale. And in commending such a parade the eastern press merely adds to the popular misconception of modern issues of international intellectual and morale progress.

No one wants Chicago to become a city of inane and listless dilettantes in living. But no one can believe that one football game by service elevens will prevent that surely improbable misfortune. The more sane thinking done both there and here the fewer displays of peace profiteers or war worshippers will be necessary. And until the advent of that sane thinking the displays should at least be unheralded.