HOAGLAND DECRIES "NEW PURITANISM" OF CHASE

The following review of the May number of the Advocate was written for the Crimson by Hudson Hoagland a graduate student and assistant in the department of psychology at the University.

An article by the Reverend J. Frank Chase, secretary of the New England Watch and Ward Society, in the May number of the Harvard Advocate, summarizes the aims and spirit of what he calls "The New Puritanism". After an impassioned eulogy of Old Puritanism and its fruits, the article exhorts us to consider the paramount importance of reviving Social, Civic and Individual Righteousness, spelled with capital first letters, quite as if these virtues had long since ceased to be.

We are informed that the New Puritanism seeks by legal means to suppress corrupting agencies and to crystallize in- to laws the old ideas of our Puritan forebears. Crimes of vice, accordingly should be on a par with crimes of violence in the eyes of the law since the former so often, cause the latter.

Lascivious literature and suggestive art are special menaces to public morals because of their effect on innocent and susceptible youth. We are warned, for example, that "a whole High School class of unwedded mothers may be the result of a lascivious book." Mr. Chase further greatly deplores the inadequacy of the law regarding matters of censorship. One gets the impression that these reformers are a very serious people quite lacking in a sense of humor.

Crusaders Seldom Artists

It seems to the present writer that Mr. Chase is correct in, regarding much of cheap and obscene literature as socially undesirable. However, his suggested solution of the problem is most unsatisfactory, and the problem itself appears, to be ponderously exaggerated by so much trumpeting and gnashing of teeth.

Men fired by the crusading spirit for