"Harvard, Consult Thyself"

Is sass ever salutary? No man can feel altogether sure of the answer. But the editors of the Harvard Crimson offer a bit of sass today which may go down in the history of undergraduate journalism as the most epicurean of its kind ever known. The Crimson remarks that Councillor Fitzgerald, in his claim that the co-operative agreement between the Boston Public Library and the Harvard Business Library violates the constitutional anti-aid amendment "seems to have scored a point." And the paper continues: "Harvard has been particularly unfortunate in its attempted mergers for some time. The proposed consolidations of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and of the Divinity School and Andover Theological Seminary, were both quashed of Supreme Court decisions as illegal or unconstitutional. In the present instance again though minor in importance legal facts have apparently been overlooked or not given sufficient consideration. In a university, possessing one of the greatest law schools in the world the repetition of these slips is strangely anomalous."

Here no allowance is made for the fact that in any weighty matter of law or equity, an uncertainty of opinion may arise even after the greatest professional authorities have been consulted and that this uncertainty may inevitably continue until the courts, in the course of formal proceedings, have pronounced themselves on the matter at issue. Neither is there any reason made manifest why Councillor Fitzgerald's view of the unconstitutionality of the Harvard Boston co-operative agreement should necessarily be accepted as correct until the particular question now raised has been judicially determined. But, by and large, as one more notable entry in the annals of undergraduate journalism, the editors of the Crimson have "runs the bell" most gayly and gallingly. --The Boston Transcript.