TONIC FOR DEBATING

If restlessness and an eager desire to experiment are tokens of returning health, then collegiate debating has shaken itself free of the lethargic morans associated with the post war years. For several months Harvard has been experimenting cautiously and with some success with the Debating Union. Now Dartmouth and Yale simultaneously announce startling departures in American college debating procedure.

Yesterday L. W. Taylor and M. R. Preuss of Dartmouth clashed informally on the subject, "Cancellation of Interallied Debts" before the Rotary Club of Keene, N. H. They are the first of many emissaries to be sent from the halls of Hanover to Rotary and other similar club organizations throughout New England. The theory of the new plan is to supply the public with well informed speakers and at the same time to bring the undergraduate "to a place of concrete ideas which are brought out by the pertinent questions of the audience."

In contrast with this purely native development is the proposed importation intact of the Oxford Union to New Haven. A mass meeting last night was to consider the amalgamation of the Yale Debating Union, the Liberal Club, the Yale Court and three or four other similar organizations into one body. Since the move is sponsored by the Presidents of the several organizations it seems reasonably certain of fulfillment.

Both the Yale Union and the Dartmouth Debaters on Circuit "will sound the death knell to formal and intercollegiate debating" according to simultaneous announcements from both Hanover and New Haven. Prophesies like that are notoriously easy to make and do not count for much in themselves. What is far more important at present than the relative merits of the two proposals, upon which no judgment can fairly be pronounced so early, is the incidental publicity which they will afford to collegiate debating. Space, headlines, discussion, all these are blessings which will give no negligible impetus to a languishing art.