THE LAST LAUGH

One sighed a little, perhaps, at the transitoriness of all things when the first knell of all the college humor in College Humor was pealed. Eight comics of the West Coast, led by the Stanford Chaparral and the California Pelican, made declarations of independence announcing that because the great faith of humor had been broken and the college campus represented as a place of flasks and caresses, they would no longer permit College Humor to reprint their funnin.'

But the powers that make the world pay to laugh allow no national tradition to die quickly, least of all one so bone of their flesh. And America's fond tolerance of collegiatism, if its cause were removed, might bring psychological chaos in its wake. Moreover, it is believed that through John Held alone do youth and age alike recollect emotion in tranquility. To prevent the catastrophic shock of sudden vanishing, as well as for auld lang syne, haven was furnished collegiatism--in the back pages of Judge.

Here, defended from the march of progress by the sturdy barrier of Judge, Junior, the good old customs will go on. What does it matter if the authors are strayed revellers, what if the number is diminishing of those who still care enough to illuminate their college, their class and their own family name with the last glints of a faded splendor?

America might have been spared an anachronism if the college comic had either cut collegiatism from its pages in the beginning, or let fly the first stones where they would have done the most good. Now it is too late. While the death struggle goes into its last horrible stages one is struck less by the pathos of it all, than by its inherent hopelessness.