THE PRESS

The severance of all athletic relationships between Harvard and Princeton, although accompanied during the past two weeks with many a bitter innuendo, may well mark a useful milestone in the progress of football, the game which caused all the trouble. For at the bottom of the break lie two important principles, new in the athletic management of universities, which the Harvard authorities had courage enough to advance and stand firm on. The first is the shortening of the football schedule: the second, abolition of a series of practically fixed games, each one of which was turning year by year into more of a Roman holiday, and the concentration of interest on a single final game. Both principles were based solely on the welfare of the players and undergraduates, more and more of whose energies and enthusiasms have been expended in the feverish excitement attending not one football game, but practically every game on the schedule.

That Princeton should have felt injured as the result of these policies, which lot her future schedule with Harvard uncertain, is unfortunate; but the manner and extent of the break were of her own choosing. A Harvard Lampoon editorial and murmurs of dirty football hardly entered into the situation except as the former furnished a convenient casus belli for the Princeton authorities. The breach was inevitable as long as Princeton insisted on being recognized as of equal importance with Yale, not can it be healed as long as this attitude prevails. However, the merits of the controversy are of small import compared with the value in forcing a new appraisal of the game of football judged from the point of view of the undergraduate, not the graduate who measures his college's prestige by the success of its football team. The Independent