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The press clipping printed below in quotation of one of the assistants in the library is hardly as conclusive as its manner would indicate. The CRIMSON of course has no pretension of passing an esthetic judgement on the Sargent murals, but the weight of opinion from such critics as Walter Pach quoted in these columns earlier in the year, coupled with the extreme reluctance of nearly all the Fine Arts department to comment officially on the paintings should justify the recent stand of this paper on the artistic phases of the controversy.

Others beside the CRIMSON have called the Widener murals glorified war posters, but hitherto these persons have avoided being heralded as boyish, mayhap because of their rather obvious graying hair. Few will question the aptness or the simile who have not been prepared for the first sight of these works by a careful instruction as to their hallowed origin.

The difficulty in finding anyone who can explain the hidden symbolism of the paintings prevents perhaps any indefensible comment upon the emotional result of careful attention to these decorations. The fact, however, that the recumbent figure in the left hand picture wears a helmet strikingly like that of a German infantryman and that standing over him there is an obvious Yankee doughboy clutching Victory and Death lends color to the theory that the natural effect should be one of intense sympathy for the American and something very like hatred for his slayer.

Admittedly a library is a place for the collection of the intellectual achievements of all races and all times. Admitted also is the fact that intense war patriotism and the sort of feelings inspired against an enemy, call them hatred or not as you will, are not only local but are remembered for a relatively short period. Anything which helps to maintain such feelings beyond the time that they are needed for the preservation of unity and national health may rightly be considered to jeopardize the cause of permanent peace. And indeed there would seem to be some ground for the opinion that there is an anomaly in decorating a permanent collection of the sum total of human intellectual progress with memorials to that spirit which in all ages has interrupted and perverted rational thought.