GARGANTUAN FOLLY

Announcement was made yesterday at the first meeting of a French course that one of the basic books of the course, a French text of Rabelais, could not be imported into this country according to a recent interpretation of the law by the customs authorities. To gather sufficient volumes for the students enrolled in this course, the Harvard Co-operative Society was forced to scour book marts of the country for copies that had already been imported.

That the literal English translation of these very same adventures of Gargantua and Pantagruel which are barred in the original French version can be and are freely sold throughout the country apparently makes no difference to our hyper-paternalistic fatherland. The same inconsistency appeared in the recent barring of certain editions of Voltaire's Candide in Boston.

In Boston such stupid and unreasonable efforts to keep clean the public morals are unfortunately so, numerous that one folly more or less makes little difference, but the spectacle of a Bostonized United States is unpleasant and uninviting. It is by no means a wholly impossible outcome to the tendency which brought Prohibition to America.

The one consolation, though it, too, is depressing is that Yankee hypocrisy would be certain to allow us our books via the medium of a bootlegger. In that part of the world visible to the average Harvard student, Prohibition did little more than take drinking from the corner saloon and put it in the home, the college dormitories, and exclusive little clubs now known as speakeasies. True, it did slightly cheapen the quality and slightly increase the cost of liquor. Our libraries may someday be filled by methods not unlike the way we now fill our cellars.