A Tip for Eliot House

(Ed. Note--The Crimson does not necessarily endorse opinions expressed in pointed communications. No attention will be paid to anonymous letters and only under special conditions, at the request of the writer will names be withheld.)

To the Editor of the CRIMSON:

Noting the reaction of the CRIMSON to the "high table" at Lowell House with some amusement and much sympathy, I venture to suggest as a friend that the situation has been misunderstood.

The dais is not essentially symbolic of dynastic pomp or ostentatious officialism. Far from it. On the dais the seated judge, almoner, or responsible arbiter of misapprehensions and maladjustments, king, president, or what not, escapes eclipse from the assemblage by persons standing in front.

Thus for all routine or long continued audience. There is nothing here peculiar to absolutism or democracy. Propriety in either case demands that climactic utterances be delivered standing.

The four inch dais in Lowell House has no sinister complexion. It is a gesture of humility. Terraces of greater or less elevation are used everywhere in the settings of domestic, public, and even agricultural improvements. Ostentation is symbolized by the reverse.

No one phrase has so inflamed the imaginations of mankind, from Babylon to the Abyssinia of Rasselas as "sunken gardens", which even in America are found on only a few of the most magnificent and sumptuous estates.

Inches here surpass fathoms of elevation. If the Lowell House dais had been a four inch depression instead, where dignitaries in dinner coats are served about a symbolic fountain of Florida water of five or ten watts even, the affront to democracy would have been extreme, and beyond measure regrettable.

The structural problem would have been difficult. The dais is laid on the common floor, and is easily removable at no cost.

The CRIMSON editors have overlooked one of the most important facts recently made public by the University, which explains the dais in a perfectly natural way. It appears that the entering class are nearly two inches taller than the previous generation, to which the high tablers of course belong.

Seated or standing on a level with the rest the "high tablers" accordingly would be obscured. The four inch dais merely compensates an equivocal detail, with a reasonable allowance for future growth.

If the revival of an ancient and outworn custom had been a motive, the same result might have been reached without a dais by lengthening the chair and table legs a couple of inches, and wearing pattens. In such case, the CRIMSON's strictures would have been justified, and the suspicion that Harvard democracy consists chiefly in affability toward properly accredited persons.

The dinner coats are purely educational. So, too, are red jackets, boots, saddles, and the paraphernalia of hunting. For the lack of these, many important citizens pass through life without acquiring horse manners, which approximate the minimum of indispensability.

Harvard's outlook is national. The cosmopolitan easterner little realizes how widely the dinner coat is unfamiliarized. A dozen years ago I hunted out an old dress suit for a party, and with a simple cloth mask passed totally unrecognized among a small group of western neighbors to whom I was as well known as the local postmaster.

I do not recall ever hearing a professor quick-named "high pockets", but many of Harvard's best and ablest men have been below even medium stature. As I look at it, the high tablers have approximated equality to an exquisite degree. Harrison Brown