NOW IT CAN BE TOLD

With the publication of each new scholarly inquiry into the origins of the World War, those whose memories go back to the fatal days of 1914 have a vivid example of the way in which disinterested study and perspective change history from the partisan scream of newspaper headlines to the weighted decisions of historians. It is evident that amid the confusion of reports and propaganda surrounding each day's news only with extreme difficulty can the layman arrive at anything like an unprejudiced opinion concerning the events which are taking place round about him. Nevertheless it is that very opinion which the average citizen does, and must, form which goes to play a subsequent and important role in the making of contemporary life. The task of the citizen faced with the riddle of current events is one of the major problems of democracy.

At best one can only speculate as to what historians twenty-five or fifty years hence will say concerning the first decade of National Prohibition. The only certainty appears to be that plenty of attention will be paid to a question that is engrossing a nation ten years after the court of supreme appeal supposedly once and for all settled the fate of John Barleycorn.

The undergraduate who has grown up under the prohibition regime has abundant opportunity to draw his own conclusions concerning the experiment in social reform. Whether he will agree with the final verdict of history is one thing, but there is little doubt about his being faced with indications of a problem which his father's effort to solve has only made more complicated.

How does the intelligent undergraduate accept this problem which in a single day envolves such a variety of news as greeted the breakfast table yesterday? There was the proposal by the President of the Carneigie Institute for a new national political party, the Liberal Party, to fight prohibition and other attacks on political and social liberty. Along side this dispatch, an account of a bill introduced in the New York State Legislature to give the state the right to buy and sell light wines and beer. On the next page, the story of Coast Guardsmen who, drunk on captured evidence, placed a "huge railroad switch tie on the tracks" just for a prank. On either side of this last bit of news, the protest of a New Jersey State Commission against the Volstead Act the demands of the Prohibition Commissioner for wood alchol poison in industrial alchol, and accounts of action to come before the House Judiciary Committee for the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment.

Not all yesterday's prohibition news is in that summary by any means, but enough to prove that prohibition, though settled at law by the peoples' representatives, is still a mooted point in the minds of the people themselves, in the face of such confusion as surrounds the Eighteenth Amendment, it is not to be wondered if the reaction of undergraduates towards the whole business is one of thorough disgust.