HART AND CARVER DIFFER IN INTERPRETING POLL

A canvas of the faculty on a small scale indicated that the CRIMSON's move to make collegiate opinion on the liquor question a known quantity is looked on with approval, but that opinions differ as to the inferences to be drawn from the recently concluded poll.

"Certainly the poll can do no one any harm." Albert Bushnell Hart '80, Eaton Professor of the Science of Government Emeritus, told a CRIMSON reporter, "and it is of use to know how many of your neighbors think with you. But I must say that my reaction to the results of the balloting is a keen disappointment in seeing that college men are not willing to forego the doubtful pleasure of becoming 'tight' in order that the community as a whole may benefit.

"I am afraid the poll shows that there is more drinking now than when I was an undergraduate. I knew personally almost every man in my class of 250, and very few of them had the reputation of being 'soaks'".

Long and Short Run Statistics

"Remember the age of college men in interpreting this poll," T. N. Carver, David Wells Professor of Political Economy cautioned a CRIMSON reporter. "Undergraduates range in age roughly from 18 to 25. In 1920 when the country was very 'dry' as a result of strict war-time prohibition, the undergraduate must have been between 8 and 15 years old. Hence those who voted on Tuesday and Wednesday formed their first impressions of the liquor situation at the exact period which wets choose as a starting point for their misleading statistics. By way of illustration, in 1911 there were somewhat more than four deaths per 100,000 due to alcoholism; in 1920 the dryest period in history, the figures were a little more than one per 100,000; now the death rate for that number attributable to alcoholism is 3.4. We must look at the pre-war years, as so many wets are unwilling to do, in order to form a just estimate of the situation.

"I therefore feel that the results of the poll show only the sentiments of a class not well acquainted with earlier conditions, and do not warn of any nation-wide landslide toward repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, which will never come.

"The colleges want modification. Look at our dry laws, evil as they may be in some ways, from the standpoint of success in fighting drunkenness, and they show up in a better light, England."