Pig Wit

The Harvard Lampoon, whose curious conception of humor managed to precipitate the present state of armed new trality between Harvard and Princeton, has with astonishing ineptitude managed to revive the scrubwoman controversy just after the fund raised by a group of alumni to pay their back wages had succeeded in removing the matter from the field of, as the liberal journals call it, public discussion. It appears that the Lampoon has published a cartoon representing the scrubwomen as having a riotous spree on the proceeds of the money paid them at Christmas.

Such Cruel and heavy-footed humor needs no comment unless that supplied by Pope to the effect that "gentle Dulness ever loves a joke." But a reader of the Boston Transcript has made a comment which has some merit. The comment was that the offense of the Lampoon's editors was a natural consequence of the Harvard administration's "policy of aristocratic and contemptuous indifference toward a group of unfortunate workers." After all, a university administration which has been content to evade and becloud a plain issue like the requirements for scrubwomen's wages under the State law and to make it necessary for a group of sensitive graduates to raise by public subscription money which the university really owed to these workers cannot complain if its undergraduate humorists adapt their wit to an official indifference better described as "contemptuous" than "aristocratic."

Before everybody gets too mad about it and follows the suggestion of State Representative Niland, of East Boston, that Harvard be punished by having its buildings taxed, a plea in extenuation might be offered in the fact that Harvard's "goodies" have been conventionally represented for years in the Lampoon as elderly harridans not above snitching a nip of the marster's gin. Still, even this might not be regarded in some circles as so very extenuating after all. --Baltimore Sun.