IT'S A WISE CHILD

Yale's stormy petrels, whose shrill cries have lately uncovered many sins, have been busy unearthing new terrors beneath Harkness Gothicana. One of the latest skeletons in the new cupboard is traditional "Tap Day" which for some time has been the occasional target of campus with as well as of crusading journalism of both conservative and radical timbre. "The Alumni Weekly" demanding a new society system based on the new housing conditions strikes at the method of soliciting membership as being the most demoralizing of the old ways. "The Harkness Boot" printed an article entitled "The Elks in Our Midst" beneath the title of which there is surely no need to go. Tap Day is one with Freshman fraternities and fence rushes. According to a letter in the "Daily News" it is "obsolete as the antimacassar, the wall motto and the works of Sarah Orne Jewett." In a word, "Tap Day" and the ritual of secrecy appears in the light of the new maturity childish, sophomoric; and ridiculous.

Sophistication, a quality of which the modern undergraduate is supposedly proud, has been defined largely by the things which are not done. Among those who so sternly put away childish things the term has come to represent a kind of blank facial water-mark, a certain disinterested preciosity, a docile decency toward reform, and a super-bred horror of the "collegiate." Yet in course of time, it must be pointed out that sophistication is not defined by the things which are not done, but rather by the things which are not done seriously.

The history of those traditions, about which our less enlightened fathers would become pleasurably reminiscent it they were not afraid of the laughter of the kindergarden, is brought to mind by the premonition that Yale's "Tap Day" yesterday is perhaps its last. All pros and cons of its observance aside, it seems unfortunate that college traditions of that type should be taken so seriously as to require abolishment. The presence of such social amenities would form a pleasant part of college life if sophistication were not swallowed so naively. When the collegian grows cynical about his cynicism, more distrustful of his irony, and more worldly than his worldliness he will live of being smart in the old way and take up shorts, roller skating, marbles, and go from house to house impishly ringing door-bells under the guise of a New Radical Movement.