ESCAPE OR PRIVILEGE

Mr. Hammond, in a letter published elsewhere in this column, feels that the "one primary issue" in connection with inter-House eating is the "bearing of eating in the House upon the creation of a corporate personality in the House." He fears that the system right be used by narrow groups "to avoid eating in the House by spending the weekly quota upon guests." The desirability of House corporate personality can be much exaggerated; yet if the fears expressed are well-founded, they constitute a just objection to the plan.

But certainly here "imaginings are...worse than the reality." There is, in the first place, a considerable inertia inducing men to eat in their own House. Any narrow eating club would find the discrepancies as to the members' 11 and 12 o'clock classes standing in the way of regular gatherings. And should a student fill his quota by being host, say, to three visitors on three occasions, he would find himself pressed financially unless he in turn were regularly invited out by his guests, an unlikely and inconvenient procedure. Inter-House eating was originally proposed by the CRIMSON not on the theory that eating in the several Houses was a distasteful process which their residents would wish to escape, but with the feeling that friends in different Houses should be enabled to eat occasional meals together, unhampered by financial restrictions and the obvious embarrassments involved.