WARS AND RUMORS OF WARS

Scarism has faintly made an entrance into the undergraduate conversations about the Sino-Japanese difficulties during the past days, while developments become increasingly critical in the East. Such mildly propagandist trends of thought will make little advance into the minds of students who reason out the relation which they bear to the problem at hand.

In the past weeks the newspapers of the country have capitalized to new extremes the difficulties that face the world community of nations in China today. Headlines are high; pictures of super-dreadnaughts begin to cover the front pages. All this is justifiable from the point of view of the newspapers. It is business to them, not government, or reason.

To what extent the present-day undergraduate allows the newspaper writers effectively to spread the doctrines of an impending war depends on the student. It is he who concludes from the pictures of our soldiery on duty in the Orient in 1927, and of massive members of our battle fleet, that war is just around the corner.

An equal propagandist is the conversational scarist, who peddles witticisms of drafts, who describes a feeling of boredom with academic life, and who pictures the great future of adventure and real service that comes with enlistment in an army in the Orient.

In England, according to reports, there is little excitement--less, it seems, than in the United States. Difference in the Eastern and Western interpretations of catastrophe makes what we might call war a bit of large-scale policing to the Orientals. It is intelligent to discuss the crisis in terms of proper proportion. It is unintelligent to become worked up over nothing more substantial than an impressively warlike front page, bearing antique military photographs and often pitifully weak news articles; all these appear under headlines that clearly stamp the issue at its true value.

In the last analysis the paper manifestations of nations are readily passed aside. Polls on disarmament, student international groups, and all the educational facilities that can be devised are able to do little. For the preservation of peace, a sane mental condition, void of scarism, but attempting to reach a sound opinion, is worth more than all the paper agreements that can be framed.