THE AGE OF CONSENT

Although no official statement has been made, Harvard undergraduates may rest reasonably well assured that beer will not be sold in college dining halls. The moral implications of the sale of a "non-intoxicating" beverage have been only too prominent in the official mind; and since those bogies have been combined with a state law forbidding such sale to legal minors, it is safe to say that the administration will allow less vulnerable and consequently less scrupulous merchants on the Square to profit, without competition, from the Undergraduate Thirst.

It is no unwarranted assumption to state that, despite the best efforts of the police, beer will be sold in Cambridge either directly to, or for consumption by, minors. Beer is traditionally a college man's drink. And any merchant with a proper eye to his own interest will be none too anxious to require the display of birth certificates. Morally, moreover, the sale of beer to students, albeit minors, would be a move toward temperance in the college, would be rather more in keeping with the spirit of the present liquor legislation, one suspects, than are the widely flung photographs of hilarious elders justifying a new independence by faultless gluttony.

Until this restriction is removed, or altered to compare at least with the parallel rule regulating cigarette sales, to comply with Undergraduate desires, save perhaps to allow students to bring their own beer into the dining rooms. But if the purpose of the present legislation be to promote temperance and respect for law, the Massachusetts legislature has, from the undergraduate point of view, acted with the same hasty assurance and disregard for public opinion which graced the promulgation of the same virtues in 1920.