JOHN REED

John Reed's portrait now hanging in Adams House in another testimonial that Harvard is ready to house any of her sons who show themselves to have honorably lived up to her standards of truth and courage and devotion.. This principle war firmly and happily established when the names of the graduates who died fighting on the side of the central powers in the World War were placed in the Memorial Church alongside of those who fought for the allies.

Had the reactionaries then triumphed, and these names been excluded, Harvard would have been long in living down the just accusation that she hated her enemies more than she hated needless human slaughter. Similarly when redbaiters, more fanatical than any red, forget that they are first men, and that only second are they Liberal, Conservative, Red, Republican, or Democrat, then those immoderate haters only show the shallowness of their own humankind-ness.

Happy is it indeed that the wide comment occasioned by the hanging of this portrait of a Harvard graduate, painted by a Harvard graduate, and presented by a Harvard graduate, should be almost unanimously in praise of its acceptance by the University. As the Boston Herald puts it in an editorial quoted elsewhere in full in this issue. "A university as large as Harvard, with graduates scattered throughout the world and attached to all manner of political religions, and economic causes, cannot draw strict lines as to whom it will and will not cherish," on any basis of dogma.

The jealous insistence of the press on the justice and liberality of Harvard's action, and its insistance that this action does not imply any dogmatic bias is a good omen for the future of liberal universities in this country.