HELL ON WHEELS

Sweeping down with more fury than the Assyrian, Colonel Apted has led his band of Yard police to a stirring triumph over the college bicyclers. Today Harvard is reviving the Magna Carta of Cambridge pedestrians, the Lowell law against bicycling in the Yard, and henceforth the hateful two-wheeler is banished from the highways and byways. No longer need walkers and truckers, freshmen and presidents, stand petrified with fright while the whirling dervish streaks by streaming dust and dirt on all who watch it pass. Nightmares and dreams of sudden death are over, and all's quiet along the Charles.

Yet on the morning after the full flush of victory some one must reckon up the bill, for, in sober deliberation, events once rosy take on the stark grimness of reality. True, dangers of the paths are now abolished, but at the sacrifice of an undergraduate prerogative which except for the heart-rending interregnum of the Lowell regime has lasted since Lallement got his patent in 1866. In the wink of an eye a tradition of three-quarters of a century is brought crashing to the ground.

Whatever its sins and indiscretions, the velocipede deserves no such tyrannical treatment. From Dunster House to Divinity the clicking of the chain and the whirring of the silver spokes are forever silenced, and Fascism has thrust its iron fist into the Yard for the first time. The insidious forces of United Shoe Machinery, General Motors, and Standard Oil, hurling the lie at those who said it couldn't happen here, have made a vital stab at the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity.

Democracy and bicycles are inseparable. Which are the bicycling nations in the world today? Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, England, the very sanctuaries of liberty! Who ever heard of a bicycle in Spain, Italy, Russia? The truth cannot be disguised. If nought else can avail, the Student Council must rush once more into the breach and pass a resolution advocating repeal of the tyrannical law.