Debaters Trip Cambridge on American Revolution Topic

"Let them have the good will, but give us the decision," Edward F. Burke '50 pleaded toward the close of last night's Sanders Theater debate, and that's just what happened.

Arguing that the American Revolution was not a mistake the Debate Council won its first post-war international debate but the losing due from Cambridge University won the audience with jabs and quips on such American institutions as the drug store and the ball point pen, and kept the more serious-minded Americans searching for an issue to fight on.

Denzil K. Freeth, opening the British argument "that it would have been better for mankind if the American revolutionaries had stopped short of separation," said in his serious moments that Hitler would not have started World War II if the U.S. had not been a "semi-isolationist, independent" power that the Axis couud count out of a war.

The Only Way

J. Philip Bahn '49 began the home argument by stating that "there was no other way to get autonomy in 1776 or 1783" than outright revolution. There was no such thing as Dominion status then, he said, and America would not have become a great nation if it was not set "free of British restrictions" on industry and expansion.

Addressing himself to the "colonial rabble before me in this far-flung corner of the earth," be-whiskered George William Pattison, a veteran of the British Royal Dragoons, said that sticking with Great Britain would have given Louisiana to the U.S. for nothing, averted the Civil War, the spoils system and Tammany Hall, and remarked that if there had been no revolution "you would be able to make a decent cup of tea."

In the world situation today, he added, "we are all paying for the folly of George the Third."

Burke's speech exhibited the advantages which independence found for America. Extensive immigration, he said, would have been impossible under British rule, and America's technical know-how would have been retarded. This industrial efficiency, he said, "is a benefit to mankind."

In the final rebuttal, Pattison admitted that the Revolution was a turning point, but questioned whether that made it necessarily good. The U. S. "plundered" the continent, he claimed, and added that American Democracy had its roots in Locke and the British revolution of the 17th century. Even Watt, he said, "was neither Russian nor American."

The vote of the judges was two to one for Harvard