Reflections on Violence

Three times this past week a few pawky undergraduates have poured from their rooms to answer that delicious call of "Rinehart" as it carried to them on warm evening breezes through half-opened windows. In their breasts burned the spirit of spring-riot.

But once they had run whooping and shouting from their dorms, these intrepid few, this little band of men, found themselves alone, unsupported by their fellows. Little wonder that they broke and dispersed when confronted by the force of organized police action with all the power that it commands--the seized bursar's card, the Dean's office disciplinary action.

In this undergraduate timorousness can be seen the flickering of that flame which once burned behind the barricades, that flame which John Locke ennobled into the right of revolution, and that flame which has swept generations of Harvard men out of their stuffy rooms on warm spring evenings and across Cambridge Common to set up tumult and din in the Radcliffe quad.

If freedom is to live long in this world, and if the Radcliffe girl is to continue to experience each spring the thrill of the Sabine women, flat flame must not be allowed to die.