Big Response To Price Cut

No one encourages democracy like Western Union encourages democracy. For the sake of an ideal--our heritage--the American dream--this little company has kindly offered to charge approximately half price for "personal opinion" messages to the President, Vice-President, or any Congressman. Since the recent change, the number of telegrams sent to Washington has increased enormously, said the young Cambridge Western Union spokesman, his eyes glowing ever so slightly.

And of course Harvard students, internationally minded as they are, have speedily responded to the new offer. Brookline sends as many telegrams in one Sunday night as Cambridge does in two weeks, he observed. A frequent habit of Harvard students, he added, is for three or four of them to send some "silly poem" to the President. By the time they said all they wanted to say, even after leaving off the salutation, they had gone so far over the 15 word limit that they didn't save money anyhow.

The most telegram-provoking issue he noticed was the excitement over steel, when "barrels" of missives left the Cambridge office. According to the representative, the telegrams were unanimous in their support of the President's action once the decision had been made.

And on the nuclear test resumption question (which came up just after the new telegram policy began), opinions were equally one sided. The anti-test messages numbered "Well, maybe not hundreds, but a lot."