The editors of this Magazine have been made aware,

both by numerous letters and by private speech, that a great many alumni feel a genuine distress because of the decision to make chapel attendance a voluntary matter with undergraduates instead of the compulsory morning exercise which formerly ob- tained. It may be added that others, while holding the decision to be inevitable, share in much the same regrets. One al- ways dislikes to see an old custom aban- doned, especially where that custom wore the livery of heaven. Nevertheless the MAGAZINE has been forced by the evi- dence to concur in the belief that com- pulsory chapel, so far from serving the ends of real religion, was actually doing harm thereto and for some years had been defensible mainly as a disciplinary matter wholly apart from any religious bearing.

Without wishing to belittle the ideas of those who still entertain a contrary view, the editors would express their unqualified belief that in the circumstances abandonment of compulsory morning chapel was the only possible answer, however much one may regret the fact. The present size of the College militates against making any homogeneous requirement. One might, perhaps, meet the situation by requiring chapel attendance only of the two lower classes; but that in turn would but ill serve the professed ends of any service of genuine worship and would have to be defended, as has been already said, on the grounds of salutary discipline alone. It should be understood, also, that the recommendation for the abandonment came with most force from those who have religion most at heart—not, as is sometimes hinted by objectors, from "radical" elements with no sympathy at all for the, church. To find the assemblage for morning worship marked by unconcealed indifference, if not by elaborate manifestations of rudeness and forthright hostility, has been extremely painful to those to whom religious exercises are dear.

We cannot regard the change as indicating any surrender to godlessness, or as presaging decay. If there were godlessness it could hardly be met by pretensecovered by the putty and paint of formalistic and enforced observances. It is doubtful that the Founder of the Christian faith in any place counselled forcing man's belief. It was well, in a way, when indifferent students were brought daily into contact with religious observances, so long as that enforced contact produced no obvious reactions in the wrong direction ; but it seems to have been the feeling that the latter was precisely what happened and that the policy of enforcement actually operated to defeat its own ends, from the purely religious viewpoint.

Religion is always at a crisis and in a state of flux. The orthodox ideas of one generation are seldom those of the next, and the natural inertia of established practices causes the inevitable changes to lag somewhat behind the march of progress. The incidents in Tennessee last summer suffice as a commentary on that. Moreover the adolescent, suddenly discovering doubts of his childish concepts, is prone to fly to the opposite extreme for a season and to close his mind to ideas which he confuses with those which his growing maturity has forced him to lay aside. That passes, fortunately. One accustoms oneself to different standards and different spiritual evaluations. But in the undergraduate period, devoutness is certainly an exception; and the propensity to sweeping denials, based on the recollection of infantile preconceptions which are no longer tenable, must be reckoned with.

The present size of the College while it was not the reason assigned for the change with respect to chapel services, nevertheless forced the situation to be met and precipitated a decision which, if the College were no larger than it was 20 years ago, would probably not have been compelled. Dartmouth would doubtless have worked along as she was doing—and the underlying defect, while known to exist, would not have received its full measure of attention. Most of us, we believe, sincerely regret the necessity of doing this thing—but can hardly deny that it had to be done. Religion, however, will survive. We cannot believe it to be so poor a thing that it must drive men to worship when young, that they may worship voluntarily when older. Meantime the pressing problem of the church is to present its vital truths to modern mankind in such guise that modern mankind will not instantly reject them—no easy task, in view of the Fundamentalist demand that earlier concepts of God's truth be received as inalterable for all time.

Beware of dangerous analogies in considering the compulsory chapel problem. It might be possible, under the reasoning of those who argue that nothing is of any value save what the student does voluntarily, to argue for unlimited cuts in every subject in the curriculum. Why force a student to attend classes in mathematics, or in political economy, or logic, or anything else he elects to study, or is required to study ? One who goes to any such exercise under compulsion will usually get far less out of it than the man who comes with the zeal of a sincere devotee. As a matter of fact some such argumentation is already heard. The Yale Alumni Weekly not long ago spoke of the blighting influences of compulsion on scholarship and cultureseeking. To rebel against what one is enjoined and commanded to do is human nature, "and it may well be that the way out of this particular difficulty is to advance toward the educational methods across the water, where, more than in this country, college students are left to their own devices and real intellectual interest springs from the responsibility thrown on the student himself." We somehow feel that we should prefer to let Yale try it first. Our present inclination leads us to skepticism.

Dartmouth cautiously proposes a certain extension of freedom to men of exceptional standing in their junior and senior years, feeling that it is not fair to hold them back by required attendance upon classes which are speeded to the gait of the more backward students. But that is an experiment, and it is by no means one which its own advocates stand ready to throw open as a privilege to students in general. We are not, in other words, quite so ready to see the beauties of untrammeled freedom in other than matters of chapel attendance. When it comes to academic work, a measure of enforced compliance seems still to be regarded with official favor—and we believe quite justly so.

In which connection a further, and perhaps too dogmatic, word. It often seems to us that almost too much reverence is paid to what the student thinks about intricate problems of college administration. Reactionaries are heard to remark that "boys come to college to learn, not to teach; to take orders, not to give them." This causes acute pain, of course, to progressive educators who resent discipline as stunting the youthful growth; but unless the signs and portents are wholly misread the chaotic state of younger American society is producing a stout reaction toward the idea that Age still knows a thing or two, while Youth doesn't know everything, and that for the efficient management of any college a limited monarchy will probably work better than a confederation of soviet republics. But this is controversial ground, of course, and perhaps it would be well to leave at this point before the discussion grows acrimonious.

Among the interesting sequels of the football season last autumn were the editorial utterances of undergraduate papers in various colleges, prompted by the demand of the Harvard Crimson for a radical change in the method of prosecuting that major sport. The Crimson, it will be remembered, took advanced ground by recommending a curtailment of the schedules so that no more than three intercollegiate contests should be played—the remainder of the season being devoted to intramural contests, with all antecedent 'varsity practice abandoned. In addition something was said about the desirability of curtailing the present prodigious gate receipts, which the editors recognized as underlying the finances of the whole athletic system but which they suggested should be replaced by an adequate endowment. This radical proposawas, we believe, echoed with varying degrees of enthusiasm by undergraduate editors elsewhere, although not all went to quite the same length. In general it may be said that so far as undergraduate periodicals may be assumed to represent the opinion of students actually in college (one has sage doubts as to the extent to which they do this) they revealed a widespread favor for the curtailment of intercollegiate games to three or four, instead of keeping on with from eight to ten.

Of undergraduate editorials we shall have more to say in a moment. Football, alleged to occupy too prominent a position in the athletic world, has certainly claimed a disproportionate share of attention within the past few months in the field of journalism. The reasons are the overdone publicity which has come to attend it; the excess of excitement attending the development of the season; the part which non-collegiate crowds have begun to play in the matter; and the concrete case of a single player, "Red" Grange of Illinois, whose fabulous fees of half a million dollars or so, accumulated in two weeks after he had espoused outright professionalism, intensified the feeling that the whole business was being grossly overdone.

Possibly the regnant American passion for self-immolation on the altars of virtue and morality, which has saddled this country with the problem of prohibition and various other laudable, but apparently insoluble, puzzles, is responsible for this editorial assault on the very keep and citadel of our most distinctively collegiate sport. We may sober up, if we make trial of these suggestions, and find ourselves sighing for the good old days, when every fall found the colleges playing game after game in the presence of colorful crowds and figuring to the exclusion of nearly all else on the sporting pages. But it ought to be significant that the other college editors, instead of visiting wrath on the Crimson for hinting at any such depletion of the joie devivre, have tended in such surprising degrees to concur. Is it significant? Do the rank and file of college students also feel the same way? If so, in what proportion —and how long would they continue to feel so, in case they found their autumnal sports so drastically reduced?

Before taking that up, it may be well to turn for a moment to a few seemingly practical considerations. For one thing, that much-berated matter of gate receipts. One eminent athletic authority promptly pointed out to the editors of the Harvard Crimson that a principal fund sufficient to yield the revenues now derived from a Harvard football season would need to total about $10,000,000— a staggering sum, suggesting anew the disproportionate place occupied by athletics by inviting unflattering comparison with the endowments already secured for purely scholastic works. Moreover, it is bound to be remembered that Harvard herself led the way in this directionunwittingly, of course, but surelywhen she erected her Stadium as a model for a score of other universities to emulate as a fine method for enabling from 40,000 to 80,000 people to witness athletic contests. Still further, assuming the football schedule to be cut, is the effect going to be to minimize the public's sporting fever, or insure the confinement of interest to purely academic circles? We attempt no specific answers, but we have the uneasy feeling that within a year or two there would be universal outcry against perpetuating this novel system on the part of those who remembered a more joyous day.

As for those undergraduate editors, now. They are a different breed from what obtained in elder years. Whether or not the undergraduate body is inclined to approve what the editors of their college papers say, the editors can with some truth claim that at least their pontifications are not being ignored. For the past three or four years it has been peculiarly true at Hanover that the editorial policy of the students' daily paper challenged attention and criticism—which latter it frequently found to be warmly hostile. Editors are prone to certain easily-besetting sins in every community, and among them is the lust for shocking readers into taking notice. It takes a great deal to produce that result sometimes —and no doubt it takes more than common in the case of a college body. Hence an occasional inquiry whether these editors are wholly sincere in their expressions of extraordinary beliefs, or whether they merely wish to start something.

We prefer to believe that as a rule the editor thinks he thinks what he says he thinks, and is not merely bent on giving his public what he is pretty sure that -public will be angry ;about. Certainly there is no reason to question the sincerity of the Crimson editorial staff when they assert a belief in a wholly remodeled football season.

What one may more appropriately question is the extent to which these startling views are shared by the readers and subscribers. College editorial boards are hand-picked, as a general thing, from a very small group which has elected journalism as the thing to "go out for." In Dartmouth some 15 or 20 young men usually adopt this line in their freshman year and do work enough to form a squad from which an editor may ultimately be chosen. "In other words," said one of Mr. Larmon's bulletins a few weeks ago, "there are 1950 men in college in any given year who are not being considered for the editor's position, in which group may be found many men whose thoughts and opinions would be more important than the editor's. It is well to remember that the editorial column represents the thoughts of two or three men who have survived a competition begun in freshman year, and not the two or three who have been selected from the entire junior class as being representative of the thoughtful men of the college."

Very true—but it is equally true of every editorial staff in the country, or in the world. Editors can seldom be counted on with absolute assurance to reflect public opinion, although often enough they do so. One of their aspirations is not to reflect, but to mould, public opinionand occasionally they succeed even in that. You never can tell. Before us at the moment lies a summary of the views of American newspapers on the vexed topic of a World Court, which indicates that 80 per cent have filed opinions in favor of such a tribunal, that 12 per cent are opposed, and that the remaining 8 per cent have taken no position, for or against. How accurately does this represent public opinion ? Who really knows ? How accurately do the editors of this MAGAZINE represent the opinion of the Dartmouth alumni in any position on a debatable topic—such as compulsory chapel, or the proper relationship of athletes to the selective process of admissions ?

The usual fact is that the editor represents himself, seeks to do so honestly, and hopes most people are going to approve. It is no more true of undergraduate editors than of others that they can be taken as an accurate index of popular thought—and it is no less true. On this matter of football schedules and so forth, no doubt a great and solemn referendum (as President Wilson would have called it) would easily settle the question whether the desire for a short list of three or four games is felt by any considerable number of students, or is confined to a small group of self-styled intellectuals, whose secret pride is in being different from the herd.

As for the alumni, one fears they would be arrayed heavily against such changes—even at Harvard. It is not a matter in which the MAGAZINE is at present willing to take any very decided stand, or express any but the cautious suspicion that if such changes were made they would be regretted, even by many who honestly believed they were going to like them. As for their power to produce any improvement sufficient to compensate what they would take away, we can see many reasons for doubt.

John Carleton and an Oxford friend Skiing in Switzerland