Letters

No Stuffed, Shirt

TO THE EDITOR:

Permit me to congratulate you upon the article written by Charles Bolte in this

month's issue of the ALUMNI MAGAZINE. It was an intelligent, well written article.

The world is full of "stuffed-shirts." Most of them are older men. A few are undergraduates. In the past, there have been occasions when "The Undergraduate Chair" has been written by an undergraduate "s-s-." It is a pleasure to know that this year's "Undergraduate Chair" will be well worth reading.

Brooklyn, New York.

Cynicism of the Past

To THE EDITOR:

The courage and completeness of President Hopkins' renunciation of past errors, as divulged in your October issue, impressed me deeply. As professor, now emeritus, in another school, I can assure you that Dartmouth was not alone in the unrealism of its indoctrinations.

It is true that she was nation-wide renowned —or notorious—for the liberality of her philosophy. On the other hand she was perhaps not so exposed to contacts with the "counterfeit liberalism" which your President repudiates, as are schools closer to metropolitan areas.

Be that as it may, the boys are in part what we teachers made them. We almost universally accepted pacifism as the panacea for international troubles, and here I rather reluctantly

include myself, since if my wife didn't occasionally remind me—she is a D. A. R. and gloats—l would by this time have thoroughly convinced myself that I had never had any truck with the sticky stuff.

Unfortunately, the trend went much farther than this and student cynicism sometimes excluded all decent principles of right living. This, too, can be in part laid to a materialistic attitude of many of the younger teachers, who as President Hopkins puts it, had "forgotten that it was through fortitude and hardihood that privileges had been won for them that they had come to assume as rights." So I cannot share in the indignation that my friend and classmate Ned Dearborn put so forcibly in your October issue.

Indeed, what most impresses me is the receptivity of young men to example and ideas. I venture to doubt that not over ten per cent of the Dartmouth men who signed the protest sent to Washington are by this time of exactly the same mind as they were at the time. In this respect they do not differ from their elders.

We had at Rutgers at one time, an appreciable number of pacifists, fascists, and unavowed (or even avowed) communists, but I am assured by those in closest touch with students that the number of these is now neglioible I am more concerned with our alumni whose social and political philosophy was crystallized before graduation and has remained so since. Some of these, I fear, perhaps not many, are a definite drag upon the spirit of cooperation, of unselfish devotion to the common weal that we need more than all else just now.

Our boys, I know, will not fail us. The call 0f one of our presidential candidates for work and sweat and sacrifice will find a response that will discredit the present passive acceptance of nursing and dole as the normal estate of a loyal member of society.

New Brunswick, N. J.

Vox Clamant is

The boys are on the campus now, The feast is spread upon the board, The harvest of a thousand years By clerk and scholar reaped and stored.

And some are spinning golden dreams And some are treasuring a store Of revelry for unknown years While chapel bells ring out once more.

And some are straining back and limb To sweep a rival foeman down While others bend at unsung toil To earn their way towards cap and gown.

The drowsy summer days are gone, And autumn's tang is sharp and clear, His banner flames on shrub and tree The college starts another year.

Elementary Principles

To THE EDITOR:

There seems to be consternation among the brewers of liberal education lest something essentially hard has been left out of the brew or something excessively soft has slipped into it.

I venture to call attention to one fundamental that seems to me not to have received the emphasis due it.

Should not the search for truth, of which we hear so much, begin with the simple basal truth that right is right and wrong is wrong?

The user of every man-made mechanism from an eggbeater to a motor car, recognizes from the start that conformity to the purpose of the machine—the law of its being—is_right, breach of that purpose or law is wrong; and he knows that ignorance of that purpose or aw will not mai;e wrong right.

And in a world ruled by universal and unchanging law can we escape the conclusion that COnformity to that law is everlastingly right and breach of it everlastingly wrong? Is not. the present world debacle due to the prevailing ing notion that right and wrong are merely a qiestion of the changing mores, a matter of fashion? Just here enters softness, bordering rottenness.

Ideas of right and wrong may differ or change according as mankind learns more, or nets more, of the laws of physical and moral nature, but so long as those laws themselves remain unchanged does any intelligent being believe that wrongness and Tightness can be come interchanged?

This is so elementary that it may seem beneath the dignity of higher education to stress it; but the most elementary principles need continued stress until they become established in the commonsense of mankind.

fitchburg, Mass.

WILLIAM D. PARKINSON '78 Mr. Parkinson, whose letter to the Editoris printed herewith, is Secretary of his class.