A MODERN QUIXOTE SPEAKS

Now that the class season is over and argument as to whether Yale would have won if we had only done otherwise has ceased, now that almost the last indoor sport has died a late and lingering death, one kindly communicant keeps alive at the last hour the tradition that Harvard's democracy must be assailed.

The challenging bugle of equality again sounds its perennial note, and the sparse but brave defenders of democracy rally to combat the aristocratic hordes.

The same arguments with the same proof to the same conclusion are adduced. Our professors are always called unapproachable, and the undergraduates of the University are branded more or less delicately as "snobs," the proof of their snobbery being sown thick with mention of Gold Coasts, clubs and other evil inventions. It is somewhat of a question whether a man is an aristocrat even if he puts no virtuous boycott on Mt. Auburn street dormitories, and is social enough to like to meet his friends in a social organization.

Space and time--and perhaps temper--are too short to prove anything beyond what has already been proved about Harvard democracy.

The question is not whether everyone knows everyone else in the University. The question is whether the standards of intimacy are more strict or harder to overleap than at another place. It would be difficult to find any spot east of No Man's Land where no thought is paid to a man' s creed, his intelligence, or his breeding. If such a place were found it is a question whether we should care to go there. A man who has no standards of taste or judgement may well lack standards of anything else.

In these columns recently we urged that men know other men. That does not mean he should blindly close his eyes to any judgement of men. Such blindness would be the very antithesis of knowledge. Democracy is not equivalent to genial joviality. It is something deeper and more enduring. Those who accuse Harvard of lack of democracy fail to understand the spirit or the meaning of the word.