Communication

(We invite all men in the University to submit communications on subjects of timely interest, but assume no responsibility for sentiments expressed under this head.)

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

"War as it is played today requires specialists in all departments--" so runs your leading article. Harvard, apparently, exists to turn out water-tight-compartment specialists. Since the present system of competitive intranational and international life breeds war, then Harvard should turn its talents and energies to the "adequate" production of specialists in war. . . . not yielding to West Point in this achievement.

War being a profitable, honorable and very respectable profession to follow in this twentieth century all young men should have "adequate" opportunity of "making good" in that alluring profession. If Harvard with all its traditions, its intellect, its privileges, can turn out a "group of military specialists" . . . "invaluable to the country in time of war," then Harvard has done its duty by America!

Secret diplomacy in its worst form, coupled with the inflated preparedness of the type called "adequate" brought on this war in Europe. If the people of this nation knew the forces behind this wild call for "adequate" preparation, this false "insurance" of peace, if our young men understood the financial and commercial pressure back of this agitation, they would treat with the indignation it deserves this wholesale betrayal of the spiritual ideals and forces of America. Force, the "Big Stick," the mailed fist, the iron hand behind the Law and such cant phraseology of the half-baked thinker are running riot in our press today.

What is "adequate" preparedness? Who shall be the "experts" into whose hands this nation shall give its future? Thomas Edison, Major-General Wood or the Du-Point Powder Co.? Against whom, against what, are we thus "adequately" to prepare? Have we attained such internal unity among out sixty or more nationalities, have we even utilised one-half of the potentiality of such nationalities in building up world federation, that we should now take up in despair this old man's outworn creed and method from the war ruined hands of Europe?

If we young Harvard men do not ask ourselves and our elders these questions, If we are content to have the same type of thought served up to us in our own University daily paper as is provided in any of the commercial press, then we deserve to be turned out by a highly efficient machine as "highly specialized experts" able to destroy the works of civilization, but utterly incapable to achieve either physical, mental or spiritual construction on new and really democratic lines . . . "Where there is no vision, the people perish." LEON SHERMAN PRATT 1Dv.   W. HARRIS CROOK 2G.