Too Far to the Right?

(The CRIMSON invites all men in the University to submit signed communications of timely interest. It assumes no responsibility, however, for sentiments expressed under this head and reserves the right to exclude any whose publication would be palpably inappropriate.)

To the Editor of the CRIMSON:

Speaking as one who left Harvard during the stern spring of 1917 and never got back and yet apparently gives more thought to Harvard matters than many who graduated "Cum Laude". I want to thank Professor Chafee for his interview in the CRIMSON of April fifth urging the freedom of at least the Union for the radicals.

I sat in the Union late one afternoon in the autumn of 1915 reading the papers. A man in the next chair began to talk. (We were both radical.) He said that a graduate friend of his had told him that most undergraduates were radical but lost their radicalism within five years of graduation and that the chief trouble with the reactionaries was that they "just gravitated too damned far to the Right."

We both knew instinctively that the statement was true. It has grown increasingly clear to me that the statement is profound. At the moment I am a banker and excessively conservative. And I have learned that I am no exception in anything; less than in others, in that 'youth grows old'. And I wish I could be a little more "liberal". So: let the undergraduate hear the most radical men to be found, (whether bright or stupid), and let them hear a reasonable number of bright conservatives. Then perhaps when they begin the inevitable swing to the Right they will attain a true liberalism,--a virtue rarely found anywhere at the moment.

When Harvard bars anyone her students wish to hear, I shall regret my loyalty. J. R. BURROW JR. '18.