Editors Daily Crimson:

DEAR SIRS.- Allow me to call attention to one source of the disorder and inefficiency in the Co-operative which I have had in mind for some time and which seems to have escaped general notice. I refer to the fact that Mr. Waterman the superintendent when he went into business in Boston on his own account, took with him, drafting off into his own business, most of the best clerks and employees of the Co-operative, and turned most of the work of the Society over to new hands. No store or business house could stand that, you know. It means that the process of selection which has been going on for years under the superintendent, and which resulted in a pretty good set of employees, now redounds to the benefit of the superintendent's new private business; and it means that the thorough knowledge acquired of the routine of the Society's business and of the Society's stock, is wasted and lost.

We cannot blame Mr. Waterman for starting a business of his own. His services to the Society in the past have been invaluable, and but for them the Society would probably not be in existence now. His services were worth more to the public than the Society could afford to pay for, and that settled it. Nor can we blame the directors for keeping Mr. Waterman on as nominal superintendent after his work began to be put in elsewhere. If they could have replaced him they undoubtedly would have done so. But the place is a mighty hard one to fill. Nor, finally, can we blame the employees of the Society for going with Mr. Waterman into his office in Boston, if he offered them better pay. But we can and do blame Mr. Waterman for taking them from the Society. He had selected them and watched them and drilled them, and I suppose he felt his claims on them were ahead of those of the Society. And he left some of the best ones-perhaps those his office did not need, however. So what I write to call to the notice of your readers is that the Society has been going on its uppers, deprived of a superintendent and of old employees at one swoop, with nothing to keep it running but its routine and the organization Mr. Waterman had worked out for it in the past. And I would not have your readers forget that the directors could not help all this; and that Mr. Waterman, as business men and business methods go, is not open to severe censure. Perhaps those clerks would have gone to Mr. Waterman's even it the directors had cut loose from Mr. Waterman entirely and offered higher wages all around. We outsiders do not know.

The Society is in a shaky condition, naturally, but I should hate to see it closed up. The undergraduates don't know how things were before its existence, and how many thousands and thousands of dollars have stayed in the pockets of the students that would have gone to Sever and often Cambridge tradesmen. Let the Society stop and the prices will go up all around.

AN EX SUFFERER.