The election of Class Day officers by the senior class is so near at hand that a protest againt illegal and underhanded methods may seem so late as to be useless, yet we must place ourselves squarely against the unfair methods sometimes employed at these elections. The minute a class begins to have "bosses" and to split itself up into antagonistic factions, each running its own candidates, the fairness and honorableness which ought to exist at college if anywhere ceases to exist and the element of "machine polititics" sweeps everything before it. We cannot afford to have a Tammany ring in these elections. The matter of society preferences has no right in a question of such importance to the whole class. The best men should be elected no matter what their society connections may be.

It has often been the case that men who deserve places on the ticket have been defeated simply because their classmates had insufficient moral courage to vote as they ought. There is a class of unprincipled men in every large gathering who are only too willing to follow any leader who tickles their fancy with a tale of wonderful exploits or with a hope of preferment of one kind or another. These men, weak as they are individually, form a formidable body when many of them get together, so formidable a body in fact, that often the tide of fortune turns entirely on their action. And these men are found in every college class. Yet we are loath to believe that there are many men in ninety-four who have not sufficient manliness about them to sink their own little ambitions in the welfare of the class. If the wirepulling and slate-making affected the class alone the harm would not be so great, but the influence does not stop with the class. If a slate is practically elected before it is really elected, if certain athletes get certain places and men from various societies take the rest and the whole thing is a foregone conclusion, the report is immediately taken up by a public greedy for scandal, that at Harvard nothing counts but athletics, wealth and society. Such a report gathers material as it goes and we are soon in disfavor with a large number of people. All this sort of thing has its evil effect on the good name of the University, and no class has a right to start the circulation of such stories. Each man in the class, then, has a plain duty to do; it is only a question of moral courage whether or not this duty shall be done.