In the game with Brown last week, the spectators showed a disposition to cheer at the errors made by the visiting team. This is almost without precedent at Harvard. It has been a matter of pride among the students in former years that, no matter how the Harvard team was treated away from home, the teams which visited here should be received with the utmost courtesy.

Athletic games are held not because they give one college a chance to defeat another, but because they are the best means of developing the different sports. They are promarily athletic exhibitions, and to cheer at any misplay is to ridicule an honest effort. For that matter, even if other teams were invited here that they might be defeated, it would still be poor taste to cheer at errors; Harvard ought to win through her own strength, not through the weakness of her opponents.

We are well aware that this a delicate question,- that no discourtesy is intended, and that the cheer comes because Harvard is gaining and not because opponents have made a misplay. Yet, in the outward appearance, there is nothing to distinguish one motive from the other, and it has been a tradition here that, in such cases, even the appearance of discourtesy should be avoided. It is a tradition that ought not to be broken.