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To the Editors of the Crimson:

The columns of a college paper are evidently not intended for political discussion, much less for discussion of the affairs of foreign countries. Such matters sometimes, however, although they have no direct collegiate connection, have so deep a human interest that no paper, even a college daily is inappropriate of their presentation. I feel that the British treatment of the Boers is one of the questions which is, or should be, of universal interest. The situation as revealed in successive official British reports is simply appalling, and ought to be presented to this country so as to command wider attention than has yet been given to it. The schools of Germany and France have already become associated in a movement of protest and sympathy, and most of the continental universities have expressed themselves in great public meeting. Those who care to inform themselves as to the attitude of thoughtful Europeans should read Edmond Rostand's stirring poem, "Le sou des Boers."

In this country, for some reason or other, the facts have been presented in a very inconspicuous way by the press, and have not apparently commanded wide attention, at least in this part of the country. Yet it is not more than four years since the front pages of our papers were covered with the accounts of Spanish atrocities in the concentration camps of Cuba, and public opinion insisted upon the cessation of such brutalities even at the cost of war. It is but little more than two years since press and pulpit and public were alike fervently aroused because one unfortunate individual in France had been misjudged. One man had been mistreated and the whole French people were therefore denounced as degenerates. Many good Americans (even the Boston school board, I am told) threatened to boycott the Exposition. In South Africa today the mismanagement and indifference of the British government are responsible not merely for one man's misfortune, but for the death of several thousand women and children every month and for an incalculable measure of suffering.

Somewhat more than a hundred thousand Boer women and children have been driven from their homes and have been herded together in camps like those established by General Weyler in Cuba. For a considerable time the families of those still in the field were given only half rations, with the idea that the men, seeing their wives and children in a starving condition, would be driven to submission. Even in England this policy was so bitterly denounced that it had finally to be abandoned. The policy of extermination, however, whether the result of deliberation or indifference, has been continued. The mortality in the British concentration camps during the last seven months according to official British reports outclasses anything of the sort ever reported in Cuba. During three months more than 15,000 of the women and children so confined have succumbed. This means a death rate of over 2 per cent per month,--or over 25 per cent per year. In other words, the present policy if maintained would obliterate the entire Boer population in less than four years. Even in December when it was claimed that great improvements had been made in the arrangements of the camps, there were 2880 deaths of which number 1767 were children. It is little wonder that the London Daily News (edited by Rudolph Lehmann, whom Harvard men can never forget) should speak of the policy as an "unutterable criminality."

That the hearts of most Harvard men are with Lehman in the fight he is making for the Boers, no one will deny who heard the ringing cheers which greeted Mr. Bryan's remarks on the man a week or so ago, or who heard the applause which met Mr. Hammond's allusion to Majuba Hill Monday night. The question then suggests itself, cannot these feelings be made to count for something? Is there no way in which we can make some contribution, even though it be small, to the cause of these heroic Dutch?

I can think of but one way. As the hostility of Europeons to the British policy has grown more bitter, British public opinion has grown more and more sensitive to criticism from this country. Every endeavor has been made to conciliate us and to purchase our acquiesence. The repeal of the Clayton-Bulwer treaty is one example, and another is the unnecessary announcement of yesterday of the British government concerning the services which it claims to have rendered to the United States at the beginning of the Spanish war.

A widespread protest in this country at the present moment against the practices of the British government might thus materially assist the efforts of fair-minded Englishmen like Lehman, just as two years ago the world wide protest against the French government helped Zola and Picquart. Can not Harvard men then give some more deliberate and formal expression to those opinions which twice within the past fortnight have so strikingly revealed themselves?

To put the matter briefly and to make the question as concrete as possible, are there not men in College who are willing to take the trouble and responsibility of arranging a student's meeting, and of securing addresses from such men as Senator Hoar, Ex-Speaker Reed, Bourke Cochran and Carl Schurz?  A. P. ANDREW