To the Editors of the Crimson:

In answer to a brief and concrete question, probably the entire University would welcome a discussion or presentation of the Boer affair. Whether we should take active steps towards making the University an irritant to English public opinion is an entirely different thing. Some of us have been under the impression that the University has gained in prestige, because it has suc- ceeded fairly well in abstaining from head-long plunges into political questions, and that it has lost when it has attempted to mix in such matters as the Venezuelan affair of a few years ago. It may be that Harvard would support Mr. Lehmann, if for no other reason than personal enthusiastic devotion, in a proposal for international boating, or some kindred subject. Whether Harvard should support him on a political question, purely English is open to considerable discussion. Mr. Lehmann in athletic matters is truly one "whom Harvard men can never forget" but in political matters we also have anti-imperialists who do not stop at such expressions as "unutterable criminality." Yet somehow their phrases don't per se prove the government wrong.

Your correspondent thinks we should take an active step because we intervened in Cuba. This assumes that our intervention in Cuba was perfectly justifiable, and that the situation in South Africa is parallel to that in Cuba before the war. The first is open to argument and the second needs more facts than we are now able to get, due to the "inconspicuous way" in which the press publishes South African news. Occasionally we hear that which leads us to think that the Spanish policy in Cuba was not so yellow as printed and it may be that the present Opposition in England is using some left-over American printer's ink taken over in the recent invasion.

The writer further thinks that some expression from Harvard would be particularly valuable as an irritant to English feeling, which is very sensitive just now. Passing over the propriety of such a remedy, I am not sure that "every endeavor has been made to conciliate us and to purchase our acquiescence." The Clayton-Bulwer treaty may have been repealed to strengthen an Anglo-Saxon understanding, but hardly to purchase our acquiescence in a war policy pursued on a continent to which, happily, the Monroe Doctrine does not extend. The announcement in Parliament the other day that England alone had sided with us in the Spanish war was made not to offset any rising collegiate feeling in America, but, it is presumed, as an effort to offset the effect of Prince Henry's visit.

By all means let us have addresses by prominent men, but by all means let us leave the resolutions to Continental Universities and the Boston School Board.  2L