To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

It matters not whether you call it suicide. It matters not whether you believe in the efficacy or the justifiability of hunger striking. It matters not whether you support the cause of Irish freedom. The fact is that a man believed so firmly in the right of his cause, and held so steadfastly before him his high ideals of justice and right, that he willingly sacrificed his life for that cause.

And yet people have the coarseness and the utter want of finer sensibilities, to joke about it. The average sentiment around College this afternoon seemed to be, Well, it's about time he did something or other; or, the damn fool! did he expect to go on living on nothing?

There is something fundamentally wrong in the nature of men who, considering any desire to be serious as dull and boring and even "plebeian," can have the callousness to joke about a man who has just made the most courageous and noble and idealistic sacrifice a man can make. Levity in such a case cannot fail to stir the feelings of all those who see in Lord Mayer MacSwiney's death an unfalling loyalty to ideals, seldom realized in most men, and therefore the more inspiring, And such levity will not, I think, be anything to be boasted of or gloried in. DUNCAN P. FERGUSON '22.

October 26, 1920.