Bristling defenders of Americanism at Columbia have chosen rotten eggs, and masked man-handling to combat radicalism. They replied to the "insulting" doctrines of William Z. Foster by showering him and his audience with eggs; they answered jeers at the R. O. T. C. on parade by properly subduing with barrel-staves the student who pleaded guilty.

Faced with these facts, one cannot justly say that college men are not taking an active part in public questions. But the part that these particular "students" are playing is open to question. Tactics more ingenuous and less blundering than those of the Ku Klux Klan might be expected of the college man.

The old American backwoods developed men with plenty of red-blooded fighting spirit, but unfortunately furnished them with a fighting code which demanded just one retaliation for every slur on a man's name, home or country, namely, immediate and direct action with ax, gun, or flst. Where each man who was not a coward was considered equal to his neighbor, there was no discounting an insult because of the stupidity or lack of breeding in the man responsible for it. An earlier and more polished society which recognized the duelling code distinguished between affronts coming from a "gentleman", and those arising from a boorish and Lefthanded mentality.

Egg throwing and coercion reveal a laudable fighting spirit, but unfortunately reveal also as little tact as the blindest radicalism: Pankhurst's window smashing, Irish guerilla warfare or I. W. W. bomb plots. In accepting the challenge the college man loses all the advantage which his education gives him, he drops his foil of polite discussion for the cudgel of insult and calumny.