There are signs that crew is perhaps after all about to come out of the wilderness. Three years of failures and disappointment, which reached a culmination last Spring, have been followed by something of a new spirit apparent in the care given to the selection of a coach and in the pre-season practice.

It is too early to make any predictions as to the ability Coach Stevens and his assistants will show in rescuing the Harvard crew system from the slough of Despond and putting it on a winning basis. That they will have some difficulty at least in co-ordinating their methods with that of the other coaches and in establishing a thorough system resulting in immediate victories seems evident. But the undergraduate has no right to demand immediate and constant victories. Winning systems are not built in a day.

One thing, however, the undergraduate body has a right to demand--a frank statement of the relation between captain and coach and rowing committee and of the position which each will occupy. In the past adverse criticism has been centered on these questions of relation and position and a situation in which it was believed that the coach was too much sub-ordinated was blamed for 'Harvard's repeated failures. A frank exposition of the present situation is not only an act of justice to the undergraduate body but is the only way to establish confidence in the new regime.