The following criticism of the current issue of the Advocate, which appeared this week, was written especially for the Crimson by John Gallishaw Sp '17, recently made an editor of the Writer.

The second number of the Advocate speaks well for the editorial efficiency of the board, and somewhat less well for the artistic impulses governing those who wrote its contents. The editors have placed a wide variety of reading matter at the disposal of the members of Harvard University, and it is to be hoped, of a wider audience. No one may rightly complain that his literary preference has been neglected. If one likes poetry--these is poetry of sorts in this Advocate; there is also some of the other sort. If one's preference is biography--he finds in this number a passage from the life of a little-known New York patriot of pre-Revolutionary times. There is also fiction--one very good story, and two others which are by no means bad. Strangely, there is only one essay within the covers of this Advocate, yet it is a charming one. There are articles, of course; the perennial favorites, football and Harvard educational policy, are treated at some length of words and with some depth of thought. The editors have broadened the scope of their magazine; no taste is neglected.

The leading position is given to an article by Walter D. Edmonds, Jr., called "The Gum-Didderators of Football." Besides the tocsin sound of the title, the author provides a further alarum by the use of "jugglingatoriums" in the third paragraph. The problem of the importance of the game of football in the program of American higher education is a vexed one; Mr. Edmonds' distinguishing contribution to the discussion is a decree that "big" games are all right--because they have some part in the prevention of hardening of alumni arteries but that they should be kept among friends and neighbors. The threat of professionalism in college football, according to Mr. Edmonds, lies in the intersectional games. "As long as relations lie among a small group of neighboring colleges, a college spirit of friendly ri- valry can be maintained. Once the game becomes an intersectional affair, it has emerged from collegiate bounds and has assumed what amounts to national rivalry. The attitudes of two practically unconnected colleges toward each other in a football game are dubious at best."

Tutorial System Discussed

In the other article, "The Harvard Reformer's Hornbook," Mr. D. H. Gordon pays his respects to Harvard's present combination of the divisional and tutorial systems and speculates on its future and on the future developments in other phases of the University's educational policies. It is one which shows that the writer has made a careful study of the problem. He has been equally careful in writing it.

The versatile Mr. Edmonds also publishes a story relating the perils of holding double-pinochle, when the holder is an octogenarian who all his life has drawn mostly nines and jacks. "The Miracle of M. Le Noir" by C. C. Abbott is De Maupassantesque, thoroughly so, and one is tempted to say satisfactorily so. But the best story of this issue, despite the title "Her Daughter's Child," and despite the fact that it illustrates the undesirability of tacking bits of Mr. Arlen's style onto a Mrs. Freeman plot, is Donald Gibbs' story of Jane Fermier's grand-daughter who failed to arrive. The idea is worth a story and the characters decorating the idea are possessed of the breath of life. Mr. Gibbs has the good story-teller's instinct.

However you may estimate the degree of poetry in Mr. Doughty's song, the realization of its impressionistic originality persists. Way in the back of the magazine is Richard Linn Edsall's "Revulsion." A "Rondean" by Mr. Smart and a "Pause" by the same poet are sandwiched in to the advantage of the poetical average of this number.

On the whole, this is an issue to which the Advocate board may well point with pride, and which no one on or off the board, can possibly choose to view with alarm