The "Speed Demon" who has recently set all Charlestown by the ears with his 60-mile clip after boasting that he would lead the police a lively dance, is no new phenomenon to Cambridge. For years motorists have driven past the Yard in a manner as bloodthirsty as you please. Recently the tendency to scorch down Massachusetts Avenue with all eight cylinders hitting furiously and the "cut-out" wide open has accelerated perceptibly.

Mr. Goodwin would have it that the leniency of the courts is responsible for the severity of the speed. But for this terrifying attempt on undergraduate life, there must surely be other contributing reasons, however occult. Perhaps it is a new expression of the old antipathy between Town and Gown. There is also the hypothesis that the vicious driver, instead of being a psychopathic case, is a convert to Fundamentalism trying like a Mussulman to roar up to Heaven with the life of a Modernist for registration, license, and gate pass. Whatever the explanation, the humor of the situation is rapidly passing beyond that stage characterized by Dean Swift as "A college joke to help the dumps."