The decision of the Harvard Athletic Association to abandon the Yale football rally has simple implications, every one of them optimistic. More than a veil of smoke has clouded the rallies of the past two years. There has been enthusiasm, but it has been of a fragile artificiality that could not endure, for instance, night air. The hortatory experts have played to houses that only an invoked loyalty could lift above tepidity.

There will be no need on Thursday for the parting adjuration that Harvard Yard must be silent this night. The Yard will be quiet, but not in order that the squad may mend with sleep the experience of being commanded by two thousand men, haute voix, to perform a personal obligation. Under the new arrangement Harvard men who want to cheer their team before it meets Yale can still do so. The cheering will not, however, be done for a team at that moment striving to look dogged and breathe smoke. It will be done for a team that is in the Stadium, running through signals.

Abolishing the Yale football rally is abolishing a tradition. One might feel little guilty about that, did he not know that the tradition has been soured by unspontaneity. The game is where it has always been, on the knees of the gods and the linemen. And at the needful moment, in the Yale Bowl, it will be for the cheering section to show that Harvard's old and inextinguishable pride in the Harvard team has lost nothing more than a blurring anachronism.