Princeton will not allow its undergraduates to keep them. Stevens, head coach at Yale, has forbidden his football squad to ride in them during the season. Automobiles. Or what Copey once called "hell wagons."

A hundred years from now, some budding Ph. D. will write a thesis on "The Social Influence of the Automobile" and it ought to be a good one. What they have done to Harvard as a community is only an example on the large scale of what they have done to every American family. The bisecting of the college preserve, the destruction of quiet by the roaring arteries of traffic, is an incident common to every village and town. The coming and going, the opportunity of being somewhere else, that has a way of depopulating Harvard over the weekends to the belittlement of those gentler amenities, good talk and reading, has hit the American home just as acutely. If undergraduates are less in their rooms today, and consequently less accessible to the knowledge of one another and of books: if they are more in the company of girls, more addicted to dancing and visiting, thanks are largely due to the automobile. And if they run more risks than in the days of the horse there is the same cause to blame. Cars are made to go faster and faster, many of them are sold on the basis of their speed:--this one "can touch 73 without pushing," that one "can do 50 in second." The manufacturers are not guilty; they must follow the trend of competition. The human nature that makes undergraduates push their cars--as very often they push themselves--to the limit is the force that keeps many parents awake nights, the force that is too often responsible for a shocking tragedy.

The system of bounds that is enforced at Oxford and Cambridge, the rule that compels every undergraduate to be within his college precincts by midnight, that allows him only one week-end leave each term, is repugnant to our independence. But if the accidents and casualties continue to increase we may have to accept it. Both of the prohibitions cited in the first paragraph were occasioned by specific disasters. We cannot afford to grant intellectual privileges to machines that hurt. Harvard Alumni Bulletin.