When the National Student League branch at Yale chose to involve itself in a foundry strike, many things might have been expected. There might have been a few heads broken, or a ponderous manifesto on the academic spirit by the owner of the foundry. But only a few cynical sculs could have foreseen that Dean Mendell would make the statement which he did, all unafraid and all complacent, to the effect that Yale wanted nothing so much as to foster a spirit of cooperation between students and neighbours, albeit the neighbours were strike-breakers of the most brutal and witless kind.

The Dean also branded the opposition of the National Student League to the foundry strike tactics as "uninformed and ignorant." I wonder how uninformed and ignorant it was. I wonder whether college men, sincerely and dispassionately dedicated to the study of the social problems of our time, are not better informed than the stick wielders of the Connecticut constabulary. The question is not one of information, in the sense that a scientific dispute would require, for a strike is not a scientific dispute. It is a symptom of a very real and a very serious disease, which students, before anyone else, had analyzed in the middle of the nineteenth century, and which they have fought ever since, unassisted by college deans or gendarmes.

That disease, despite the magic incantations of Senator Wagner and the Industrial Labour Board, is approaching crisis. Strikes and lockouts are symptoms of it which only the "ignorant and uninformed" can watch untroubled. The Yale branch of the National Student League may have been rash, although I do not think so; they may have risked their academic futures too recklessly, although we must respect them for doing it.

The academic spirit, which any navvy can call by a better name, was at its flower in Harvard College when Henry Adams was an undergraduate. The academic spirit did not think it right that Henry Adams should hear of Auguste Comte; it did not care to explore the moral results of the industrial revolution. Nor does it care to discuss them now, with the result that most American undergraduates still think of Socialism as a scholastic crotchet that is first cousin to free love and atheism. Mr. Hoover, one remembers, thought that all good things should drop from above. They did not in the economic structure, and they will not in the academic. All power to the National Student League or to any other undergraduate organization which can see its own hand before its ace, and which is not afraid to point that fact out. POLLUX.