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GIVE US THIS DAY

This year's award for torchbearer of righteousness goes by unanimous vote to the President of Princeton, who by an encyclical enclosed football tickets hopes to banish Bacchus from the Palmer Stadium. Through collaboration with the Bible and Lord Chesterfield President Dodds arrived at the scholarly conclusion that drinking at football games is poor manners. It follows that sobriety is laudable. So were the Ten Commandments and Wilson's Fourteen Points, but even the most inspired professor would think twice before attempting to enforce them.

Mr. Dodds' method of broadcasting was as unique as the proclamation itself. He enclosed the notice in an envelope with the football tickets. In such a place one might expect the warning that, "Miss Fontanne is on the stage at the rise of the curtain and the audience is earnestly requested to be seated in time," but not a request that "all persons refrain from the use of alcoholic liquors while attending athletic contests." Still it was an easy way in which to breathe the word around, and when the notices have been thrown away with the envelopes they will no longer be able to haunt either Princeton or her President.

Past Presidents of Princeton have been so engrossed in academic pursuits that they failed to see the world tumbling down about them. Woodrow Wilson vetoed the Volstead Act, and John Grier Hibben led the movement for Repeal in New Jersey. But science tells us the climate is changing, and so it might be cooler now in Palmer Stadium than it was ten or twenty years ago, with a resultant rise in the consumption of alchohol. Or perhaps they believed, as this paper does, that drinking in a stadium, where neighboring eyes should be on the pigskin, not the bottle, is less objectionable than in most public gatherings. In a university where a realistic attitude is taken toward athletics and athletes, the cup that warms should be tolerated "pour le sport".

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