(Ed. Note--The Crimson does not necessarily endorse opinions expressed in printed communications. No attention will be paid to anonymous letters and only under special conditions, at the request of the writer, will names be withheld. Only letters under 400 words can be printed because of space limitations.)

To the Editor of the CRIMSON:

Mr. Richard Gregg '07, in a letter to the Harvard Crimson, printed on November 15th, quotes a paragraph in the biographical statement of President Conant, contributed to the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Report of the Class of 1914, which reads as follows:

"Those who were in Cambridge in the spring of 1917 will recall the scene of an academic community rapidly but confusedly becoming war-conscious. Neither at that time nor in retrospect did it seem to me an edifying spectacle. The professors acted as recruiting officers and students marched off to war; for the most part their erstwhile instructors were not able either to lead or to follow them into the combat area. The cheering, however, was vociferous."

Mr. Gregg follows this quotation with the sentence, "Someone has said that the only thing man learns from history is that man never learns anything from history." The general implication of the letter is that Mr. Conant has fallen into a war psychosis under the emotional pressure of present events.

To say that the emotions raised by war are regrettable, or, to use President Conant's word, unedifying, is very far from saying that they are avoidable on the part of members of a University that cannot but reflect the emotions of a community of which it is a part. A philosophic detachment so complete as to impose upon all its members that superiority to human emotions and mundane events which Mr. Gregg advocates would be impossible outside of a retreat, which by its very seclusion would limit its spiritual benefits to its own members. A university, nevertheless, and quite fortunately, is a place where idealistic influences have some chance of exerting a leavening power on the community. Mr. Gregg's complaint evidently is that the leaven of philosophy falls short of leavening the whole lump. In this we can all agree with him, while hoping and working for a better world.

The passage quoted above from President Conant's Class Report expressed his dislike of the distractions and interferences with normal University life, produced by war and by the emotional excitements associated with recruiting a volunteer army. If Mr. Gregg will put alongside of that statement President Conant's persistent efforts in the present emergency in behalf of a Selective Training Act under which the hullabaloo of drumming up recruits was to be replaced by an orderly selection of men for the tasks for which they are best fitted, small ground for a charge of inconsistency would-be found.

War is a grim and determined business, but when nations which believe in war and armed force as the supreme attributes of national life, brutally attempt to destroy or enslave nations which reject that belief, the latter have no alternative but resistance. If that resistance stirs up unedifying emotions, the same thing could be said of the feelings aroused in the innocent victims of any catastrophe--not only the emotions of fear and terror, but even those of exalted heroism, which, however admirable, inevitably disturb the desirable tranquility of normal life.

Jerome D. Greene '96