To the Editor of the CRIMSON:

I have observed with sympathy your editorial efforts to resist the hysteria which is rising around you. Certainly you have not had much help from your elders, who have chosen to deny the realities of the last twenty years and to return to the exhilarating days of 1917. They have shown no hesitation in turning the classroom into a camp, the lecture hall into a recruiting station. That minority of the faculty which disagrees has been more scrupulous--too scrupulous, I think--and the time has come when we too should speak our minds. It may come as something of a surprise to you to know that some of us are not ashamed of your efforts to retain your sanity.

Once again we hear the old arguments about moral issues, the fight to preserve our liberties on the European front, and the German menace to this part of the world. These shibboleths--so threadbare and yet so perennially effective--are demonstrably empty of real meaning. But many of the older generation are understandingly engaged in these misguided rationalizations because they are unable to cope with a world they have had some part in creating. Certainly it must be disillusioning to all of you to discover that those to whom you look for leadership, those whom you are prepared to honor, are willing to relieve their emotions without any real thought for your future and your reaction is natural and inevitable.

You are taking part in a battle to keep America from a hideous expenditure of resources and men which she imperatively needs to make this hemisphere inviolable. You are trying to keep her from a desperate gamble with her democracy, a gamble in which the cards are inevitably stacked against her if she intervenes in Europe, and in which she has some chance of winning if she turns her energy to the betterment of her own part of the world. The latter is the real desideratum. That--and that alone--is worth fighting for.

I am troubled, therefore, by the line you appear to take. I cannot see that you gain anything when you parade the horrors of war or play on the emotions which everyone shares, no matter what his views. You should realize, I think, that you are not engaging in an emotional holiday or expressing a mere literary conviction. You should emphasize that your struggle for non-intervention entails also a willingness to make sacrifices--genuine sacrifices--in the fight to preserve and extend democracy at home. You should know that as you struggle for the real interests of your country, you must move in the teeth of an opposition that will employ the most invidious devices that selfish interest and muddled idealism can muster. Among other things the opposition will not hesitate to impute your actions to unpatriotic motives. But such a struggle as yours, properly conceived, means infinitely more than the easy gestures which your opponents are so eager to provide. Yours will be a course even more unpopular in the months to come than it is new, a course in which you must prepare to act as sufferers who will probably fail to convert any of the opposition. I know, however, that you can count on the support of some of your elders. And I know that when you find something worth your efforts, you are all capable of the utmost loyalty. John Bovey '35, Instructor in English.