To the Editor of the Crimson:

Your editorial of Wednesday, "Speak Now," I have read with great sympathy. It is directed to those members of the Harvard faculty who "taught us the folly of 1917-18" and deplores the fact that at this time those "from whom we learned non-intervention are not saying much." I have known four generations of Harvard students. I have a high respect for the integrity of their views. They deserve an explanation from those of us who bear some responsibility for the creation of the non-interventionist attitude at Harvard at the present time.

It was natural that the post-war disillusionment of my own generation should have induced many of us to emphasize the failures of the Versailles settlement and that, by implication, we should have suggested to generations of undergraduates that war is scarcely an instrument designed to achieve the political slogans which accompany it. I have no doubt that many students enlarged this view and came to the conclusion that war is futile and that Europe's troubles are her own.

On this whole problem of "America's Relation to the War" I spoke in October to a group of Harvard undergraduates who were members of the American Independence League. I deplored the waves of hysteria which were already sweeping the country and urged that the problem of possible American participation be viewed in the light of American interests, broadly conceived. I urged that American interests were then as always "tied up with guesses on the future' and that it would be unwise to adopt dogmatic attitudes. "What we need in the coming weeks and months is not a doctrinaire position, stubbornly maintained, but open minds, and an unceasing contrapuntal discussion which will ventilate all phases of this problem."

During the past month cataclysmic events have taken place in Europe. We have had a revelation of power which had been hidden from even the military experts. 'The Nazi Juggernaut has gone crashing across Europe, heedless of the resistance of the small powers, threatening the French with imminent defeat and raising the specter of an invasion of England. Whatever may be, said of these victories, they raise problems whose very existence occasion the most acute anxiety in this country. These victories oblige us, I believe, to reviser positions which appeared perfectly tenable last autumn.

In its most extreme form the Nazi menace would mean naval and military action in the western hemisphere. A completely victorious Germany would control the Italian navy, possess perhaps important parts of the French and British navies, enlist the natural cooperation of the Jananese, and have at her disposal an array of European shipbuilding facilities incomparably superior to ours. Equally important, the Germans would have become enormously self-confident. Military action then is a real possibility, and it would doubtless be materially-aided in parts of Latin America by the generous cooperation of fifth columnists.

I am less impressed than some by this spectre of military action. It presupposes a Germany footloose in Europe, which means a Europe adequately organized under Germany hegemony. The tremendous problems involved in organizing such a Europe would, I think, provide surprises for those who believe that Europe will fall like a ripe plum into the waiting German hand. But even if we discount the military, menace, a German victory over France and England would oblige this country to become something approximating an armed camp. With the inevitable economic and social controls accompanying rapid militarization, we would face a regimentation in which our democratic system would be drastically altered. And this new regime would not be imposed for today or tomorrow, it would go on living indefinitely in a world inhabitated by great power systems like those of the Nazis and the Japanese.

It is for reasons of purely American interest, therefore, that I believe that we now have a large stake in preventing Nazi domination of Europe. Until such time as American interests can be merged in the larger interests of an international order (in which so many of us had placed our earlier hopes)-until that time the national state must command our loyalties. I have no more sympathy than many undergraduates I know for certain types of Anglophile and Francophile enthusiasm deriving from sentimental considerations and unconnected with basic American interests. I, too, have many close friends in France and England. But I have such friends as well in Germany and elsewhere. I should ask nothing better than to gather all of these men of good will and, like the Acharnians, to make our separate peace and found that new society on some unmolested desert island. Unfortunately, the world is not so organized.

Immediate American interests demand, I believe, that we cooperate in every effort, short of of war, to aid the Allied cause-I say "short of war" because it might be hazardous in the extreme for this country to become involved in war, if that war is soon to be lost. It may well be that we shall want to intervene later, but we must first see our way more clearly than the chaotic events of this moment will permit. What is needed now is a clear-headed and realistic willingness to learn the lessons of events as they occur and to come to these events with our minds unburdened with rigid attitudes adopted in advance.

Let me make it quite clear that I share much of the scepticism of the Harvard undergraduate body when it is implied (as it is so often in public statements these days) that our choice is a clear-cut one between democracy a la mode 1925 and a Nazified world. For what it is worth, my own predictions is that the western world stands on the brink of revolutionary developments which would, even with Allied victory, leave little in Europe recalling the democratic institutions we have known. And in such a world America would perforce be carried long way on the road to regimentation. But with Allied victory this regimentation would be self-imposed and milder, we hope, than that of an America competing in arms with a Nazi Europe. In Dante's Inferno there are nine circles. It is better to occupy the second than the ninth.  Donald C. McKay  Assistant Professor of Histor