To the Editor of the CRIMSON:

The letter from William M. Wood appearing in the CRIMSON of Friday, June 6th, and urging that the Harvard Student Union "be exposed for the true termites that they are!" demands careful critical examination of its entire logical development; for its motivating idea is convincing a progressively larger and larger portion of the population--and is in consequence becoming a graver and graver threat to the very basis of all democracy . . .

Let us examine Mr. Wood's fundamental premise: By opposing the policy of the Administration and of the majority of the people the Harvard Student Union, a minority group, becomes "unpatriotic". In support of this Mr. Wood makes dogmatic pronouncement:

"It is an affront to Democracy when 85 members of a student body of 8500 take it upon themselves to define the will of the American people in order to serve their own questionable ends." And it is in the use of the word "questionable" that the major fallacy of the argument appears. These ends are questionable to whom? Obviously, it is to William M. Wood. But who has entrusted to William M. Wood a discrimination so absolute that his views of the just and unjust shall be accepted as sovereign? Who is he to define the words "patriotic", "subversive", "anti-American"?--Let him first define the word "American".

Mr. Wood may make reply that his definitions are valid--are absolute--because his views are at present in general agreement with those of the majority of the American people, whose views, by democratic principle, must be accepted as sovereign. But he asks, in accordance with this self-asserted divinity, that opposition (such as the HSU) be eliminated--as "termites". After which painless extermination it is hard to see how the free discussion essential to democracy would exist. On what basis could Franklin D. Roosevelt or William M. Wood claim then to represent the beliefs of a majority of the people, since without question of or vote on an issue no estimate of public opinion could be made.

Thus we observe the reduction ad absurdum of the premise that the view of any individual or any majority is ipso facto absolute. The best that can be said for a majority opinion is that it is a majority opinion under which the policy of the nation should be provisionally ordered. For always the dictatorial tendencies of a majority should be subject to the check of a wakeful minority aspiring to power.

With humility, casting away dogmatism, let us attempt a provisional redefinition of our own democracy: Let it be a society in which the Harvard Student Union has the courage to oppose aid-to-Britain, the CRIMSON the courage to favor aid-to-Britain and to oppose war, William M. Wood the courage explicitly to favor the President's program--and all three, looking on the formulation of their own views as a national responsibility, regard it equally as their duty to protect the propagation of opposing views . . . Louis H. Pollack '44.