To the Editors of the Crimson:

Wednesday evening some of us listened to Miss Von Lieben, a student at the University of Vienna, describe sincerely and without flourishes just what amount of food students in Vienna had to live on, elsewhere had meant to them. But the Mary Margaret McBride background to this program, furnished by the other participants, was enough to cause some quick dial-twisting to another station.

With the food relief drive only three days off, it's about time we who are going to shell out know that our contributions are not for just "another emergency," or another group of starving people, but for students like ourselves who, possibly even more than we, will be the policy makers, the planners, and the leaders of a world in which we must spend our days. We can think about the crust of bread symbolizing 900 calories a day, but let's think far more intently on whether we are to keep alive this vital force-about the only optimists left alive in Europe or Asia-or let it die, and with its death, let tumble the victory of progress over cruelty and degradation, won so recently.

Five dollars worth of food kept Miss Von Lieben going at her university for four weeks. Harvard's contribution to the University of Vienna last summer brought, as a testament of gratitude from students there, two board and room scholarships for Harvard students. Of the $25,000 to be raised in the present drive, $21,000 is divided among the Universities of Warsaw, Athens, Peking, and Vienna, schools where hunger and a forty percent tubercular rate compete for the lives of students. The remaining $4000 buys food for Harvard's own baby, a summer rest school at Salzburg, Austria, where 100 of the best European students will be taught by leading men from our own faculty.

Let's remember these things when some follow from down the entry asks us to kick in. William J. Richard,Jr. '49.