To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Despite the ominous warnings of your editorial, Bus Ride to Heaven, I see no evidence that the principle of separation of church and state is violated by permitting a community to offer bus service or any other service to parochial schools.

You seem to think that behind subsidies to Church education lurks union of Church and State. There is nothing contrary principle of separation of Church and State in the practice of subsidy. American communities have always "subsidized" the Church. By exemption of Church property from taxation the State directly encourages an establishment of religion. Yet it is seldom objected that this represents a sinister union of Church and State. How much more important is this concession than the few pennies involved in picking up parochial school children. The historical fact is that the State has subsidized religion without interfering with it in the least.

You deplore the possibility that out of minor subsidies to parochial schools will develop control over them. If the state has the power of control after subsidy, it has the power of control before subsidy. It is obvious that without subsidy that State rightly exercises considerable control over parochial, as over all education, public and private. Without contributing a penny, New York State's Board of Regents controls the federal government. New Jersey taxpayers, contrary to the opinion expressed in the CRIMSON editorial, are not being exploited by a law permitting school buses to pick up parochial school children, so long as the taxpayers of New Jersey have chosen to put the law on the books and have chosen to keep it there. Far more vicious, it would seem to me, is the effort of a minority of the state's taxpayers run to the federal courts and upset by court ruling what the majority of taxpayers refuse to upset by majority vote. Francis Murphy   Dunster G-13