To the Editors of the CRIMSON,

It was my idea the other day to write a letter congratulating you on your editorial dealing with civil liberties and tactics. I let this opportunity to do good pass. A few days later you printed the logically curious effort of W. W. du B. and W. in which you were called fascists. It seems reasonable enough not to praise the CRIMSON, but this of Wilb, Wilcx, Whsde, and du Bou, will, in the words of another age, never do.

As I see it, the group is defending the use of bully boy tactics because the tactics are used in a "good cause". I infer that if the same tactics were used by Smith's hoodlums to break up a Communist meeting, that would be a "bad thing." As the W's and du B point out, "the demonstration was incredibly well-organized" and "is it a denial of free speech for the audience to be louder than the man addressing it?" This makes beauty of organization and violence basic criteria in matters of discussion. It puts all opinion not backed by muscles as hard as the heads of those engaging in such discussion at the mercy of hardness.

As the CRIMSON said, this is not the intention of the Bill of Rights, because the CRIMSON doesn't want its presses smashed when it prints the kind of editorial it did. And it is not the privilege of crypto-Communists like RW, TW, WW, and AdB to give the Bill such an interpretation when it suits their fancy. All parties are to have an equal right before the law, and private persons are not to take over the police function at any time. Every citizen has a great duty to defend orderly process and the law as it stands, changing the law at will as his ideas about his society changes. This is very simple minded and rather 18th century, I'll admit, but no one has demonstrated that an administrative procedure based on mob violence, curbed at intervals by arbitrary police power either in Germany or Russia or Spain is a better system.

Smith is a vender of snake oil, and what he says stinks. I say the same thing of the refuse I read in the Daily Worker. I do not howl for the suppression of the Worker, and neither does the CRIMSON. But Communists howl long and loud about people like Smith, and when the remaining rather few middle class libertarians ask for legal treatment of Smith, they are, inevitably called fascists and Germany is darkly referred to. But I saw Life's photographs showing Communists breaking up a meeting in Hungary, and recall Trotsky's death in Mexico. And here at home I remember Albert Malz's recent attempt to introduce the question of esthetics into party art, and his public and humble apology to the party for having had a thought of his own. When such people show a concern about "free speech" they must be talking "quietistic" nonsense. I would like to see the three W's and B reacting in tweed coated agony to "an incredibly well organized" group of black camelias or knights of the burning pestle breaking up a Communist rally in Madison Square Garden.

And this was a Communist led affair. I will not believe the men who wrote such a sentence as "If Communists were among the demonstrators, good for them," did not know the organizing group was Communist. Their accusing the CRIMSON of spreading "the untruth that resistance to Smith was . . . primarily Communist" is at best disingenuous. The thing was led by Harry A. Mendelsohn and his AYD friends. Mendelsohn may not be a member of the party, but in two years acquaintance with him I've never seen him disagree with the party or fail to support its local front groups. If this was not Communist led, the burden of proof lies on those charging the CRIMSON with spreading calumny.

If Wilbur, Wilcox, Whiteside and du Bouchet want a continued comfortable academic environment in which the AYD can have a chapter, I suggest they give some active support to the social-democratic quietism which the CRIMSON'S wellargued editorial recommended. James A. Walker