There is supposed to be a man who gets $100 and up a day by betting anyone he meets who owns a cigarette lighter that the lighter won't work on the first try. I'm going into the same sort of business myself. I'll bet anybody who sits down to phone a girl at Radcliffe or Wellesley between 7 p.m. and closing hour that on the first try the line is busy; and I'll bet the same thing on the second try, with small odds.

The only trouble is that although everybody will bet on his cigarette lighter, nobody will bet on my proposition. And that's because the rottenness of the telephone equipment in girls' dormitories is discovered sooner, and impressed more often on more people, than any other single piece of knowledge got out of a Harvard education. In one Radcliffe house, there is one line for more than 20 girls. Most of the others have something like three incoming lines and one outgoing for about 50 girls. And it's just as bad for the inmates as it is for the callers: they never know how many calls they aren't getting, they have to wait to make a call, and, in a token gesture to keep the lines free, they aren't supposed to talk for more than five minutes. So the girls ought to do something about it themselves. I understand that the key people in this sort of thing are the Housemothers. Let the girls approach these stern people, and let them demand that the lines of communication be extended. Let them get rid of that derisive repeated blast of buzzing that the telephone company is pleased to call a busy signal. It offends the senses and curbs the passions. It must go.

Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., identified by Time last week as the father of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., is teaching in the Netherlands this winter and so for the first time in several years he won't be giving History 61b (formerly History 5b) in the spring term. History 61 is the College's basic American history course, and in view of Truman's election it's too bad that former members of the class won't get a chance to find out if Schlesinger would revise his first lecture, which is the past has included his cyclical theory of American political history.

Roughly, the theory goes like this: regardless of issues and men, ever since the Revolution a pendulum has swung back and fourth, carrying the American people now into a liberal era, now into a conservative era; it is, to change the metaphor, a spiral movement going from a "period of change" into a "period of stabilization" and on into a new period of change, and so on; and--note this--each of these periods lasts, with one or two exceptions, from 12 to 16 years. Now I'm not saying that Schlesinger would feel he had to get up there on the platform and join those jolly good sports who are making such a noise and a bother about "eating crow." Among the past exceptions to his theory was the 32-year period from 1869 to 1901, and he has explained it so that it doesn't alter the theory. And if he can do that, he ought to be able to take a period that lasts perhaps only 20 years and fit into the theory with hardly any trouble at all.

But there is one point that might bother him a little. And this is the fact that the spiral had already begun to twist into a conservative period in 1946, according to several of his own standards for determining such things; so now it has either doubled back or jumped way up ahead, depending on how you want to look at it. And no matter how you look at it, to change the metaphor back again, pendulums don't change their minds.