THE SPARRING QUESTION.

EDITORS DAILY CRIMSON. - There appeared in yesterday's CRIMSON an editorial referring to a petition, the aim of which is to make boxing cheaper for the students interested therein. It opposed such a measure on the ground that it ensured a favor only to "many students" and not to the university at large. This is true, but it must be remembered that the success of this attempt would give more men the enjoyment of sparring. Practice of this kind is, as all other gymnasium exercise, merely a recreation for the mind, but I cannot understand why it should not on that account be well cultivated. The art of self-defence, while it gives a person a happy confidence as an athlete, does not destroy the instincts of the gentleman, but engenders on the contrary equanimity of temper. Your paper fears also that the enjoyment of a special teacher in sparring would, if the conduct of the faculty were at all consistent, necessitate a special master of fencing and dancing. Here you commit a mistake; sparring is a mode of defence which has a national character, as fencing has in Germany, and in the immediate vicinity of the college it is practiced at the approach of the winter meetings to such an extent that three men make its instruction a specialty. As to dancing, I can only say that it would be a very amusing sight to see college men dancing under the supervision of a teacher.

If you had, however, confined yourselves to an opposition against the principle involved, there would be little blame attached to your editorial. As if, however, this were not enough, you end with a personal tirade against Mr. Ferris himself. You must not look for the highest criterion of education in a sparring teacher. Yet this the pupils of Mr. Ferris' class can say for him, that in his classes he has always acted in a fair and gentlemanly manner.

'87.