REGIMENT LAUDED IN EDITORIAL

The following is an editorial from a recent edition of the Boston Transcript:

"The tramp of a thousand men marching today in the Harvard Regiment answered many a challenge. Have college students, more and more favored by circumstance, become so lost in seeking personal comfort and private success that they have no time for unselfish service? The regiment's regular ranks and its well-ordered marching told of many hours devoted to drill in the midst of busy weeks in winter and spring. From the day of their enlistment to their final review this morning the men have worked conscientiously to serve not themselves but their country. Has Harvard's tradition of restraint, which makes other colleges wonder sometimes at what they call a Harvard indifference, not only curbed but also broken the university's spirit? The regiment silenced such questions. Its manly bearing met the test of Major-General Leonard Wood's searching eye; the men's vigorous step and resolute faces gave weakness the lie and scouted indifference.

Answering many a challenge, the regiment was also a living challenge itself. It called to a halt the extremists of pacifism. If those who would not have our nation prepared to meet the demands of war hold an ideal which refuses sanction to such qualities as the regiment has developed in Harvard men what is their ideal worth? Can it foster anything else but Inertia? The regiment, on the other hand, was the embodiment of ideals linked with real forces. It showed that it had begun to effect that co-ordination of moral with physical might which has won all the world's battles, whether in war or in peace. It defied the degeneracy of inertia. When the regiment marched in Saturday's parade and when it drilled today in the Stadium it quickened the pulses and brought cheers to the lips of all persons who watched. And the response awakened by these boys was the natural response which earnest men and women cannot help giving to the strength of young manhood when they see it embodied before them in a way that proves the surviving force of the nation, and that shows determination not only to hold to ideals but also to link them with deeds.

So it is right to say that today's review in the Stadium signified more to the honor of Harvard than any of its greatest athletic victories ever did or ever can. It was not the work of eleven men and their substitutes but the feat of a thousand men and their officers. So large a representation could be taken as the measure of Harvard's whole undergraduate body. It made no difference that the crowd of spectators was thousands less than the throng which goes to a football game to gain public applause, they entered to help prepare themselves for an hour of national need. Their enrolment, the manner in which they have discharged their duties, their appearance today in the Stadium incarnated Harvard spirit at its best and its broadest. All honor and long life to the Harvard Regiment!