A Reason.

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Ex-Captain Trumbull and the cheer leaders, and the CRIMSON as well, seem not to consider a certain reason which may account for the present undergraduate lack of football enthusiasm. It is not that the student body thinks Princeton will be easily defeated. But may it not be that a whole-hearted interest in the team has subsided because of too many one-sided early-season games?

The ex-Captain, referring to mass meetings crowded when he was a student, does not divulge that in those times Harvard had more than three mettlesome opponents out of nine. In addition to Brown, Princeton and Yale, the University team had real combats with Cornell or Machigan, Dartmouth or Penn State, Washington and Jefferson or Carlisle--there were always no less than five games out of nine that were close games and profitable tests. Naturally, the stu- dents then were inspired to cheer and sing, to swarm to mass meetings.

The CRIMSON, complaining that only one undergraduate in eight attended the mass meeting last Thursday night, asks if the others were sipping tea or discussing art. If they were, is it not presumable that the particular art under debate was the art of drawing up the University football schedule?

Any fan who really follows football (and it is to be assumed that there are many hundreds of fans in Harvard, even though they didn't attend that mass meeting> is familiar with the interesting succession of games being played this year by such teams as Colgate, Syracuse, Cornell, Pennsylvania, Dartmouth, Brown, Penn State. Not one but meets five redoubtable rivals; Cornell and Syracuse have six each.

In speculating on the 1919 Eastern championship, New York sport writers are wondering simply whether it will go to Colgate, Dartmouth, or Pennsylvania. They glance at the unimpressive schedules of Harvard not only, but of Yale, and of Princeton (of eight games the latter has only four difficult to win) and they have recorded their suspicions that the "Big Three," having year by year dropped "dangerous" adversaries from the schedule, are not displaying the best possible sportsmanship.

You can practically fill the Stadium and the H. A. A. treasury, no matter whether Harvard play the Southwestern Baptist College or the Arizons Aggies a war-tired public is ravenous for any kind of football. But the University team, in spite of its irrefragable prestige, where does it actually rank at the end of the season?

It is difficult to instil enthusiasm into a student body compelled to watch games won by 35 or 45 to 0.  WILLARD CONNELY 1G