A BREAK FOR FREEDOM

For three years the University has struggled with its sixty per cent rule for class elections and each year its chagrin has increased. Day after day of balloting has gone by while committees in charge have drummed up reluctant voters until the quota was at last attained. This year elections are being carried on by postal ballot and optimistic committees seem to believe that one or two days will suffice to crown their efforts with success. For they argue quite logically that to the jaded Sophomore and the indifferent Junior it is easier to walk to a mail box than to a polling booth.

But the Sophomore class has been even more energetic, and, seizing the bull by the horns, is holding a referendum on the subject abolishing the sixty per cent rule entirely. Such action would seem to be eminently fitting, for whether or not one day is enough to secure the quota this year, the rule has made itself thoroughly odious in the past and is far from likely to be a blessing in the future. Proposed originally because there was too little interest in the middle class elections, the rule has not even theory, much less practical success, to recommend it; interest in class elections, it has been proved, can not be awakened by legislation. If the postal ballot method of election does not succeed both in appealing to the voter's interest and catering to his love of ease, nothing will succeed and it is time to abolish Sophomore and Junior class elections.

This is a somewhat dire prospect. Despite what important critics may say, class officers have, after all a certain measure of usefulness, and if the College is to have a Student Council, it is only right that all the classes should be represented. Any rule abolishing elections in the middle classes would be sure in the course of time to be abolished itself. Nevertheless such a rule has been proposed, in the past and is sure to be proposed again in the future, if the difficulty of the sixty per cent regulation is not overcome. The Sophomore class has led the way it seeking an escape from the dilemma. "Nothing succeeds like success" says Dumas, and certainly if the Class of 1926 escapes its bonds, it is not likely that the Class of 1925, with its experience of the past two years, will long hesitate.