CODMAN URGES VIRULENT TO DISREGARD DRY LAW

With the results of the CRIMSON prohibition poll showing the sentiment of the University to be largely opposed to the Eighteenth Amendment as it now stands, comes an interview with Mr. Julian Codman '92, a prominent Boston lawyer, in which he decries the Volstead Act in the strongest terms. "In my opinion", says Mr. Codman, "drinking at Harvard never had any harmful effect.

Drinking Beneficial

"In fact I would go so far as to say that drinking as it was done at the University in pre-prohibition days was even beneficial. It brought about a spirit of comradeship and opportunities for social gatherings largely lacking at present; and, above all, it taught men how to act when, so to speak, they 'had a little bit aboard'.

"It has been said that we are in this world to be educated; we cannot be educated in the true sense, if our brother shuts us up in a glass cage. Every experience we have serves to educate us in the ways of life. If an institution or a government forbids us to have these experiences, we are cut off from a whole part of life, and cannot hope to understand it. We must have our temptations, and we must fall, if need be, before we are fitted to meet them evenly in life. The Volstead Act is only another restriction on experience, and without being a hypocrite I cannot but urge every red blooded, virile man to disregard prohibition as it now stands.

"The problem, it seems to me," continues Mr Codman, "is whether the Federal Government of this country shall actually absorb the functions of the States so that they are no longer sovereign as provided in the Constitution. Also whether the same government shall establish a paternalism over the individual citizen, directing his activities from the cradle to the gravel or whether, on the contrary, we shall return to the theory of our fathers.