YOU CAN ALWAYS TELL

Somehow one has always sought comfort in the hope that whatever else may happen in a changing world the Boston Evening Transcript would stand put. Never seriously indicted as a "scare" sheet the old comforter of Back Bay has staked its little all upon the satisfactory handling of the expected. Its news material emerges from the editorial offices with the tough parts removed and furnishes its established clientel a not too stimulating contact with a busy world of affairs.

But now and then the smell of stale cigar smoke disturbs the quiet atmosphere of America's most antique daily in an incongruous fashion. Many a college graduate of the mauve decade whose four college years taught him the art of a polished dependence upon tradition must have shuddered last evening when he opened his Transcript to the page which bears the clippings headed School and College. Underneath a large cut of a well-known college president there ran a bold face paragraph which mixed up college men and Pullman smoking compartments with disquieting innuendo. Readers of the more widely circulated journals may be interested to know that Mr. Nielson finds that college men lose all marks of their special training after ten to fifteen years when viewed in the storied light of a Pullman smoking room, but it is hardly fit food for the thought of Commonwealth avenue.

The same liesurely journalistic style which allows reviews of symphony concerts to run three columns ought at least to permit more than mere tabloid comment on matters of such obvious educational importance as the permanence of collegiate training. Departures from policy of this nature are all the more insidious since they fail to carry the warning found in less selective journals which usually run this sort of material under some such head as "thirty seconds a day with serious thinkers."