THE ARMY GAME

Saturday's football game at West Point focused attention on the Army contest from many opposing points of view. An increasing number of Harvard men who in the past may have looked upon the Army meeting as a major event of the football season are beginning to see the fundamental artificiality of the game itself which is so obscured by the appeal of pageantry and precision.

There are two deep-rooted reasons why the Army is not one of the more desirable opponents of the Harvard football team. The first is the absence of interests common to Harvard men and the United States Military machine. On many past occasions it has been pointed out that there are colleges and universities far more logical as opponents of Harvard in the friendly rivalries of sport than West Point. The time has come, as the unprecedented lack of palpable interest on the part of Harvard undergraduates in the last Army contest confirms, to clear the Harvard calendar of games with teams from institutions respected but whose representation on Soldiers Field is regarded as irrational. Unhappily the Harvard athletic authorities have signed a four-year contract with West Point thereby making impossible an immediate solution of this particular problem.

The second ground for the termination of football relations with West Point is the same as that which brought the United States Naval Academy to close its seasonal football engagements with the Army. The officials at West Point have displayed an obdurate attitude on the subject of eligibility, yet they did make a concession in agreeing to consider plebes ineligible. The present regulation at West Point permits graduated college football stars three additional years of inter-collegiate competition while other institutions allow only three years in all. As long as West Point continues this rule, its football team cannot be regarded as a logical opponent for Harvard.

One is compelled to admit the difficulties which will confront the Harvard authorities in their attempt to find if college to supplant the Army on the football schedule. For the West Point contest hitherto has been a great financial success. The Military Academy, in agreeing to but one contest at West Point after every three in Cambridge, has been generous in easing the obstacles raised by Harvard's rule limiting the football team to one trip away from Cambridge per season. But it is a matter of principle and of reason that the football team from West Point should be eliminated from the Harvard schedule.