"CONTINUAL DECLINE IN DRINKING"--WORCESTER

"For more than 100 years there has been a steady decline in the drinking of hard liquor by Harvard students", said Dr. Alfred Worcester, Henry K. Oliver Professor of Hygiene, in a statement issued to the press recently.

"Not so many years ago", he is quoted as saying, "it was not uncommon to see a dozen cops pile into a wagon and hurry off to quell some riot in a dormitory entry, or in the Square. In my own student days our various committee meetings and editorial conferences were held in the crowded saloons of Harvard Square. Our class dinners and commencement gatherings were occasions of drunken revelry. It used to be a point of honor never to leave a drunken classmate in Boston or down at the port. Instead, he must somehow be got home and put to bed. But now that is apparently the last thing that classmates do for each other. Even if one meets with an accident, he will be carried anywhere else than the College infirmary, lest the fact of his drunkenness be known. Whatever is said to the contrary, there is not now anything like the amount of drinking or of drunkenness that there used to be, and it decreases regularly and appreciably each year."

Among the reasons which officers of the University offer as explanation for the decrease in drinking are: poor quality of liquor obtainable, the depression, the new House Plan, and the fact that men are kept so busy in all departments of the University that they have little time for indulgences.