BRITISH EYES ON HARVARD

(Ed. Note: The following article has been written specially for the CRIMSON by Peter Hume, a member of Queen's College, Cambridge, and correspondent for the London Post. Mr. Hume is better known in this country as author of the "Cambridge Letter," appearing from time to time in the CRIMSON.)

It is difficult you know, my hosts, after so long of writing to you from such a distance that I can say almost anything I like with the certainty that you will have the hell of a job to prove that I am not making it all up to play an away game, so to speak. It is galling to my poetic imagination, so happily occupied in the fascinating pastime of creating a figmentary sort of university life three thousand miles away, to have to write in and presumably about things to which you knew the answers long before I did, to be brought from a kingdom all my own (at least as far as you are concerned) to a state where truth is truth and you know what it is. Of course I have the consolation of knowing that when I get home I shall be able to write lovely imaginative sketches of a University which I will call Harvard and all the saps over there will think it is you. But as far as this letter is concerned that is no help at all. But I am cunning you see. I have already written over a hundred words without saying the wrong thing. In fact if you look carefully you will observe that I haven't said anything at all. Which is in the tradition.

Now, I have been here seventeen days and have been asked something like seventeen hundred times what I think of America. The answer is that I don't at the moment think at all. Leaving aside the question, now I am afraid finally settled (you know which way) in England, as to whether I think at all so as you would notice it, my answer is that you don't give a fellow time for such spare time pursuits as thought. He gets off a boat and is met by a hospitable American who once had a drink with him perhaps. The hospitable American takes him to a party where he meets about thirty more H. A.'s. They find out where he is staying (if he has found out himself) and from then on it is just "madder music and stronger wine" until he is carried in a state of delirium tremens and general paralysis of the insane onto the returning boat. The man who does not get the best time of his life in a visit to America must either spend his visit on Ellis Island or go about as Andrew Volstead. That for the moment is all I can think of to say to America, and I assure you it is a high compliment. Perhaps by the time I next write to you from Cambridge, Eng. (where life, as I have previously indicated, is a round of leisure) I shall have had time to think up some pithy sayings and artless aphorisms about the real America. Meanwhile "for all our thanks"--I must rush off to a party.