Off Key

Mass meetings are significant when and only when they hit the top in newspapers publicity. This and this alone in is the fundamental powers of the peace rallies which chronically afflict the campuses of universities throughout the country. They made the front pages. Of course, they never accomplish anything immediately tangible beyond the taking of an oath here and there never to fight and the dispatching of telegrams to congressmen, telegrams potent for their nuisance value. True, nothing ever happens beyond the yelling of many voices for peace. And it is probably also true as the cynic claims that those who yell hardest for peace today are first into the trenches tomorrow. "Yes," sneers the R.O.T.C. man, "I'll be an officer when you're in the mud."

But that isn't the point. The point is that whenever students stage demonstrations, rallies, or reviews on a large scale, the word of it goes out over the nation. And the old people in the hills of West Virginia realize that the young men of Harvard or of Yale or of Columbia and the young men of the United States are for peace or war or whatever they are for. When you poke fun at peace demonstrations, remember that. Remember that the student, whatever scorn or contumely be at times levelled at him, is in the minds of the mass of the citizenry most looked up to as a group. To the mass of citizenry if not to himself he is a hope for the future. Potentially he is beyond all other forces in contemporary America the strongest force in public opinion. When he articulates that's news. When he stages a demonstration the effect he has varies directly with the noise he makes and the attention he receives.

Today the R.O.T.C. stages its first grand review at Harvard. If a certain particularly ornery horse doesn't lie down on the soldier who buttons his cinch, it will probably not be the last. Military science and Naval Science have large followings at Harvard as at other colleges. And if these R.O.T.C. men believe in the merits of preparedness and the rather completed ineptitude of the present U.S. force in comparison with other armies, let them make their grand demonstration today be but the opening gun in their own noise making campaign for the ideal of preparedness as against that of peace at any price.