THE RACE IS NOT TO THE SWIFT

If ever the Big Three need to stick together in danger, now is the time. One side of the Eternal Triangle is collapsing. One stem of the race is vanishing. In a feature article, the usually unsensational New York Times announced that "Old Nassan's graduates were failing to a striking degree to reproduce themselves . . . and are dying out with amazing rapidity . . . The men now in college will have few descendants in six generations."

Behind every result there is a cause, and at Princeton--where this maxim also holds true--a questionnaire sent to 1,856 men brought striking answers to the paternal collapse. Princeton men sighed over their "inability to have more children" and their "limited financial means." For the first reason, Harvard has nothing but a raised eyebrow. For the second--that purest of emotions, pity. With a comforting arm around the Tiger's tweedy shoulders, we note with care that he earns $6,600 per year, higher than any other college average.

The brightest ray of hope is the observation that "as marks get worse, there is a definite progression towards fewer children." It means that the Princeton man--if he has any hope of survival--faces a serious future. He must forget his clubs, his tweeds, his weekends, especially his New York (whose results, after all, don't count in the official survey) and concentrate on four years of hard study. The higher ranking the student, the greater chance for children. Let the midnight oil flow, let the pages of Aristotle turn, and the Princeton boy will grow to manhood and become the apple of the census-taker's eye.