THE MAIL

To the Editor:

There has come to my notice a report in your January 18 issue of a talk which I gave to a group of students at Lowell House on January 14. Yet I must ask myself whether your good faith was not taken by surprise when you were induced to report me as saying that which I did not say and to present so distorted a version of my remarks that it bears little if any resemblance to fact.

When your report affirms that I "lashed out strongly against clerical fascism . . ." it departs from the truth at right angles. My notes which I closely followed show no such expression, and a checkup among some of my auditors reveals that there was none.

My main argument was that if we are to have a responsible citizenship, capable of serving the ends of democracy, it must be prepared for those tasks by education and training. And I wondered whether the evil of that kind of politicians whose attitude toward good government so frequently in negative, might not be reduced by more attention to the training of men for statesmanship. I suggested the commonplace which anyone who knows any thing at all ought to know, that in this particular, England has gone farther than we. But I said nothing about "selection," and the whole burden of my suggestion was that such training should be given in colleges--which is quite the reverse of what you caused me to say.

I was asked to speak on the general question, "Should Youth Enter Politics?" I thought youth should enter politics because in youth's hands rests the future, and because interest in political questions was the best training for responsible citizenship without which democracy can never survive. I mentioned too that this fact was at the bottom of maintaining the peace, since world peace was as much a question of men as of systems. From those premises my argument proceeded. Lawrence Fernsworth,   Nieman Fellow.