Editorial

A new executive sweeps even cleaner. Last year saw the intrusion of new candidates into our politics and since then life at the College, once so drab and so impersonal, has never looked back. Unencumbered with the venerable heads that generally preside over our executives stifling the zeal of youth and year by year eroding in turn the ancient rut, these fresh young statesmen hurled away the crisp greenery of their salad days and determined to struggle out of the trench.

It is well known that men are never very wise and select in the exercise of a new power and perhaps our Executive in its enthusiasm attempted too much in its first year. However, the students after their first pained surprise, realised the Executive was working in their interests and accepted the various expressions of censure—even to the temporary closing of the men's common room, in a philosophic manner.

Then with amusing naivete and moved by either the promptings of an awakening conscience or by some vague sense of justice our executive announced its intention of purifying college politics. The constitution was modernized and in it installed an up-to-date system of election, the system that America has adopted in electing its Senate.

Unhappily, and for diverse reasons, all have not seen eye to eye on the respective merits of the innovation and so, to-day on one side we have the Opposition from a somewhat insecure foothold beseeching us to thwart the designs of authority and on the other the unfoiled Potentate quietly biding his time.

Where two views be open to acceptance among men such as one finds in a University—men of quick decision and impregnable resolve, one is prepared for the just degree of social constraint. But it is remarkable that there should be so much difference of opinion upon a matter that, viewed logically, must be either right or wrong. One is led to conclude that both camps are not regarding the various debatable points in the same perspecture and it would be as well that in future the widest publicity should be given to any violent departure from established precedent, before the matter is brought to a decision.

In view of the overwhelming influence of the pen in the moulding of public opinion, and the impossibility of divorcing politics from news, the position of the College organ, constituted to act as a ventilator for student opinion, becomes difficult to define. If we operate in the interests of the executive only, by means of persistent sophistry the College in the future—for Smad is presumably for all time—may be misled in many important aspects of our politics—and anything savouring of Fascism must be shunned. On the other hand if we become an official Opposition unhealthy discord is created and our real mission will become subordinated to the dispute in hand. The only remedy for this blight on our lives is this anaemic neutrality which we shall anxiously preserve and endeavour to sustain.

To all, our pages have been thrown open, and our productions like that of the world's Press now, go abroad through all the College, 'silent as snowflakes,'—even if they lack the potence of thunder.