Precedents are all against me. I am a fresher. I have not a single quotation to support me, and I am probably to share the fate of many - the fate of being summarily dismissed with the words, "just another half-baked intellectual snob". Yet I must protest against the labels plastered all over the average fresher by the individual who so ineffectually shelters behind the initials "R. L. M."

This fellow, so quaintly conventional and complacent in his flaunted iconoclasm, entitles his article "For Freshers Only" and thereafter proceeds to join his companions in jeering at that person. Intent on pursuing realism he finds it essential to feed freshers with "hog-wash"; eager to conform with, and at the same time impress, his fellow-Socialists, he throws his exquisite little verbal bombs - which do little other than waste paper - at "the pernicious ravings of the modem capitalist press".

Exaggeration is not enough for this self-styled disciple of tolerance, who in reality is no more than a poseur; he must dogmatise to complete the destiny of "the fresher". So he formulates a law embracing the fresher's mind. (Goodness knows, the human personality's variability should have told him long ago of the hopelessness of generalising about man). In this law he probes deep into what he thinks are our principles and benignly offers advice. He describes in an outpouring of his poetic soul the "compact, beautiful unity, in which all explicable things are fully explained". Let us be comfortable in as uncomfortable a way as possible, he says. I know not what his aims are, but - and here is my one spontaneous quotation - I know that, as Nietzsche declared: "Unless you have chaos within you cannot give birth to a dancing star", (Yes, Mr. Meek, Nietsche said that) -