Nearing the End!

Once more we are approaching the end of a College year. Soon another year of College life and study will be over and the results of learning and swotting will be tested in the dreary rooms of sack-cloth. Those good little boys and girls who have religiously shunned the temptations of Victoria's night life will probably reap their just reward and gladden the hearts of stern examiners and fond parents. Those who have endeavoured to combine judiciously study and pleasure will also achieve their deserts, we hope. and in scraping through the finals will feel that they have spent a successful year here. Those who have relegated study to a subordinate place in their College life will need all the luck that we wish them to persuade the Gods of their Fate that they have picked up sufficient knowledge in their last minute mugging.

In any case, the decision rests with the Fates. It has always been "Smad's" opinion that students should enter a University firstly with the idea of being educated — educated in the broadest sense — and secondly to pass examinations. The College is an educating force in toto not merely by virtue of its Professors and its lecture halls. The man who hopes to acquire a broad and beneficial University education will not acquire it only in his particular course of study — in a little world of intellectualism divorced from reality and cut off from the world of men and women. Rather will he find it in his association with other higher-than-average minds and personalities with whom he can come in contact only by participating in the full College life through the medium of its Clubs. How often are we told that man is a social being? The best citizens are not the book-knowledge degree-hunters, but the students who have learned to understand their fellow-men and have used their academic studies to develop traits such as tolerance, common-sense outlook, and straight thinking.

This year's examinations will inflict upon the com-munity another batch of graduates and "Smad's" hope is that the majority will be those who have given something in personal service to the College. Those who have taken all they can from Professors and Libraries are not true Salamanca-ites. In a year or so the College will have forgotten them and rightly so. To those who have helped to make the College greater, who have given something to the furtherance of College Clubs and activities, to them we would offer our best wishes for well-earned success.

And before "Smad" says farewell, it is fitting that the members of the Staff of this "Organ of Student Opinion" should receive their due thanks. The production of a paper such as this in a community such as ours, is at once an arduous and thankless task. It is obvious that none of us will receive any bouquets, nor do we expect them. It would appear that our success is to be measured by the amount of abuse and criticism we are able to provoke. Splendid! We seem on the face of things, then, to have achieved some measure of success. We shall feel satisfied if we have proved sufficiently provoking to stir some of you out of your semi-somnolent state; if we have annoyed and irritated some of you, we are pleased; and if we have angered others of you so far as to arouse active antagonism, we are overjoyed. But whether you have been annoyed, amused, or merely bored, we thank you for your flood of contributions, your helpful criticism and your much-appreciated efforts to supplement our unworthy talents by taking the burden upon your own shoulders in an endeavour to produce a paper worthy of you. There may it rest! Habemus!