GREAT BRITAIN Pacifists Pimched

Pacifists Punched

Proud of their Pacifism, several score undergraduates at Toronto's co-educational Victoria University pinned white feathers on themselves last week, swarmed to a meeting of approximately one-tenth the student body.

"Be it resolved," droned the presiding officer, "that this House will not, under any conditions, fight for its King and Country." By a slim majority of six the motion passed. Meanwhile London's historic Punch dealt in scathing verse with the famed Oxford Union whose members have twice voted, both times by overwhelming majorities, never to fight for King & Country.

Sneered Punch at the Union:

It is a cheap and useful club,

But not the Alma Mater's hub,

Nor a true index of the soul

That sees life steadily and whole.

Though normal youth may here be found,

The cranks in greater force abound

In this their happy hunting-ground,

Where the unending human ass

Blows off at times superfluous gas,

Exulting whensoever he shocks

The feelings of the orthodox,

And, for the rest, is overjoyed

By bombinating in the void.

So when embittered, acrid fogeys

Who spend their time in raising bogeys,

And those disgruntled critics who

Think everything on earth's askew,

In this unmannerly debate

Discern a menace to the State

As well as a convincing sign

Of Oxford's unredeemed decline,

Punch, undisturbed by all these strictures,

Unawed by pessimistic pictures

And only tickled by the goad

Applied by Jeremiah Joad,*

Like the good Bishop in the song

(Who found the preacher overlong

In arguments that wouldn't wash),

Loudly ejaculates, "Oh, bosh!"

--A Jeremiah (i.e. denunciatory pessimist) is Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad, M.A., since 1930 Head of the Department of Philosophy and Psychology at Birkbeck College in the University of London. Though he plays such cheerful games as tennis and hockey, Jeremiah Joad also sits long over the chessboard, writes ironical, sarcastic books. A typical Joadism: "Advertisements are ugly, partly because commercial men rarely have the sense to employ artists to design them, partly because artists, on the rare occasions when they are employed, have not the sense to design what the commercial men want." (The Babbitt Warren, p. 143; Harper, 1927.)

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