HAPPY NEW YEAR

Pious Boston, tapping her foot, was not allowed to observe it. Even the weary students dragging back to dormitories to rest during the Reading Period find the old year too much with them after the rigors of vacation. Artificial, calendarical, a mere notch in the tally of history as it may be, it still is a beginning, however, and for the newspaper men, even more than the diary makers and occasional topers, it is a field day. The columnists and cartoonists have dusted off the old resolution jokes, and the editors have rolled up their sleeves to pass in review, summarize, compare, and prophesy. It seems that next year will be as prosperous as it always has been, and that lastyear was highly significant, which significance having been extracted, the twelve eventful months were canned, labelled, and put on a shelf.

But this still leaves the inevitable resolutions which are after all the imresolutions which are after all the important things. For in no yague fashions do the festivities of celebration invoke a painful celebration that is conducive to the thumbing of leaves. After all, the sheet is clean, and since one makes one's own bed and has to lie in it, it does seem too bad to dirty the linen. Writers can wash it in public, but most people rounding the curve and seeing the straight stretch are too weak not to determine to keep the sprint unimpeded. And so they make resolutions, and are the better for it; and break them and are the worse for it. It is wearying to be platitudinous on this subject but the only way not to be trite, and to beat the humorist is to make no resolutions, and then stick to them.