Your article on sprawl ("How Sprawl Got a Bad Name," June) is so, so right and a pleasure to read. I have been a local councilman in Nottinghamshire, England for 40 years--40 years of hearing bawling opposition to any building anywhere. I have thought everything your writer expresses, but lacked his eloquence to use against wrongheadedness. False altruism masks fear and hatred of one's fellow man in these arguments. There is also greed by some for the benefits of an artificial shortage of building land. The advantages go to the haves, the disadvantages fall on the have nots.

In this month's TAE, the cover stories assert that American sprawl is the natural result of individual freedom, and that critics of sprawl are "snobs" who want to dictate Americans' land use choices. Not so! Land use regulation virtually dictates sprawl in most of America.

Zoning laws prohibit housing in many commercial zones, making it harder for people to walk to jobs and shops; mandate low density, making transit ridership impractical; require that businesses and apartment complexes be surrounded by parking, making pedestrian trips time-consuming; mandate that major commercial streets be so wide that most sane people will not cross them on foot; and mandate that intersections be few and far between, so pedestrians have to go out of their way to cross those eight-lane arterials or find nearby side streets.

If anyone is a "snob," it is the bureaucrats who created these regulations and, in doing so, effectively decided that non-drivers would be second-class citizens.

Congrats to the new sprawl lobby! It seems that instead of providing any solutions for the problems created by sprawl, your magazine has instead created a lobby for the protection of it. I am sure that many road-building and automobile interests cannot wait to have your authors as their mouthpieces.

Dialogue among religious sects is heartily American (BIRD'S EYE, May). But, when Muslims are committed to overthrowing all political systems other than their brand of theocracy, it behooves you to rethink including them in your universal generalizations.

In "Puritanism Lives" (May) David Gelernter quotes Lincoln telling his cabinet in late September 1862 that he was freeing the slaves as a result of a vow he made to God, while praying that General Lee be repelled. But, if a vow to God was Lincoln's reason, why did the Emancipation Proclamation only free those slaves within rebel states?

Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation at a time when the war was going badly for him. It was a desperate attempt to cause an uprising among the slaves in the South. His motives were purely political, not puritanical. GelernterÍs history seems tainted by a romantic view of the facts.

I was extremely moved by Blake Hurst's "The Making of a Cadet" in the May issue. Like Blake's son Ben, I was a cadet at Washington University, and am familiar with the tentative coexistence between ROTC and the campus.

After graduation I eventually took a commission in the 82nd Airborne and deployed to Saudi Arabia and Iraq as part of Desert Storm. I left the Army in 1992 seeking bigger and better things. Little did I know that nothing that was to follow--no matter how much bigger the paycheck--would ever match the level of responsibility, pride, and accomplishment that I felt during those years as a young lieutenant.

Hurst described how he cried watching Ben during the color guard ceremony at the Washington University football game. If the commissioning ceremony is still held in Graham Chapel on graduation day, with its magnificent pipe organ blasting out the "Star Spangled Banner," he has something infinitely more moving to look forward to.