choice is scarcely more representative. If a boy is a member of a clique from one of the leading preparatory schools, or a distinguished athlete, the path is easy-so easy that often quite undeserving fellows rise to the crest of the wave. But, lacking such advantages, as many a good man does lack them, he finds himself in imminent danger of being submerged.

In the modern world no taboo is more powerful than that which rests upon American undergraduates who have failed to "make" a club or fraternity. They are hoi polloi, barbarians, outsiders-to mention only a few of the epithets. Every instinct of self-preservation impels a boy to get himself "run" for a fraternity, to follow, heel, or swipe; in short, to enter a conscious struggle against which every manly impulse revolts.

Two things equally grave result from this. An increasingly large proportion of undergraduates fail to get what they are capable of getting out of undergraduate life. Helpless and forlorn, they live in little cliques, remote from the moving interests, the priceless traditions, of the student body as a whole. And the universities in turn are failing to develop the full value of the material they have to work with; for if the right man fails to make a team, fraternity, or club, the institution as a whole loses precisely as he does.

Yet I for one do not accuse our universities of any snobbish intention or real exclusiveness of spirit. Everywhere the impulse and the ideal are right. Many poor men of character and ability yearly make their way into the inner circles at Yale and Princeton; and if Harvard is a shade less fortunate in this respect, I do not say that it is,-it excels all other universities, I think, in what may be called the democracy of scholarship and intelligence. The universities in which the fraternity system prevails are the most obviously democratic in their dominant ideal; as, for example, the great state universities of the West.

The real need, as we are coming to see, is not of an ideal, but of a system-an organization which gives every undergraduate the opportunity of developing to the utmost his capacity for college life and college leadership. In a word, the disorder is functional, one of digestion and assimilation.

LXXXVII-11

"The university," wrote a graduate of Harvard, toward the end of President Eliot's régime, "has very largely lost its power of social assimilation. A wellknown professor, walking through the college yard, met a youth who seemed so forlorn and troubled that he was prompted to ask, 'Are you looking for anybody?' The young man answered, 'I don't know anybody this side of the Rocky Mountains.' Whether from shyness or from pride, many men hold Harvard degrees whose acquaintance at at Cambridge is scarcely greater."

The anecdote was quoted from a university pamphlet written to convince the reader of the hospitality extended to newcomers; and the critic who took it so backhandedly was scolded at his alma mater for omitting to mention that the young man was a freshman, and, having thus been taken in hand, eventually found friends. In an address delivered at Yale, Dean Briggs listed this critic with the author of "Brown at Harvard," the leading actor in which, also a Harvard man, was rotten-egged by loyal undergraduates. Apparently the good dean thought that the offenders deserved alike to be in very bad odor amid the classic shades. So be it! It takes the breaking of eggs for the making of Hamlets, and a critic may similarly profit.

One fact, however, Dean Briggs failed to mention. The critic went on to urge that in order to insure a hospitable welcome to freshmen, and to restore "the power of social assimilation," it was only necessary to have a system of halls reproducing the residential features of the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge; and even while he was held up to the reprobation of a sister university, his idea was taking substantial form on the banks of the Charles in a system of freshman halls. "It has been remarked," said President Lowell, in explaining his innovation, "that the only advance in the art of the novel since Scott lies in the fact that we have learned to begin a story in the middle." The new halls are to plunge the freshman in medias res. Could any illustration be more suggestive of the dreary waste of the first half of an undergraduate's life in the conditions that have hitherto prevailed? Not that the figure walks on all fours. The literal fact is that these new

halls are to begin the task of "social assimilation" at the beginning.

Other universities have been similarly criticized by their children. Yale is in chronic revolt against her societies, Princeton against her upper-class eating-clubs; and wherever the fraternity system prevails, it has its unrelenting foes. Nor is the remedy which Harvard is trying its own exclusive invention. President Wilson, when president of Princeton, attempted it in a somewhat different form. He failed to establish his "quads," and for reasons which, as I hope to show, were sufficient; but the idea lives on. Even as the Colonial halls for freshmen are building on the banks of the Charles, the Gothic tower of Dean West's graduate college is rising beautifully on the summit of the hill at Princeton.

At the University of Wisconsin, President Van Hise some years ago showed me architects' designs for a system of residential halls for which he was hoping to secure the necessary money; and he now writes: "Our plans have been presented to each session of the legislature and are pending before the present legislature. We have strong hopes that the appropriation will be made which will enable us to take the first steps in carrying out the plans." Apparently there is to be a single huge commons-a thing most undesirable socially, and of no considerable economic advantage. At Cornell, Andrew D. White cherished the hope of separate colleges from the start, and President Schurman has urged the plan in his reports during the last dozen years. There is now a good prospect that it will be realized and that each college will have its separate kitchen and dining hall.

There is no paradox in the fact that we are seeking a remedy in the English universities. Oxford and Cambridge have traditionally been, and still are in the main, the resort of the upper classes; but, thanks to their internal organization, they are in effect more democratic than any American university. This is the conclusion which, much to my surprise, was forced upon me by a rather wide experience as an Oxford undergraduate; and it was strongly confirmed by American Rhodes scholars whom I met during a recent sojourn by the Isis.

No freshman can live a single day in

an English college without making several acquaintances, and at the end of his first week he can hardly escape having literally dozens. The porter who greets him at the gate expects him, and has a room already prepared to receive him. His first duty is to call on his tutor, who is destined to become a familiar and most helpful mentor. The tutor takes him to call on the master of the college, and introduces him not only to other freshmen, but to second-year men, whose duty it is to call on him, invite him to breakfast or luncheon, and in general supervise his entrance into the college life and activities. In our universities a freshman is regarded as an uncouth creature to be ridiculed, hazed, or at least ignored; in the English colleges he is a younger brother who is to be encouraged to develop his best capacities.

One difference of custom tells the whole story. With us rooms in the most favorably placed dormitories are the abode of upper classmen. The freshman lives as he can in an outer limbo of boardinghouses, or in college buildings justly despised. In Oxford the freshman is taken at once into the quadrangle, though upper classmen have to be turned out into the town to make room for him. In effect, the English system says: "For better or for worse you are one of us, and for four years we shall have to abide by your deeds. Come on! Let us make the best we can of you!"

At Harvard, if I may record an experience which is typical, I was plunged for two years into the gloom of a very tedious novel before I discovered, quite by accident, that I could run. Then the story began. At Oxford the master of my college, a philosopher of European reputation, walked circles around me at our first interview, and said that I ought to be able to row and play foot-ball. I suffered tortures by field and river before I was given over to the cinder track, and incidentally I made many good friends. I abhor public speaking, yet was drafted into the college debating society, and several times forced to expose a naked intellect. A man must be a goat by nature and preference if he is to escape the helpful friendliness of an English college.

It was in order to achieve some such organs of digestion and assimilation that

President Wilson proposed to divide Princeton into "quads." So far so good. Unfortunately, either from ignorance of the English universities or because of some formal and doctrinary theory of democracy, he added ideas alien alike to the English and the American university.

Each quad was to be mathematically democratic: so many rich men, so many poor men; so many men from north, south, east, and west; so many from the leading preparatory schools and so many who arrived friendless. Each quad was to be, so to speak, a cross-section of the undergraduate body as a whole. To any one familiar with the English colleges, this arrangement must seem somewhat cut and dried, as most cross-sections are. The life of any great university is rich and strong enough to give scope to various developments. In Balliol learning is tempered by sportsmanship; in New College sportsmanship is redeemed by learning. The dominant qualities are the same, yet the atmosphere of the two places, and of the men who are bred in it, is full of the variations that enhance character and make life interesting. Brasenose, Trinity, St. John's, Magdalen, Christ Church, have each its atmosphere, subtle and indefinable perhaps, but permanent and distinct. And so on through the list. Every college gives the stamp of Oxford, yet each adds an inestimable imprint of its own. Without knowing quite why, perhaps, Princeton revolted at the attempt to level it down.

The rock upon which the "quad system" split, however, was the upper-class eating-clubs. In the main they were, and still are, characteristic of the best elements of Princeton life. To me personally, and I have studied them at close range, they seem the most representative, the most truly democratic social system in any American university. It is the rule, and

a rule which suffers comparatively few infractions, that their membership shall not be made up until the end of the second year, when the true character of all candidates has had time to develop.

Yet the fact remains that certain cliques are generally reputed to be in the following for Ivy, Cottage, Tiger Inn, and so forth; and not unnaturally there is strife to become identified with these cliques. And the members of the clubs

wear distinctive hatbands, much prized, it appears, by the ins and deeply resented by the outs. In President Wilson's opinion, certainly, the clubs were the resort of exclusiveness, of snobbishness; and so they must go!

One difficulty was that many of them were heavily in debt for their buildings. Even the most doctrinary democracy cannot by fiat disestablish an issue of bonds. It was equally evident to the Princeton mind that, for all the abuses that seemed to center in them, the clubs were a most valuable asset to the university. They were the rallying-ground of those graduates who, on the whole, were the leading graduates, the ones who had the welfare. of the alma mater most dearly at heart. To abolish them was to oust the Princeton spirit from its firmest vantage-ground. And it was to lessen the revenues of the university; for the returning graduate is the graduate who most easily loosens his heart-strings-and purse-strings.

To regard the clubs as opposed to the quad or college system, moreover, is, I believe, fundamentally to misconceive the situation. They are rather to be regarded as essential to its fullest and most helpful development.

Let us go back to Oxford. Each college is a microcosm in which the spirit of the place works powerfully, thoroughly; yet, after all, it is small, on an average numbering about two hundred. The little frogs are happy in their puddle; but how about the big frogs? The best thing in the world for a big frog in a small puddle. is to try life in places where his advantage is less obvious. If an Oxford man is a good sportsman and a good fellow, he is elected to Vincent's; and there he meets the good sportsman and good fellows of the university as a whole. The debaters go to the Oxford Union; and to win one's way to the presidency of the Union is perhaps the greatest distinction of an Oxford career. There are half a dozen smaller debating clubs which foregather the most distinguished birds of a political feather from all the twenty colleges. There are purely social clubs, like Bullingdon, and there are the Gridiron Club. for diners, the Musical Union, and the Dramatic Society. As soon as a man has won special distinction in any line, in short, he emerges from the little world of

his college into a club, and is thrown among kindred spirits from the university as a whole.

In his university club a man takes part in activities which are wider and higher: he develops his own ability, and contributes his quota to the general life of the place. But, far from being cut off from his former mates, as he is in an American university club, he brings them an inestimable privilege. The major part of his life and activity is still in his college, and he carries back to it reports of what is being said and done in the world without its walls. The local life and the general life interpenetrate and fuse, so that the humblest man in college lives, actually or vicariously, in the general stream of Oxford tradition. Whereas the quad system means uniform, mechanical democracy, small in scope and without local distinction, the English combination of club life and college life means varied atmosphere and charm, with the largest possible outlook, and opportunity for vital leadership. In that vivid phrase of Oom Paul's, one hand washes the other.

The common run of men may feel regret at not taking active part in the affairs of the university; yet they have had a fair chance, and do not complain. The college still affords them a pleasant home and a life of very considerable scope. There is no taboo, no social stigma of being excluded. Not by the farthest stretch of the word could they be called outsiders, barbarians, hoi polloi. And the system works equally well in the case of the club man. To the end he is at home in college among brothers. Except when he is turned out to make room for incoming freshmen, he sleeps there, and takes most of his meals in his room and in the hall. He still plays on the college teams, rows in the college boat. And so he escapes the dangers of the club or fraternity man in an American university, whose life is largely limited to association with the favored few. There is no real exclusion on the one hand, no real exclusiveness on the other. The life is highly organized, highly specialized, highly efficient in giving scope to all grades and varieties of capability. If it is not more democratic, then there is something wrong with our conception of democracy.

In a recent political campaign it was

asserted that at Princeton President Wilson routed the snobs and made the college democratic. To this a leading Princetonian retorted that Princeton was precisely as democratic as it had always been. He added, significantly, that it was still doing business at the old stand. These are harsh words on both sides.

The credit of first organizing undergraduate democracy, as it now seems, is to go to Harvard. In a way there is justice in this, for Harvard was the first prominently to advocate supplementing the club system with a system of residential halls-as long ago as 1894.

At that time a widely different plan was given preference, also of English origin. In the early nineteenth century Oxford was a victim of a quad system very closely similar to that which of late President Wilson advocated. The twenty colleges lived miniature, separate lives, with no common meeting-ground, no mechanism for developing special talents or for creating a highly organized university spirit. Then came the Oxford Union; and the university, which has always been more keenly political than any American institution, found a powerful unifying force in debate. Membership was open to all, and the library, periodical room, and auditorium of the Union-let us not forget the lawn, where afternoon tea was served in summer-proved a rallyingground for all active spirits, political and social. It so happened, however, that the new spirit of unified Oxford did not stop with the Union. Other clubs were formed, as we have seen-clubs that took precedence from the fact that their aims were more definitive and interesting and their membership carefully selected. Long before the close of the century the unifying force of the Union had become a mere tradition. Except on the evening of a debate, those who foregathered there were a social fringe, with little unity and no real influence or power.

It was this Union, however, which Harvard chose to imitate, precisely as the framers of our national constitution took as model a form of the English constitution which had long been obsolete. For a time the spirit of democracy struggled mightily to make the Harvard Union the real heart and center of undergraduate life. To join it was represented as a pa