the daily intercourse of college, should become such lofty beings in the
hall of a secret society; or, more probably, he thinks of nothing but the
sport or the mysterious incentive to a studious and higher life which the
society is to furnish. He feels the passionate curiosity of the neophyte.
He is smitten with the zeal of the hermetical philosophy. He would learn
more than Rosicrucian lore. That is a vision soon dispelled. But the
earnest curiosity changes into _esprit du corps_, and the mischief is
that the secrecy and the society feeling are likely to take precedence of
the really desirable motives in college. There is a hundredfold greater
zeal to obtain members than there is generous rivalry among the societies
to carry off the true college honors. And if the purpose be admirable, why,
as Professor Wilder asks, the secrecy? What more can the secret society
do for the intellectual or social training of the student than the open
society? Has any secret society in an American college done, or can it do,
more for the intelligent and ambitious young man than the Union Debating
Society at the English Cambridge University, or the similar club at Oxford?
There Macaulay, Gladstone, the Austins, Charles Buller, Tooke, Ellis, and
the long illustrious list of noted and able Englishmen were trained, and
in the only way that manly minds can be trained, by open, free, generous
rivalry and collision. The member of a secret society in college is really
confined, socially and intellectually, to its membership, for it is found
that the secret gradually supplant the open societies. But that membership
depends upon luck, not upon merit, while it has the capital disadvantage
of erecting false standards of measurement, so that the _Mu Nu_ man
cannot be just to the hero of _Zeta Eta_. The secrecy is a spice that
overbears the food. The mystic paraphernalia is a relic of the baby-house,
which a generous youth disdains.

There is, indeed, an agreeable sentiment in the veiled friendship of the
secret society which every social nature understands. But as students