It is true that there are societies and clubs, but these also to a certain degree have been swamped in the rising tide of undergraduates. With freshman classes as large as those of to-day, the old social machinery becomes incapable of sifting the clubable from the less clubable, those who deserve recognition in the body of undergraduates from those who do not. The evil is increased by the fact that as a rule in America the social life is organized early in the undergraduate course, so that the men who fail of election in the first year or two have failed for good. There are, to be sure, cases in which men who have later developed signal merit have been taken into the all-important societies and clubs of the upper classmen, and sometimes these societies make a special and most creditable effort thus to remedy the failures of the system; but the men who are thus elected are an exception, and an exception of the kind that proves the rule. Unless a man has been prominent in one of the large preparatory schools, or becomes prominent in athletics in the first year or so, there is only one way to make sure of meeting such fellows as he wishes to know, and that is both to choose friends and to avoid them with an eye to social chances, a method which is scarcely to be commended. As the incoming classes grow larger, there is an increasingly large proportion of undergraduates who fail to qualify in the first year or two in any of these ways. Throughout their course they neither receive benefit from the general life of the university nor contribute to it. They are often of loyal and disinterested character, and they not infrequently develop into men of exceptional ability in all of the paths of undergraduate life; not a few of them have been 'varsity captains. But instead of exerting the influence on the welfare of the university which such men might and should exert, they find it impossible to get into the main currents, and revolve impotently on the outside, each in the particular eddy where fate has thrust him.