had countenanced “dances, athletics, fraternities, and such.” No, all that we really mean by democracy in college is the equal opportunity to invest one’s inoffensive charm and perfectly good money in a transient society, to be neighbourly across geographical and family lines, to cultivate the local twist of the universal ideal--to be a “regular fellow.” Which is very much what we mean by democracy outside. Whatever the precise type of man a college exalts, its characteristic virtues are those that reflect a uniform people--hearty acceptance of unexamined ideals, loyal conformity to traditional standards and taboos, unassuming modesty in “playing the game,” and a wholesome optimism withal. But as for genuine democracy, the unrestricted interplay of free spirits against a common background, what college can boast that its social organization approaches even the measure of equality enjoyed by its disinterested scholars? There was a modicum of it in the free elective system that obtained in Dr. Eliot’s Harvard. There was an indifference to seniority that sorely puzzled the graduates of other colleges. Alas, freshman dormitories descended upon it, treacherously carrying the banners of “democracy”; and a “group system” of courses began to externalize intellectual interests to which the elective system, abused as it was, had offered every opportunity for spontaneity. It may be that the Amherst of Dr. Meiklejohn’s experiments, or the Smith that President Neilson envisages, will recapture opportunities now fled from Cambridge. These cases, after all, are exceptional. For the typical American college, private or public, marshals its students in two caste systems so universal and so familiar that it never occurs to us to scrutinize the one and we are liable to criticize the other only when its excesses betray its decadence.