It is to be remembered, however, that not all the brethren shift onward and upward year by year. Many have to content themselves with clubs already won, and those who pass on are a narrowing band, whose depleted ranks are by no means restored in the eleventh hour recruiting of “elections at large,” deathbed gestures of democracy after a career of ballotting to exclude candidates who had not taken all the earlier degrees. Thus increasing distinction is purchased through the tried and true method of decreasing numbers. To be sure, the same end could be served if all would remain in one club and periodically drop groups of the least likely members. Initiations might be reversed, and punches be given to celebrate the lightening of the ship: it would be no more fantastic than a good part of the existing ceremonial. But--it would be undemocratic! And, too, the celebrations might be fatally hilarious. The present pre-initiation discipline is one that tests for regularity and bestows the accolade on the inconspicuous, so that the initiates turn out pretty much of a piece and the entertainment they provide is safely conventional. But reverse the process, assemble in one squad all the hands suspected of being exceptional--all the queer fish and odd sticks--and there’s no predicting what capers they might cut as they walked the plank. The real evil of the club caste is its taste for predictability, its standardization of contacts, its faintly cynical sophistication where life might be a riot of adventures and experiments and self-discoveries--in one word, its respectability. Not that it does not provide much good fellowship and a great deal of fun (including the varieties that have distressed its moral critics). But that everything it provides is so definitely provided _for_, so institutionalized, and so protected from the enrichment different types and conditions of men could bring to it that it is exclusive in a more sinister sense than the one intended by the critics of its alleged snobbery.