Excerpt from The Purple and Gold, 1902, Vol. 20The committee made a very careful investigation of the conditions at Middletown. Conn.. And found that Alpha Alpha was the only fraternity there which claimed to maintain a small. Select chapter. Most of the other fraternities have large chapter houses and require a large number of undergraduates to pay expenses and maintain their houses. The last Wes leyan Olla Podrz'da shows a total of 267 undergraduates, including special students. Of these, 226 are in the seven secret societies, fifteen in Chi Psi. And 211 in the other fraternities, or an average of thirty-five for each fraternity. The committee believed that this was entirely out of proportion to the available fraternity material in Wesleyan, and that it would be impossible to maintain a satisfactory Alpha there unless it was limited in number to fifteen or twenty members. If the fraternity material is not large in a class. Each frater nity can obtain a very few good men from such a class. And must make up its delegation of ten or twelve from material which really should not be taken into any of the better fraternities. Therefore, the poor material is likely to predominate and the tendency is downward instead of upward. For a larger number of poor men are more likely to drag down the smaller number of good men than the latter are to materially raise the standard of the former.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.