The University Club.

Let me once more trespass on your columns with a subject which, if old, is not yet exhausted; indeed the carelessness with which the question of the possibility of establishing the said club has been allowed to drop, and the rapidity with which curiosity as regards it has evaporated would seem to prove the little interest in it, though there is, I think, deep interest below the surface of all the stumbling-blocks that impede its supporters. The most serious is, as I pointed out in a previous letter, the absence of any special reason strong enough to supply motive power to keep the club going. Though there are half a hundred reasons for desiring the club, no one of them is sufficiently important to become the one prominent motive for it, and as they all, as it were, pull different ways the reasons neutralize each other and matters remain in statu quo.

Mr. Barrett suggested in the Union Debate of last week that the club offer good food cheaply; would have it a sort of etherealized Merrill's, as it were, an Eden instead of the Trees of Life and Knowledge, the Holly Tree should flourish unforbidden. Others would have it a meeting place for strangers, such as Massachusetts was turned into during the celebration, as a smoking-room or a reading-room, all these combined. Also, every proposition ended in a storm of "buts" - as they all began with "ifs."

We hear much of the Harvard indifference; it could hardly be that no such carelessness should exist among us, for before a man gets the control of any department of interest - athletics, literature or anything else - a large fraction of his college life has passed. Hence, a quick succession of captains in the crews and nines, of editors-in-chief in the papers, and so there can be no fixed policy in the conduct of athletics or anything else. One man builds his plan out and disappears; another succeeds him and grafts his own ideal on to his predecessor's relicts, so to say, and, to mix metaphors, the result is a very patchwork of policy - likest a crazy-quilt, Queen Anne's cottage, than any other product of the same human mind. Hence, too, the impossibility of the strictest economy. The bucket changes hands so often and so rapidly, and each carries it so differently from anybody else, that some water must be spilt e'er it reach the fire.

A plan to remedy these effects in our system of economy in athletics has been under discussion, namely, to provide one head for all departments of athletics, one man hired to supervise them all - to carry on one consistent policy, to reduce running expenses, and later, by longer experience than an undergraduate can have - find faults and remedies hitherto unsuspected. The "but" to this, of course, is, first, that subscriptions would fall off - that a man would give ten dollars each to four branches of athletics, where he would refuse forty dollars to the four combined - a doubtful point - and, secondly, that between the various branches of athletics there would always be question - fierily debated - of the propositions of the general fund due to each.

Now, why not turn the classes into a sort of Comitia Tributa to vote on the said proposition? Why not start the university club on a basis that shall include athletics? Certainly here is a motive for mass meetings of the members at frequent intervals, I mean, to discuss, and what is more, vote upon the management of the various teams and nines and crews. The interest in athletics would be increased, I would not wonder if subscriptions - to use a money-market term - should become easier. A feeling of personal interest in the teams would be fostered, and position on any one of them be glorified. If the managements of the various modes of athletics are to be consolidated, if the university club is to be founded, here is, it seems to me, an effectiveness and interest of both, and of doing away with some of the difficulties attending either.

Embody in the University Club, reading-room, smoking-room, place of rendezvous and restaurant, if you will and can; but also turn it to some more solid account by making it a place where matters of college interest may be discussed: a not only talked about, uselessly and with no power of direct result, but in such manner that the opinions prevailing have some concrete effect easiest obtained by giving the debaters votes. Quod bene vertat.

Y.