THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS

The plan adopted yesterday by the student council at Amherst for the limitation of the activities which may be undertaken by, or thrust upon, any one student in the college, is one more step along the road that many American colleges seem to be travelling. It has been many years now since the constant; grinding strain of extra-curricular activities first began to be commented upon to the disparagement of the colleges which allowed them to rob their students of every moment of their academic leisure. It has been at least as many years since the whole round of these activities was imported entire, and in some cases in an intensified form, into preparatory schools. Now, in the colleges at least, the tide has definitely turned. Extra-curricular activities are now seen in their natural light--not as so many high-roads to undergraduate glory, but as occupations for the sole benefit and profit of those who are genuinely interested in them.

In one way, at least, the movement takes away a certain amount of glamor from a favorite field of writers of boys' stories of the Putnam Hall variety. It marks the passing of romantic, if cardboard, figures--the Big Man in the school. Big Men there will always be, of course, in a manner of speaking, but the possibilities of the grand style are now being drained away. No longer is one man, by virtue of combined athletic, political and social prowess, to rule, in the pages of fiction at least, the community of which he is a member--carried about the place on the shoulders of his class-mates, looked up to with awe and veneration by newcomers, toadied to by all who have, in the slightest degree, the lust for power. His hour has come, and he has been called to whatever Valhalla has been prepared for him.