Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/198

 to a frowsy sort of human bear-garden, and the least cause of dissatisfaction had become the excuse for disgraceful insubordination. In fine, the elaborate and highly developed system which in the mother country was knit into the very life of the university had degenerated into a cheap and casual cook-shop.

There seems to have been no good reason why, in place of this steady disintegration, a process of gradual substitution and adaptation should not have built up an American system of Commons, as successful in its new environment as the English system in the old world—or rather, there was a reason only too good, the same reason assigned by every investigator as the basic cause of the failure of Commons at Harvard, persistent mismanagement under the fixed delusion of a false economy. The correctness of this diagnosis is shown by the subsequent history of communal eating at the University, which is too well known and too recent to require more than a few words in conclusion.

For some years after the closing of Commons there was no centralized dining—except in the extremely modified form of “club tables,” organized here and there by groups of congenial classmates, and long retaining