Page:The Fraternity and the Undergraduate (1923).pdf/166

 the chapter, and in so doing he will help to carry out the original purpose of the chapter letters which was, as I have said, to bring each chapter and each man in the chapter into closer personal touch with all the other chapters.

We are all intensly interested, I am sure, in the growth and development of the institutions in which our various chapters are located, and as for myself I am most interested in the life, the customs, and the traditions of these institutions—the local environment and the conditions which so strongly influence undergraduate life and which differentiate the character of one institution from that of another. How little of this tremendous difference is revealed by the chapter letters is unbelievable until one has read them in an attempt to discover it. Have you ever tried to determine, for example, how different undergraduate life and traditions at Albion are from those at the University of Virginia or at Tulane from the University of Minnesota? Have you ever thought to what extent undergraduate practice at an institution of more than ten thousand students like the University of Michigan or the University of Illinois differs and must of necessity differ from that of a smaller college like Beloit or Muhlenburg? The chapter letters give us very little conception of these differences because the correspondent, per-