Page:The Fraternity and the Undergraduate (1923).pdf/243

 closest relationship with the grandest and the most beautiful things in the world—flowers and birds and growing things; sunshine and fierce storms, the earth under his feet and the great sky over head. What tends more than these things to refinement and cultivation?

David, I hope his name is not an unfamiliar one, farmer, sheep, herder, hunter of wild beasts, musician and poet, watched the stars at night and the clouds by day and wrote of them as no man before or since has done, but I presume that if David and his friends had applied for a charter of some national fraternity they would have been turned down as not worthy to be known as brothers by the more scholarly and refined city dwellers because of their lack of cultivation. And yet it was David who became King.

There is one way of keeping down the number of chapters, which I believe every fraternity might with profit occasionally employ, and that is the elimination of worthless chapters. Every fraternity has a number of chapters which have little spirit, little vitality, little appreciation of fraternity progress. They are as loosely organized as a high school club and have no understanding of what it means to belong to a great national organization. Their connection with the grand officers and with the central office is remote. Their