bottom. He proposed to suppress the clubs and convert the houses into 

 colleges somewhat after the plan of the older British universities. Mr. 

 Wilson vv^as a master of phrase, but he was ill-advised when he chose 

 the name "Quad System" for his plan, a somewhat flippant, slang term, 

 which his opponents did not fail to turn into ridicule. In debating this 

 question in the Faculty, the President was opposed almost entirely by 

 Princeton graduates, who dreaded any revolutionary changes in their 

 beloved university. The graduates of other colleges were with Mr. 

 Wilson almost to a man and, had the matter ever come to a vote, I am 

 sure the President's plan would have been adopted. 



The New York alumni, as a body, though with individual exceptions, 

 were bitterly opposed to the "Quad System." After his speech at the 

 Princeton Club, in New York, in which he explained and advocated the 

 plan, Mr. Wilson was much hurt by the extreme coldness of his recep- 

 tion and said to me, "They want to get rid of me." The controversy over 

 the proposed innovation died out by default; to carry the scheme into 

 execution would have required very large sums of money and no attempt 

 to secure the needed fund was made. Mr. Wilson's resignation of the 

 presidency to become Governor of New Jersey put an end to the plan, 

 though he cherished it to the end of his life. In the last conversation I 

 ever had with him, about two years before his death, he fairly paralysed 

 me with astonishment by saying: "I had hoped that they would call me 

 back to Princeton, to finish the work I had been unable to do there." 



It was a curious inconsistency that the most ardent advocates of a 

 college for graduate students should have been so inflexibly opposed to 

 colleges for undergraduates. In my opinion, it is a thousand pities that 

 Mr. Wilson's plan was not carried out. I am convinced that, if our 

 present regrettable though imperative limitation of numbers is to come 

 to an end, it will be necessary to set up a system of federated colleges, 

 somewhat on the English scheme. To those who pursued Wilson with 

 such hatred, it cannot be pleasant to see Yale and Harvard adopting his 

 suggestions, of course without any credit to him. The clubs have many 

 excellent features and I shall be sorry to see them go, but go they must 

 eventually. 



The foregoing account is an abbreviated form of a document which I 

 read over to my dear and ever-to-be-lamented friend Dean H. B. Fine, on 

 the afternoon of Christmas Day, 1925, and asked him whether he would 

 accept it as an accurate statement. He replied that he would, save for one 

 omission of importance; he said that Mr. Wilson's uncompromising 

 stand on the question of site for the Graduate College was incompre- 



