1870] Honor Societies 



Corps membership had fallen from about seventy- 

 five per cent of the student body to twenty per cent. 

 In 1910 I met in BerHn the president of a student 

 ''Total Abstinenz Gesellschaft.'" 



The parent of modern Greek Letter groups arose Phi 

 as a medium for encouraging youths of promise. ^/'^ 

 This was the "Phi Beta Kappa Society," founded '"^^'^ 

 at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, 

 Virginia, on December 5, 1776 — not a fraternity 

 in the modern sense, but rather a means of granting 

 honors in literature. The persistence and expansion 

 of Phi Beta Kappa has been a prominent factor in 

 our colleges and universities, the actual members in 

 each institution electing each year a certain number 

 of associates from the higher classes; the institutions 

 themselves, however, have not, as a rule, formally 

 recognized the organization. Phi Beta Kappa had 

 not been established at Cornell at the time of my 

 graduation. Through the interest of the local group 

 at Stanford I later became a retroactive member. 



In science, Sigma Xi, founded by Professor Henry Sigma xi 

 Shaler Williams at Cornell in 1896, of which I was a 

 charter member, runs parallel with Phi Beta Kappa 

 in literature. For the main address at the banquet 

 of the society's first general convention at St. Louis 

 in 1903, I chose as my title our motto — ctttouStJ 

 ^vvrjov — which I translated as "Comrades in Zeal." 

 Within the last twenty years other scholarship soci- 

 eties have arisen, with membership confined to pro- 

 fessional schools — Law, Medicine, Engineering, and 

 Journalism. 



But there are among students, as we have seen, 

 other bonds than those of scholarship. This fact 



1:61 1 



