Page:BairdsmanualofAmericancollegefrate8.pdf/897

be entirely suppressed, and that the new organization shall be given the date of the original failure. As a reason for this they say "We consider the two chapters to be the same," or "The charter of the old chapter has been transferred to the new." or "The members of the new chapter have been instructed to consider the members of the old chapter as part of their alumni." Or a fraternity establishes a chapter at an institution and it becomes inactive almost immediately. Many years afterwards, the institution having progressed, and become the home of many fraternity chapters, the old chapter is revived, and the fraternity demands that no mention be made of the long period of its inactivity, oblivious of the fact that usually the statement of the number of members initiated compared with the date of its original institution, shows that it must have been inactive for a long time. Or an old college contains a literary society loosely organized to which anyone may belong. After some years it dies of indifference. Some of its members organize a local society, half literary and half social, It dies in turn, and some of its survivors organize a local fraternity, which is finally granted a charter. At once this fraternity annexes as members all of the persons who belonged to any of the prior organizations, and demands that they shall be listed as their own prominent alumni. It is of course quite right and proper when a local fraternity is granted a charter, that its alumni who have been responsible for its up-building shall be taken over into the new organization, but anything further than that seems to warrant the mention of the persons so admitted as an entirely different class from regular frater-