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Updated: June 24, 2025
"If Youth but Knew" is the title of a book published some years ago, but still with a quite living interest, by "Kappa"; it is the bitter complaint of a distressed senior against our educational system. He is hugely disappointed in the public-school boy, and more particularly in one typical specimen. He is if one might hazard a guess an uncle bereft of great expectations.
On Thursday, by particular request of the literary society of "Phi Beta Kappa," so called, in the university, General Lafayette attended the celebration of their anniversary at Cambridge. It was never known before, that any one, however distinguished either for literature or virtue, was invited to dine with the society, unless a member of some other branch of the association.
Such advice to cut loose from the moorings of the past was not unknown in Phi Beta Kappa orations, though it had never been so brilliantly phrased; but when Emerson applied precisely the same doctrine, in 1838, to the graduating class at the Harvard Divinity School, he roused a storm of disapproval. "A tempest in our washbowl," he wrote coolly to Carlyle, but it was more than that.
I was a reasonably good student in college, standing just within the first tenth of my class, if I remember rightly; although I am not sure whether this means the tenth of the whole number that entered or of those that graduated. I was given a Phi Beta Kappa "key." My chief interests were scientific.
He was born in New Haven, and had entered Yale College with the class of '48. The Delta Kappa Epsilon Fraternity was, I believe, founded in the year of his admission, and he must, therefore, have been among its earliest members. He was distinguished as a scholar, and the traces of his classic and philosophical acquirements are everywhere visible in his books.
"Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it." "The Progress of Culture," his second Phi Beta Kappa oration, has already been mentioned. The lesson of self-reliance, which he is never tired of inculcating, is repeated and enforced in the Essay on "Greatness." "There are certain points of identity in which these masters agree.
One day, however, while trying to seize a horse that had entered the river to drink, the Kappa got its head twisted in some way under the belly-band of the horse, and the terrified animal, rushing out of the water, dragged the Kappa into a field. There the owner of the horse and a number of peasants seized and bound the Kappa.
It associated him with Good Fellows, with men who were nice and human, and important in business circles. It was his V.C., his Legion of Honor ribbon, his Phi Beta Kappa key. With the subtleties of dressing ran other complex worries. "I feel kind of punk this morning," he said. "I think I had too much dinner last evening. You oughtn't to serve those heavy banana fritters."
He was wonderfully kind about informing as to whom it was worth my while to be agreeable. . . . Don't trouble with Brown; be pleasant to Jones, but look out for Robinson, the fellow with a Kappa Iota Omega pin. He had hardly warned me against Robinson, before that young man was addressing me with great cheerfulness.
Although Motley did not aim at or attain a high college rank, the rules of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, which confine the number of members to the first sixteen of each class, were stretched so as to include him, a tribute to his recognized ability, and an evidence that a distinguished future was anticipated for him. AEt. 18-19.
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