gnized place in university councils.
It is quite obvious that the significance of this movement among college
graduates was not recognized for a long time. Everywhere the graduates
were slow in finding themselves; and it is safe to say that an efficient
alumni sentiment was almost unknown until within the last fifty years.
But the seeds had been sown. Though Yale began her remarkable
organization by classes as far back as 1792, and others may have
followed her example, records of any further efforts in this direction
are difficult to find until many years later.

The first attempt at a general alumni organization seems to have been a
meeting of the alumni at Williams College at Commencement time, in 1821,
to organize a Society of Alumni. The purpose of the proposed
association was set forth in the following words:

The meeting is notified at the request of a number of gentlemen,
educated at this institution, who are desirous that the true state
of the college be known to the alumni, and that the influence and
patronage of those it has educated may be united for its support,
protection, and improvement.

This does not seem an unsatisfactory definition of the fundamental
object of an alumni body of the present day. Seventeen years later a
Society of Alumni was organized at the University of Virginia, where,
with perhaps a characteristic Southern emphasis on the social side of
human relationships, the committee was instructed,--

to invite the alumni to form a permanent society, to offer to
graduates an inducement to revisit the seat of their youthful
studies and to give new life to disinterested friendships found in
student days.

Other universities soon followed with similar organizations. Harvard's
Alumni Association was established in 1840; Bowdoin and Amhert came at
about the same time, while the first alumni association at Columbia was
founded in 1854. In the West an alumni association was started at Miami
as early as 1832. The first years of these organizations were apparently
a period of struggle, but the spirit that they represented grew, and
eventually they made alumni influence everywhere effective to a greater
or less degree, with the end not yet.

At Michigan, alumni organization has had a history similar to that in
many other institutions. The University published a list of the first
four classes as far back as 1848, but the alumni did not become a
united bo