The Junior Promenade at Yale.

There appeared in the New York Evening Post of last Friday a long letter from a Yale alumnus under the heading "Where Reform is Needed at Yale." The writer was much alarmed lest "Yale democracy" should suffer seriously from the yearly increasing extravagance shown in conducting the Junior Promenade. "From the modest affair of ten years ago," he said, "this promenade has grown to an elaborate structure with numerous accessories to manage, enjoy, and recover from, which requires the time and energy of perhaps a third of the students for a week, while the pockets of many of them need the balance of the year for complete recuperation."

It seems as if some one ought to make an effort "to prevent an institution with so much of good democratic Yale fun in it from falling to pieces of its own weight, as it must when a few more stories are erected on the present foundation." The faculty should step in and save the students from themselves. There undoubtedly exists a willingness among the latter to meet the faculty half way. Some abuses, however, must be left to public sentiment to correct. As long as decent society will permit it, the faculty can no prevent young ladies or their chaperones from allowing their expenses while at the promenade to be borne by the students. Some men are said to have paid thirty dollars a day for a week in advance to secure accommodations for their prospective guests. The bills of some men run up perhaps to five hundred dollars for promenade week. These things, in the opinion of "Alumnus," the faculty cannot touch, but it can and should pass regulations controlling the giving of Germans and spreads, and thus relieve the willing students from a burden of expense which the addition of a few more years will render well nigh intolerable.