Somewhere in London tonight there is a book on a table with a stranger's name written in it.
His profession is beside it, and his family, and the names of the three men who put him forward. Members walk past, read it, and form a view. This will go on for months. At the end of it a box will be passed around a room, and every man present will drop a ball into it without anyone seeing which colour he chose. If one of those balls is black, the stranger never learns who, or why — and the man who proposed him may be expected to resign. That procedure is roughly three hundred years old and it is still in use. It is also, structurally, the same procedure that admits fifteen students a year to a windowless building in New Haven, that fills a hundred and twenty camps in a Californian redwood forest, and that decides who receives one of a hundred and thirty invitations to a hotel in Europe each spring. The rooms are different. The machinery is identical — and once you can see it, a great deal that looks like mystery turns out to be procedure.