We're short on charter members, this year, who can speak of the debates waged and principles established when the original forty men gathered in Hamilton Hall at Columbia College to set this learned and professional society afoot. But twenty-five years ago, on the occasion of our diamond jubilee, I wrote up a history of the MLA for the special anniversary issue of PMLA, relying heavily on a work by my predecessor, William Riley Parker. No need to repeat here the contents of that sixteen-page, double-column essay. No need to remind a present reader (as Chaucer used to say in almost any of his delightful exercises in occupatio) of the long record the MLA has in stimulating and helping other humanistic societies along the way or of its long-standing umbrellalike policy of providing hospitality at annual meetings for any number of special groups and interests, from the Milton and Melville societies to the National Council of Teachers of English, the College English Association, and the Modern Humanities Research Association. Now, I believe, it provides local habitation to some eighty-four such. To witness at any annual meeting these days six thousand humanistic scholars and teachers busying themselves for three days with their scholarly concerns is to sense the pulse beats (a little frantic to be sure) of a healthy and civilized activity in a troublesome world.