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{{xxx-larger|{{uc|Discipline and the Derelict}}}}
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{{larger|''Being a series of essays on some of those who tread the green carpet''}}
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{{uc|By}} {{larger|{{uc|[[Author:Thomas Arkle Clark|Thomas Arkle Clark]]}}}} {{smaller|Dean of Men, University of Illinois}}
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{{bl|New York}} {{uc|The Macmillan Company}} 1921{{dhr}}{{smaller|''All rights reserved''}}
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{{sc|Copyright, 1921 By}} {{uc|The Macmillan Company}}
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Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 1921.
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{{sc|Human}} nature is strangely similar wherever we find it. The college undergraduate does not differ widely in characteristics whether we meet him in California or Massachusetts; in Michigan or Mississippi. The deductions which are contained in these essays are drawn from an intimate and an extended association with undergraduate students at the University of Illinois; they might, however, have been written at any other institution where similarly close relationships were possible.

{{right|offset=2em|{{sc|Thomas Arkle Clark.}}}}

Urbana, Illinois.

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{{c|{{larger|{{uc|Contents}}}}}}
{{TOC begin}}
{{TOC row 2-1||{{asc|Page}}}}
{{TOC row 2-1|[[Discipline and the Derelict (collection)/Discipline and the Derelict|Discipline and the Derelict]]|1}}
{{TOC row 2-1|[[Discipline and the Derelict (collection)/The Borrower|The Borrower]]|27}}
{{TOC row 2-1|[[Discipline and the Derelict (collection)/The Undergraduate and Graft|The Undergraduate and Graft]]|48}}
{{TOC row 2-1|[[Discipline and the Derelict (collection)/Youngest Sons and Only Children|Youngest Sons and Only Children]]|67}}
{{TOC row 2-1|[[Discipline and the Derelict (collection)/"And Some Must Work"|"And Some Must Work"]]|89}}
{{TOC row 2-1|[[Discipline and the Derelict (collection)/The Politician|The Politician]]|109}}
{{TOC row 2-1|[[Discipline and the Derelict (collection)/The Cribber|The Cribber]]|129}}
{{TOC row 2-1|[[Discipline and the Derelict (collection)/The Athlete|The Athlete]]|155}}
{{TOC row 2-1|[[Discipline and the Derelict (collection)/The Loafer|The Loafer]]|174}}
{{TOC row 2-1|[[Discipline and the Derelict (collection)/The Fusser|The Fusser]]|189}}
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{{sc|As}} long as we deal with youth we shall have pretty regular violation of rule in college. "How long are we to have student outbreaks, and student irregularities?" our president asked me not long ago. "Can't you ever get the boys educated so that we shall not be longer troubled with these things?" "I could, I think," was my reply, "if I were allowed to work with them long enough. But when they are educated they leave us. A big new crowd of young ones is introduced every year, and the process of education must be begun again."/begin/

I remember being asked at one time, with reference to an action taken by the executive body of the University, what caused the members to vote as they did? When I put the question to one of the officers concerned, his reply was that it was a question which no one could intelligently answer. No two men, he said, have in mind the same reason or purpose in coming to any conclusion. I vote for an issue for one reason, my neighbor for another. It is all a matter of personal judgment. The same thing is true, I have no doubt, with reference to the college derelict. The purposes in the mind of half a dozen different individuals who vote to impose a penalty upon an undergraduate who has been guilty of a violation of college rules are probably in no two cases alike. In the main, I take it, however, there is little if any thought

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in the mind of most men that such discipline is to punish the offender as the state for instance might punish crime. The purpose I have kept before me in whatever I have recommended is, first of all, to correct the offender, to turn him in the right direction, to make it less likely that he will offend in this regard again. The main function of education as I see it is to make good citizens. There is a further one, of course, which discipline subserves, and that is a deterrent one. Offenders are disciplined because it is hoped by that method to call the attention of others to the fact that certain things are objectionable or wrong, and so to reduce the tendency to such irregularities.

There are those whose ideas of right and wrong are so rigid, whose feelings are so strong, that they insist that every one who does wrong should submit: to a definite punishment which will inflict upon him a certain amount of pain and disgrace. Not long ago I received a letter from one of our former students, saying that when he transferred his credits from a neighboring institution to the University of Illinois he had changed two of the grades, and so had received credit for five hours of work to which he was not entitled. He asked to have this error corrected, and said that when he returned next year to finish his college work he wished to register for the five hours stolen and earn his credit honestly. There was a wide range of opinion among our officials as to what action should be taken in his case. The error was one which by no possibility would have been detected had he not admitted it, and it was an error which affected no one but himself, since no one else knew of

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it. One university officer felt strongly that notwithstanding the fact that the man had confessed and expressed a desire to make good the false credits, here was a case which demanded punishment, a more complete expiation, and he thought that the student should be expelled. I felt very differently. It seemed to me that a young fellow who had the courage to confess a dereliction of this sort and to offer to make such restitution as was possible was well on the way to good citizenship, and should be met half way. In his case the purpose of discipline had been accomplished.

Each institution employs its own methods in the handling of disciplinary matters. If the college is small, the president often is the autocrat who decides the fate of the untoward. Sometimes it is the faculty as a whole which deliberates long and seriously over the cases of delinquents. In my own undergraduate days when a young fellow had been drunk, had danced in a college building, had carried away the campus fence to add fuel to the bonfire in celebration of Hallowe'en, or had backed the cannon into the sluggish campus creek in order to show his disapproval of military drill—when he had done any of these things and was caught, he was brought before the entire faculty, assembled in serious session, and here he was tried. It was a harrowing experience, and not one always likely to bring justice. When an entire faculty deliberates on disciplinary matters, there is likely to be much talking, some wrangling, and uncertain conclusions. The responsibility is too widely scattered, and the student and good order are likely to suffer.
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In many institutions these matters are left entirely in the hands of the students who through one sort of organization or another sit upon the cases of offenders against good order and college regulations and pass judgment upon them. At other places such matters are handled by a small committee of the faculty, or there may be a combination of these various methods in operation in the same institution. Since I have been a college officer I have had more or less experience with all of these methods.

When I was in college I have no recollection that discipline was often enforced. The institution, just previous to my entrance, had recovered from a rather serious attack of student government in its worst form, and disciplinary affairs were running along pretty much by themselves. There was cribbing, but no one seemed to pay much attention to it. I have no remembrance that any one was ever called to account for dishonesty or in any way punished for it during my whole college course. There were student outbreaks, but if anything was ever done to the individuals concerned, they petitioned the faculty, peace was restored, and the offenders were immediately reinstated in their former positions. Nothing short of a riot ever aroused any comment on the part of the faculty, for with us at that time, as I have said, it was the faculty before whom the culprit appeared, who heard the evidence, and who after much talk and discussion, pronounced the verdict.

For myself, I believe that college discipline may best be administered through a small group or committee of the faculty. The entire faculty of any

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college is too large for such a purpose, and is too conglomerate and bizarre. A man or a woman may be a very good teacher without having any of the judicial qualities which are required in passing upon cases of discipline. Every extreme of attitude toward the violations of college regulations will be found in any faculty, from the man who would condone any overt act to the one who would guillotine or burn at the stake the perpetrator of the most trifling prank. The time necessary to be consumed by a college faculty in this sort of work, if it is taken at all seriously, is beyond all reason, and in the end offers little likelihood of justice to the student.

It has never seemed to me good policy that the president of an institution should have entire charge of disciplinary matters, not only because the time of the president of any institution is ordinarily taken up with other matters of equal importance, but also because I do not think such matters should ever be wholly in the hands of one man. The cases are frequently so puzzling and so complicated and so hard to unravel that several heads are better than one. In cases where the evidence is not overwhelmingly convincing it is a comfort to feel that one has other men upon whose judgment one can rely and upon whom one can fall back in case of difficulty. Every college president who does not think himself omniscient will feel the same way.

Many institutions throw the burden of deciding all disciplinary cases, such as those concerned with cribbing, and stealing, and drinking, upon a committee of students or a student council. I have talked with a number of college officials the disciplinary

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affairs of whose institutions are so managed, and they all expressed themselves as well satisfied with the result. One officer who was in general charge of undergraduate affairs in the institution to which he belonged said, in speaking to me, that he should not himself want to assume the responsibility of deciding the complicated matters which arise in connection with student discipline; they seemed to him too difficult to solve, but he was very well satisfied to leave such things with the students who were doing it seriously and satisfactorily. His viewpoint seems to me very much as if a banker might say that his financial affairs were so complicated and tangled and so difficult of intelligent solution that he was more contented to turn them over to his children to be dealt with than to settle them himself.

I have always had an abiding faith in students, and I am quite sure that when they set themselves seriously to the accomplishment of even a difficult task it is likely to be done well; but I have had experience in disciplinary matters and know something of other executive problems which may come before a college officer. There is nothing with which I have had to do officially that requires such careful judgment as disciplinary matters—such diplomacy, such sympathy, such firmness, such freedom from prejudice and bias, such skill in handling all who are concerned with the affair. If the lines between good and evil, between truth and falsity, could always be clearly drawn, if motives and the influences which surround the erring student did not have to be considered, if, in short, we were not dealing with the most subtle and intangible things when we are trying

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to mete out justice in discipline, I should be willing perhaps to trust these matters to the experience of students. But I know how hard these matters are to decide with fairness, how easy it is to make an error, how difficult, if not impossible, to correct one after it is made, and how much is at stake for the undergraduate concerned.

The greatest handicap in my experience to successful college discipline is the number of rules laid down by the college authorities for the conduct of students. Many college officers feel that when an evil exists or an erroneous custom prevails the only thing necessary is to pass a regulation against the evil or the custom, and the matter is settled. I have found that I can in the long run do far more by suggestion and persuasion than by rule, and do it much more to the satisfaction of the students concerned, for often it is possible to have them feel that they have done it themselves. Generally the more rules an institution has, the more difficulty officers find in maintaining good order, and in keeping the young people within bounds.

It is safe to take for granted that young people of college age know in the main what is right and what is reasonable as to conduct, so that it is not necessary that every sin in the decalogue or that every violation of law under the statute should be named in the college catalog and the penalty for its violation attached. Rules often prevent individual action in specific cases. Every violation of good order should be taken up, looked into, and judged as if it were the only one of its sort. Rules often hamper such judgment. Only a short time ago the members of

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our own disciplinary committee were discussing the penalty which was about to be recommended for a student who had been somewhat irregular in conduct. "I should be glad to vote for this penalty," one of the members said, "if it did not seem to me inconsistent with what we have previously done in similar cases. The last man we had before us who had been guilty of a similar irregularity received a much more severe penalty."

"Any one who has been on this committee long," a second member answered, "must realize that its chief virtue is that it never pretends to be consistent. It treats men as individuals, and we have never met two individuals alike."

Many college rules are virtually a dead letter because they are difficult or impossible of enforcement, and the existence of such regulations can do nothing less than bring the whole system of college statutes into ridicule and disrepute. If a rule is made, some effort should be made to enforce it; though many people think that laws in themselves carry weight, even if allowed to go unexecuted.

More than this, the very existence of regulations will frequently incite students to insubordination that would not otherwise have been thought of. "I've just discovered," one freshman said to another, "that it's against the rule to smoke in the quadrangle. Now I suppose it will make me sick, but I couldn't let a thing like that go by without having a try at it." I am not arguing against regulations ''per se;'' some, of course, are necessary for the proper conduct of any business or institution, but the fewer

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the better, and then only those which are absolutely necessary.

The best way to manage the student guilty of misconduct is to look after him so personally and so carefully that he may be brought to account just before he has been guilty of the act which would subject him to discipline. The most skilful disciplinary work which I have ever done has been connected with the things that never happened, because they were not allowed to do so.

Granted that the college has made few rules, and that there is some one who keeps himself thoroughly conversant with what is going on, there will still be misconduct, and necessity on the part of college officers to exercise authority. Youth is still young and curious and irresponsible, and is quite as likely to be guided by impulse as by judgment. As I have said, I believe that disciplinary matters in college will be more satisfactorily handled to all concerned if put in charge of a small committee of the faculty composed of from three to five persons chosen because of their knowledge of student life and conditions, and because of their special fitness to form reasonable and sympathetic judgments on the cases that come before them. The members of such a committee should be young or should have once been young with the memory of that time in mind, and their appointment should so far as possible be a permanent one. They should be broad-minded, and above petty prejudices; they should still be interested in the things outside of books that interest normal healthy young people,—such as athletic sports and

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social pleasures; they should have high moral and scholastic ideals. They should have backbone enough when an unpleasant thing has to be done, and ought to be done, to do it even though it hurts some students and some fathers and mothers. Ordinarily I should not consider it a calamity if neither women nor lawyers were on such a committee. Women are more often than men influenced by their prejudices or their emotions, and lawyers are likely to insist upon a "legal" conviction. Conditions are such that a man should often be allowed to go free who has violated a college regulation, while another man who may not be proved guilty of any actual dereliction may yet clearly be a detriment to the community, and should be sent away.

During the years in which, as chairman of our committee on discipline for men, I have had to do with discipline at the University of Illinois I have had a good many interesting experiences, and have drawn from these experiences some pretty definite conclusions. I have come to realize that a disciplinary officer to be successful must have certain personal traits of character. He must first of all have the confidence of both students and faculty. The faculty must feel that matters given into his hands will be dealt with squarely and without delay. No college instructor wishes to be humiliated by having matters of discipline which he reports either ignored or treated lightly. Neither should he feel that he is compromised, if not every student whom he reports for discipline is found guilty. Some instructors whom I have known are as sensitive upon this topic as aeolian harps. I know more than one who re-

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fuses to report cases of alleged cribbing, because of the fact: that a student previously reported was not proved guilty by the disciplinary committee. It was not justice they desired but conviction.

No disciplinary officer will get on well unless he has a reputation for playing fair. If the college officer is willing to give the square deal, he will have gone a long way toward solving his official difficulties. He will sometimes have to listen to some long stories, he will have to bury his prejudices against races and individuals, he will, perhaps, often have to go a long way and suffer some inconveniences to discover necessary facts, but, when the college officer was able to show them that he desired to do the fair thing, the college students I have known have for the most part been square, and have been willing to take without complaint or whimpering what was legitimately coming to them for their misdeeds.

The college students I have known will use all sorts of subterfuge to shield a fellow student, but they will usually tell the truth about themselves. There are always two sides to a story, and it is never wise to reach a conclusion until both of these have been heard No matter how damaging or convincing the evidence may be with regard to any question under dispute, it is best to hold one's judgment in abeyance until the accused party has been heard and given a chance to defend himself. Only a few days ago a woman called me on the telephone to settle a dispute with reference to an alleged agreement which she had had with a student. "Should not a student who has rented a room for a semester, and who leaves before the end of his contract, pay for the whole

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semester?" she asked. "Ordinarily, yes," I replied, "but I should like to talk to the student before answering." When I did so, I found that in reality the woman had violated her contract, but wanted still to hold the student to his.

One of the things that has impressed me most in the pretty wide experience which I have had with college discipline is that no two cases are alike, because no two men are alike. There is always something new coming up—new character, a new viewpoint, new conditions, a new view of temptation and weakness. The work can never become mechanical because of its infinite variety. One might think, if he did not know, that, having seen fifty men during a year on fifty different sorts of wrongdoing, there would be nothing new, and that the next years would be a repetition of the old stories, but it is not true. Every case of discipline which I have had to do with was a special case. I have found, too, that women up for discipline are not at all like men. I have not for years had any direct connection with the discipline of women, that work being done by a committee of women, as I think it best perhaps that it should be. The experience which I did have, however, led me to the conclusion that they are less frank than men, less likely to tell the truth if they have done wrong than men are, because they are more nervous, more temperamental, and have more to lose, as society is now constituted, than men have, if they should be detected in wrongdoing.

I have come to look upon the work of discipline in a somewhat different light than I did during the first few years I had to do with it. At first it took

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all the courage and force of will that I could summon to recommend discipline of any sort, and especially the dismissal of a student from college. It is no small matter to send a young fellow from college in disgrace. As time has gone on I have realized more clearly the effect of discipline upon the indivdual, and I have seen, too, that the parent quite as often as the child is at fault, and needs the shock which discipline brings. When one sees the fathers he often feels like being more lenient with the sons.

A young fellow who has been detected in a violation of college regulations, whether it be a case of cribbing, or gambling, or stealing, or whatever it may be, almost invariably thinks first of his parents, usually of his mother. I have remarked often, not as a jest, but as a matter of fact, that one parent at least, and often both, of most of the students with whose discipline I have been connected for a good many years has been in the most critical physical, mental, or financial condition,—a condition which the boy thinks will end in a complete breakdown if the parents hear of the son's disgrace. I have often wondered why such critical situations do not more often keep sons within the narrow path.

"It will break my mother's heart," I am told over and over again by boys who think they are uttering the truth, and though this fact is no logical argument if the punishment is deserved, and the good of the University community is to be furthered, I have come to know that it is not true. "If I am sent home," boys say to me, "it will mean that my education is at an end, and that my father will have nothing to do with me further." I have had fathers and

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mothers tell me that if their son were dismissed, they would disown him, and though this may sometimes happen, I have never yet known a parent who, when the actual crisis arrived, did not come to the support of his child. A short time ago I thought I had found an exception, but the later details proved that I was mistaken. A father and mother sat in my office and talked to an only son who was about to be dismissed for irregularity of conduct. Both said to him firmly that if he were sent home, he need never appeal to them for help or support; they were through with him for all time. He was finally dismissed, but I was interested to learn very shortly that he was sent to a neighboring state university, and that he was receiving generous monthly allowances from home.

I recall another student dismissed for hazing. His case appealed to me at the time because of the peculiar circumstances at home. His parents were both dead, and an older brother with whom, he had many difficulties, was his guardian. This added trouble the boy thought would estrange them completely. I shall not soon forget his downcast and hopeless face when he came to say good-by to me. A year later he told me that his dismissal from college was the best thing that had ever happened to him. It awakened him to seriousness of life; and more strangely than that it awakened the sympathy of his brother and brought them more closely together than they had ever before been. He came back to the University at the end of his period of suspension, a happy boy and a serious student, and as I am writing these paragraphs, a letter comes to me from him written

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from a western city where he is now a successful business man, stronger, perhaps, from the experiences through which he has gone.

Another instance is characteristic. When a boy is disciplined, his father is, of course, written. A young fellow this year disciplined, but not dismissed, for some minor divergence from the straight path, showed me a letter which he had just received from his father relative to the notice which the latter had received from me. It was an angry, cruel note, written on the impulse when the chagrined and disappointed parent was smarting under the sting of his son's disgrace. In it he said that he was through with the boy, who if he wanted any further education must himself earn it. He need not come home, he need not ask further for money. The boy was stirred and determined to stay in college; I offered to help him, to lend him money until he could get work, and suggested that I write his father. It was only a few days after I had written until the father came to see me. He was ashamed of his letter, but too proud to take back his statements at once, but before he left me he gave me a sum of money adequate to meet his son's expenses until the close of the year, which I was to lend to him with the statement that it came from a friend who was interested in his welfare, and who wanted to help him out. A little later the two were reconciled, and the story ended happily. My first conclusion, therefore, is that whatever happens to a boy, the folks at home can be counted on to stand by him.

My experience has also led me to the conclusion that the fellow who violates a college regulation or a

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moral principle and who is not detected in it, or who, though detected, is allowed to go without penalty, is usually weakened in character by the experience or confirmed in his bad habits. I stumbled upon the fact one day, early in my experience as a disciplinary officer, that a young fellow just entering his junior year was dissipating his energies and squandering his time and money by gambling. When I called him to the office he was very much agitated and begged for "one more chance." It wag the old story of his "first offense." There was the sick mother at home believing in her only son, there was the probable ruin of his college career, there were all the stage effects which I have since come to recognize, and there was the strong assurance that he had learned his lesson, and would give up the habit. Since no other students were concerned, I accepted his word, and dropped the matter. I have since learned that he kept up the practice at irregular intervals through his college course, safe in the feeling that if he were caught again he could work upon my feelings to let him go unpunished. Another case is that of a young man caught in the act of cribbing in an examination. He seemed very penitent, the offense was committed in an environment which made the temptation strong, and he gave his word of honor that such an offense would not be committed by him again. It was not a month before he was again detected, and his only excuse was that since his error had before been condoned, he thought it would be again. The man who escapes punishment, who gets away, does not have his tendencies to error inhibited. There is for him no deterrent.
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Men ultimately see this fact and admit it. "The best thing you ever did for me," one of our graduates said to me not long ago, "was to send me away from college a year. I thought at the time that it was severe, that it would ruin my chances of finishing my course, that it would break off all friendly relations between myself and my parents, but it braced me up; it gave me the determination to make good; it made a man of me."

I remember one Christmas morning, years ago, when a young freshman and his broken, tearful mother sat at my fireside trying to gather up the fragments of what seemed to them a ruined life and trying to gain courage to face the world. The boy had had very meager resources; he had been hard pressed not only for the comfortable, pleasure-giving things which most boys have, but often even for the necessities of life. Opportunity presented itself, and he had yielded to the temptation to steal from the gymnasium lockers of other students. He had been detected, arrested, lodged in jail, and fined. Now he was out of college and was going home. It was a sad hour we spent together trying to look facts in the face and to plan a sane future, and it seemed, somehow, a pretty hopeless hour. I urged him to go somewhere else and start again, and he promised to try. A few years later I received an invitation to the Commencement exercises of a reputable western college, and within it a card bearing his name. Two years ago he came to see me at home-coming time. He had done well in college, he was married, and he was doing what he could to make the world wiser and better as principal of a reputable high school.

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The discipline of which I had unhappily at the time been the main cause, he came to thank me for. It had been, he said, the turning point in his life; it had stimulated his will and his ambition to overcome obstacles. He shook hands with me as we parted with tears in his eyes.

Another case is similar. Various articles had been disappearing from the coat rooms at the University and from lodging houses about the campus, and I began to suspect a young sophomore. He fell into a trap that was set for him, admitted his guilt when the evidence was presented to him, and was dismissed from college. He was a fellow of some prominence, and all sorts of efforts were made by his friends to have him reinstated. Public officials, relatives, educators, and religious workers all did what they could to have the penalty set aside, not because the man was not guilty, but because of their personal interest in him; but it did not seem best that this should be done. I lost track of him for a while, and then one day he dropped into my office to tell me that the discipline which had seemed so cruel to him at the time had proved his greatest blessing. It had aroused him to an appreciation of his own moral danger; it had caused him to think as he had never done before, and it had made him determine to get a college education. He had entered another college, had graduated, and is now a successful professional man in a growing city in Illinois.

One can not have to do with discipline long without coming to realize to what lengths the friends of students will go to influence college authorities to set aside penalties which have been imposed. It is not

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that these friends think the student innocent of the charge against him, it is not that they feel that the penalty imposed is in general too severe; they simply ask for special privilege and special leniency in the cases of their friends. They have worked for the institution; it owes them something for this effort, and they wish the debt paid through the granting of special moral or intellectual indulgences to their friends. Public officials of all sorts, business men, teachers, and even ministers have written me and called upon me to ask for clemency for their friends and sometimes almost to demand it as a right. For the reason that almost every penalty that is imposed will be challenged I have learned that it is wisest in imposing a penalty to make it a conservative one—one mild enough reasonably to be defended and justified, and then to adhere to the conclusion reached. It invariably weakens the authority and the confidence in the judgment of college officials when disciplinary penalties are frequently being set aside.

As a rule the man himself who is disciplined takes his punishment without whining; he accepts a just penalty, admits his error, and generally comes in to say good-by to me and to ask me to write a somewhat detailed explanatory letter to his mother, to give her all the facts and to show her that he is not wholly bad. But parents seldom accept the punishment of their children as just. They have the general attitude of a father who talked to me a year or two ago concerning an attack by students upon one of our local theaters. "When I read the account in one of our local papers of the dreadful things those students did," he said, "I spoke right out. If I had

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to deal with those students, I should expel every one of them, but when later I saw that my son had been caught, I said, 'Why, poor Victor, he is a good boy. They surely will not punish Victor.{{' "}} He brought every sort of influence to bear upon us, and even tried to persuade his son to falsify as to the facts; but Victor was guilty, and had to go. The disciplining of the parents and friends of students is a far more difficult and trying task than meting out justice to undergraduates, but it comes in as a part of the day's work.

It has never seemed wise to me to convict a student of dishonesty or of any other misdemeanor wholly upon circumstantial evidence, no matter how complete or convincing the evidence may have been. If it has been done we have usually lived to regret it. I should rather let a guilty man go than to convict an innocent one. Not long ago we had reported from one of the courses in civil engineering a case of alleged cribbing. The young fellow accused denied all guilt and did so in such a straightforward way that I was convinced he was telling the truth. He had used in one of his answers, and had used it incorrectly, a table so long and so complicated that it seemed quite impossible that he could have obtained it anywhere excepting by consulting a book. The instructor in the course felt that it was inconceivable that a man before going to a quiz could commit to memory such a long list of figures. There were six columns, twelve items in a column, and seven figures in each item—a total of five hundred and four digits to be remembered in order. We deliberated a long time; the student's previous record had not been good, and

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it looked as if he had to be guilty. He protested strongly that he had written the table from memory. Finally one member of the committee turned to the boy. "You say you committed this to memory in the belief that you might get it in the examination?" "Yes," he replied, "I can commit almost anything at sight." "Do you think you could repeat the table now?" "I believe so," he said hesitatingly. It was three weeks since he had had the test, but he dropped his head for a moment and then began. "I'll read the figures across," and he did so haltingly but surely, and in the five hundred and four digits he made an error in but two. I think I shall never vote to convict any one on circumstantial evidence again.

I have had so many varying experiences with undergraduates and their escapades and irregularities that I have come often to have a sort of intuition as to what has happened as soon as I talk to the student. Two instances of this will suffice to illustrate my point. In one of the large laboratories in chemistry an instructor became suspicious that certain students were collaborating in their experiments, and were not performing all of them. It was thought that each man was doing a part of them, and that the others were working them up from his data, changing the data very slightly to avoid suspicion. I called the men and talked to each of them alone, as is my custom, before bringing them to the committee. When the committee saw them their explanations were so clear and direct as to when and how they had done their experiments that the unanimous recommendation was that the case against them be dismissed. A night intervened before I could take the recommenda-

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tion to our Council for confirmation, as is required by our rules, and during this time I had recurring to me constantly the feeling that one of the men at least was guilty. I held up the recommendation long enough to have another interview with him. At this interview I said to him that though the members of our committee had believed his story and thought him innocent, as I had thought over his manner of giving his evidence I was convinced that he was guilty, that without the other man's knowledge, he had had access to his data and had copied his experiment. My frankness seemed to make an appeal to him, and he confessed that my surmises were correct.

One of the merchants near the campus not long ago had a number of checks presented to him which turned out to be forgeries. The custom of taking any one's check is so common with our local merchants that it is usually impossible to remember who passed such checks when finally they are detected. As usual he brought these checks—three of them—to me, to see what I could make of them. They all bore the name of a well known student, but when I compared his writing with that of the signature on the checks, though there was a similarity, there was no doubt that the signatures were forged. It was evident to me, however, that the man who had committed the forgery had been familiar with the student whose signature he had forged, that he knew his signature, the name of his bank, and something of the amount of money he was accustomed to keep on deposit. "Who is your {{hinc|room-mate}} now?" I asked the man whose bank account had been threatened, "and

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who was your {{hinc|room-mate}} last year?" As soon as he had named his {{hinc|room-mate}} of the previous year, I was completely convinced that I had found the guilty man. I had in fact had an interview with him that very morning, and I knew something of the financial difficulties he had been in, and I felt strongly the weakness and shiftiness of his character. Before calling him I got from his English teacher his last theme, and I looked up his study list which bore his penmanship and his signature. When I compared these papers with the forged signature I found two or three things which interested me. The color of the ink was identical in all cases, the form of several letters was the same, and the general slant of the letters was similar.

After I had gone over these things in my own mind I called the suspected student and told him the whole story. I presented him with the evidence which I had, laid the forged signatures and the samples of his own writing before him, and said to him quite frankly that I thought he had written the forged checks. He turned quite white as I was talking; when I had finished he dropped his head upon the desk for a moment and then looking me in the eye he said, "I did do it." I presume that in reality I had little or no convincing evidence against him. It was purely a matter of knowing the man and feeling that he was the guilty one. It is a sort of feeling which it would be dangerous to rely upon, and yet it has got me out of a corner many and many a time.

There is much in the experience of a college officer as closely connected with discipline as I am to make one cynical and to cause him to lose faith in human

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nature; all that is low and unclean and dishonest in students I am daily coming in contact with. Yet I am constantly having experiences that show me that men are still honest and conscientious and manly One busy day a few years ago I received an urgent letter from one of our graduates who had been out only a few months asking me to name a time when I could see him on an important and private matter. The case was urgent, he assured me, and the interview meant much to him. He came in a day or two and told me his story. When entering the University he had transferred from another college. By some curious error the registrar of the college from which he had transferred had entered upon his record credit for a subject which he had never taken. He had let the error go without mentioning it, the subject had been transferred to his University credits, and he had used it toward graduation. The whole mistake had arisen through no direct act of his own, and he had weakly let it go. The deceit had weighed constantly upon his conscience until he could bear it no longer. He was quite willing to relinquish his diploma or to reënter the University and make up the amount which had been falsely credited to him. I thought that perhaps there might be some other solution of the matter and went over his college credits with that hope in mind. I found to my satisfaction that by a slight readjustment of his work the surplus credits could be discarded, and that he still had credits enough honestly earned to meet the requirement for graduation. I sent him home happy, and so far as I know, he and I are the only ones who know all the details of the story.
{{nop}}

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Two years ago I had another experience with a young fellow caught in a really serious college escapade, which strengthened materially my faith in human nature. It was a situation in which the boy knew that if he told the truth he would be permanently dismissed from college. I knew all the details of the case, but this fact he was not aware of. In spite of the penalty which he knew would be inflicted, and ignorant of what I already knew he told our committee as frank and straightforward a story as I have ever heard, and though his father is a man of wide influence in the community in which he lives, the boy accepted his punishment in a thoroughly manly fashion and left me with the most friendly feeling. It gave me the greatest satisfaction a few months ago to be able to write him that because of his truthfulness and because of the manly way in which he had received his punishment, our Council had reconsidered its action in the case and would allow him to return to the University next fall—an action which had been taken in reference to no other similar offender in ten years.

I was walking across the campus one bright spring morning not many years ago when I came upon a young sophomore sitting on the senior bench. "I thought you'd be along soon," he said, "and so I was waiting for you." "What can I do for you, Ralph?" I asked. "Well," he answered, "I was drunk last night, and I had to tell some one; so I thought I'd tell you." The sequel doesn't matter so much, I suppose. I am glad to be convinced daily that there are still honest men in college—men who have courage to tell the truth even when the truth brings public

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disgrace to them, men who are willing to confess their faults even when such confession means dismissal.

I seldom lose track of the fellows who for one reason or another have been disciplined by the University. Even if their dismissal is a permanent one they write to me, or send me messages, or drift at intervals in a friendly way across my path. I count them among my closest and warmest friends. Only this afternoon one of them called me up to ask a few words of advice and to make a kindly inquiry about my health. There is lying in my basket of unanswered correspondence one of the kindest letters I ever received from a boy whom I was instrumental in sending away from the University.

There is never a Christmas that I do not hear from some of the once derelicts who send me good wishes or the baby's picture. It gives me the greatest pleasure to know that these men are almost without exception doing a man's work in a manly way, and that out of their discipline has come for them a real strength of character.

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{{sc|When}} I used to lie awake at night and try to devise means of disposing of the money which I should make by writing a book or through my investments in oil stock, one of the philanthropic plans which suggested itself to me most frequently of getting rid of my spoils, was to found a loan fund for needy students by which boys with ambition and no financial backing should be able to borrow money easily to complete a college education. I had been desperately hard up myself as an undergraduate, and I had a more than ordinarily sympathetic feeling for others in the same situation and a desire to mitigate their pain. I know a good deal more about the college borrower, however, than I did twenty years ago, and though I still believe in college loan funds, I am not so sure as I once was that money or an education too easily obtained is always highly valued. I have found that not all of the young fellows in college who are willing to borrow money deserve to be helped, and that many who most deserve help are unwilling to borrow. I have seen the college borrower in a new light. It so happens that my official position has given me an unusual opportunity to observe two classes of men in college who want to be helped out of financial holes: those who have come to me for personal and immediate help because I seem good-natured and easy, and those who come to me as an

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official of the University, who for some years has had general charge of the University loan funds. I have gained the confidence, also, of not a few soft-hearted friends who have at one time or another yielded to the touch of the indigent undergraduate, and who have told me whether they have lived to regret their momentary and monetary weakness or to rejoice that the chance had been given them to help a needy and a worthy youth. From these two experiences I have accumulated a considerable body of experience and have formulated generalizations.

Our loan funds at the University of Illinois are safeguarded by numerous regulations and restrictions so that it is not possible for an undergraduate who finds himself out of funds in the morning to negotiate a loan from his alma mater before evening. The prospective borrower must fill out an application blank, he must give references, he must, in most cases, offer security and must submit the names of at least two persons who know him and who are acquainted with the individual whose name he offers as security for the repayment of his loan. All this takes time—sometimes it requires a month for all the preliminaries to be gone through, for few people answer letters promptly, and some otherwise good citizens never answer them at all, and so possibly save themselves considerable bother, as do those worthy though unprogressive individuals who refuse to install a telephone. The borrower who has not made his plans sufficiently far ahead of time is sometimes annoyed by what he considers unnecessary red tape and inexcusable delay. A young fellow called on me only a few weeks ago wishing to get help from one

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of our loan funds. His monthly check had not come, he had an engagement out of town, he needed thirty dollars immediately, and he wanted to catch the afternoon train. When I explained to him that our loan funds were not primarily to relieve such cases of distress as he presented, but even if we should be willing to make a loan to him it would take at least two weeks and possibly a month to get it approved, he was quite disgusted, and went out of my office muttering anathemas against the system.

The undergraduate who borrows money is usually inexperienced in financial matters. He has established nothing that resembles credit, he is ignorant of all such things as interest: and security and discount except as he may have come into contact with the terms while pursuing the study of arithmetic in the grades. He has seldom signed a promissory note before, and he usually signs this first one, unless some one insists otherwise, without reading it. He is told, perhaps, that the note bears five per cent. interest from date and that it will fall due in two years and eight months. This fact, however, is not likely to make any serious impression upon his mind excepting that it seems a sufficiently safe distance in the future to cause him no immediate uneasiness or worry. I have never known more than a half dozen student borrowers who got the date of the maturity of their note so definitely in mind as to be sure of it without a notification from the bursar. It is true that all of our regulations and requirements are down in black and white and are given to every student to be read when he applies for a loan, and though he affirms when he makes application for his loan that

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he has read these regulations, and though I have no doubt he goes over them, they seldom make any lasting impression upon him.

Most students have the feeling that it should be easier in a college town to borrow money not only from the college itself, but from private individuals, than in any other community. The contrary of this is in fact true, for men with money who live in a college town have had more experiences in lending it and more opportunities to lend it to undergraduates than have other people and have learned something from that experience. Every week almost throughout the college year some student, down in his financial luck, often a man whom I have never seen before on his first registration day, comes cheerfully and confidently into my office and asks, "Could you tell the name of some one in town who would lend me some money?"

"Can you give security?" I inquire. He seldom knows what I mean by the term, but when I explain I find almost invariably that he can not, so that the banks are out of the question. I generally explain to such a man that the place for him to get money is at home where he has friends, where people know him, and where, if he has lived a steady, dependable life, there are no doubt those who would be willing to trust him; but he generally leaves me discontented and disappointed.

I am surprised often, too, at the optimism of many of those who wish to borrow. Fellows who have not been able to save anything in the past are eager to tax the future, gonfidently expecting that what has proved impossible this year will offer no difficulties

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next. A man came into my office last fall and said that he would like very much to enter college. He, however, had no money and his entrance was dependent entirely upon his ability to borrow a sum sufficient to carry him through the year. He was not young—was in fact, I discovered by inquiry, twenty-eight years of age. He had been out of high school eight years, had had a fair position during all that time, was without responsibilities excepting to take care of himself, but he had not saved a cent; he did not have enough money to pay our matriculation and incidental fees, which are in reality trifling.

I told him that it would be impossible for the University to lend him money, because it now has a tegulation that no loans are available to students until they have been in residence for at least one year, but I went further to show him that if he had only himself to support, and had held a good position for so many years without saving a little money at least, so far as any loan was concerned he was what I should call a pretty poor bet. Any individual or institution would be doing a foolish thing if it lent him money with the idea that it would within any reasonable time be paid back.

The man who does not look ahead before he enters upon any enterprise to determine how he is going to complete what he has undertaken, as well as the undergraduate who enters upon the work of a year in college without having determined upon some way in which he may be able to meet his expenses, is ordinarily a poor risk. If he borrows money he will be quite as unlikely to make definite plans to pay it back and will come up to the time of the maturity of

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his note with hardly more than enough money to pay the interest. It is the fellow who applies early for his loan, who makes his plans a reasonable time ahead, who usually proves to be the best risk. A man who goes into debt should have in mind at least two reasonable ways for meeting his obligation, so that if one failed the other might prove dependable, just as a boy pursued by an angry bull in a pasture should be able to figure, as he flees to safety, that if he is unable to climb over the fence he may dodge under. He should take into consideration, also, the fact that it is the unexpected usually that happens. The fellow who never had an accident in his life, and who, therefore, considers it unnecessary to carry accident insurance is often the first to slip on the stairway and break a couple of ribs. The man who borrows should take into account the ordinary accidents and unexpected exigencies of life, but it is rarely that he does do so.

The granting of loans from the funds which I have to do with is usually restricted to students of good or excellent scholarship. In presenting to the University the money for establishing one of our, funds, the donor said specifically:

"I do not wish loans to be granted from this fund to-students simply because they are ambitious and needy. I feel that a great University should give special aid only to those men and women who show distinct promise of intellectual power and success." It is true, however, that many an undergraduate while having to work for his living in college seems intellectually commonplace, but if through a loan he is permitted to give all of his time to his work,

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he shows at once a marked increase in intellectual power. I have not, however, found that the scholastic standing of a student is in any dependable way an index of whether or not he will show promptness in the repayment of a loan. As often as not the dullard is as conscientious in meeting his financial obligations as is the high brow.

One significant fact has shown itself in the collecting of loans due the University. We have three principal loan funds. From one of these the loan is made to the individual student upon his own personal note without endorsement by a second person. Notes drawn upon each of the other two funds require security. No insistence has been made that these last notes be bankable, but only that a second person who has been recommended as honest and reliable sign them. Even when these notes are not paid when due there is seldom an attempt made to collect from the security. In but one instance, so far as I now remember, during the twenty years that the funds have been available has an endorser of a note been required to pay. It is a fact, nevertheless, that the notes that bear an endorsement are met with much greater promptness and regularity than are the other notes. It is not an exaggeration, I believe, to say that the unendorsed notes run twice as long, before they are finally met, as do those which bear an endorsement. The man who gives only his personal note feels safer, knows usually that a collection could with difficulty be forced, and so feels justified in taking his time.

A few years ago a wealthy friend of education offered to present to the University five-hundred dollars a year to be given to such needy students as the

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University might designate and in such sums as might be determined. This was done for one year, but the effect upon the men themselves was to my mind not a good one; they were not stimulated by it, their self-respect and self-reliance were not strengthened. I therefore wrote the trustee of the fund suggesting that the amount which he should put at our disposal be lent to students, rather than given to them, at a low rate of interest for a reasonable period of time and upon its repayment that it be used to increase the fund available. This was done, and the effect in my opinion has been much more salutary. What we get for nothing we seldom value.

The time set for the repayment of the loans, which I am discussing, is two years following the date of the borrower's regular or expected graduation. It has been interesting if disappointing to me to find that only a very small percentage of the loans are paid within that time; if they were, the University would each year have at its disposal nearly twice as much money available for loans as it now has. The time the notes actually run, I have no doubt, if the matter were investigated, is fully twice as long as that agreed upon. Most of the loans are ultimately paid, for however careless he may be and however long he may delay the liquidation of his debt, the college borrower is innately honest and at least means well.

There are exceptions to this last statement of course, one of which I recall. I met an old college acquaintance of mine a few months ago. He had been graduated twenty-five years or more, and though he had not made any marked success in his profession, yet he was in comfortable circumstances and

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without a family depending upon him. He was recalling old friends and old experiences.

"You know the President lent me two hundred and fifty dollars in my junior year," he said. "I suppose the debt's outlawed long ago."

"Haven't you paid it?" I asked him in astonishment.

"No," he replied quite nonchalantly. "He never pushed me, and so I just let it go. He's dead now, anyway."

There was no suggestion in his tone of obligation or gratitude or shame for having treated a friend badly; and the kindly old man who had done him the service had lived a life of sacrifice and died in comparative poverty, no one knowing how much of his savings had gone with the two hundred and fifty dollars which my college acquaintance referred to.

The actual reasons why the college borrower does not pay are usually the reasons of youth, for youth is optimistic, the future always looks bright; to-morrow is to be a more successful day than to-day has been. There is no coefficient of error introduced into his calculations for the future, and he seldom if ever prepares for the worst or for the unexpected.

Some men are thoughtless, careless, and indifferent. Having made an obligation, the fact passes out of their mind entirely until their attention is called to it. Under these circumstances they are quite unlikely to be in any position to meet the obligation because they have not prepared to do so.

Some, naturally, have ill-luck. Their wages when they get to work are lower than they anticipated; illness overtakes them, and a hospital bill, and a doctor's

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bill have to be paid; unforeseen calamities arise in their immediate families, for which they were not prepared, and for which they were not responsible. All these things must be taken for granted, and expected, but they do not indicate the usual nor the normal condition of affairs.

Other graduates fall into situations at once in which unusual opportunities for investment present themselves. They are thereupon loath to use their money for the payment of a debt which seems to many of them, now that the money has been spent, very much like putting their earnings into a dead horse. "I could have paid the loan a long time ago," one man frankly wrote me, "but I could get money nowhere else at so low a rate of interest, and my investments were bringing me so much more than this that I could hardly be expected to withdraw them just as I was getting a financial start to pay this debt. The University can afford to lose better than I can."

A few men take advantage of any chance to evade payment. I am reminded of one of these whom I had personally helped. He was not eligible for one of our regular loans. He was down financially, had a chance to get a good job in a distant city, but had no money to pay his transportation. I came to the rescue and took his personal note for the thirty-five dollars required to carry him to his destination. When I wrote him a year later suggesting payment of the sum borrowed, he replied that it was at that time inconvenient for him to pay; besides, he added, the debt was uncollectible since he was not of legal age when he signed the note. He was, therefore,

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he alleged, at liberty to pay when and if he pleased. There are not many like him, thank heaven.

It is a curious coincidence that of the eight men whose loans from one of our funds are longest overdue seven are lawyers. Perhaps their knowledge of the law has helped them in the evasion or the neglect of their obligations. It will at once be said by some one that the explanation of the phenomenon lies in the fact that lawyers are long in getting established, and that these men are not making enough money to meet their obligations, that they must spend what they make in order to keep up a respectable appearance. This is a good explanation, but in this case it is not the correct one. Of the ten lawyers whom I have repeatedly written concerning overdue accounts only one has replied; no one has paid, though all are quite able to pay.

A great many fail to meet their obligations on time because they plan to pay in one sum what they have borrowed. Almost every one who goes out from college could, from the very beginning spare five or ten or fifteen dollars a month from his salary and so gradually reduce his debt; but when it comes to having at hand two hundred or three hundred or five hundred dollars, the situation becomes more complicated if not impossible. There are too many temptations surrounding the man just out of college tending to separate him from his money to make it likely that he will have available at one time the total sum of his indebtedness. If he begins by making monthly payments he will be surprised how quickly the debt will be cancelled without any apparent embarrassment to himself.
{{nop}}

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But the excuses already given explain only a small percentage of the cases where notes are not met at the time of maturity. Far and away the largest number of graduates who fail to meet their notes when they become due give matrimony as the only excuse. Whether the self-supporting student who must borrow while he is in college is after he graduates less experienced in the affairs of the heart or more sentimental than the average, it is a fact that he is the first to gather his family gods under his own roof-tree, and, ignoring or forgetting his former obligations, to take to himself a wife. It has become quite a habit with me now, when a former student does not pay his loan when it becomes due, to suppose that he has married, or knowing that he has married and that his regular monthly payments have ceased, to surmise that his family has increased in size, and my supposition is nearly always correct.

A few years ago I found in the morning mail an appealing letter from a former undergraduate. He had been out of work for some time until all his funds had gone. Now, however, he had found a good job. His only trouble was that he did not have at hand, nor could he get, sufficient money to meet the most simple living expenses until he should obtain his first month's pay. Would I not, remembering our former friendship, let him have twenty-five dollars until pay day, and thus virtually save his life? I sent him a check for the amount asked for, but did not hear from him for months. I wrote him two or three times, but even my letters brought me no response. Then one day when I was in the city I called

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him up on the telephone and inquired courteously why I had not heard from him. He seemed reluctant at first to give me any definite explanation, assured me that it had been his specific intention to write me that very day, and, finally, when pressed admitted that he married immediately following the receipt of my check and added that I, being married myself, could well understand that the necessity of buying furniture and establishing a home left him no surplus to meet obligations previously incurred. I understood perfectly. Incidentally I have not yet received my money, though I have had a postal card picture of the new baby and a brief line from father indicating that he expected soon to send me a remittance.

A few quotations from those who have assumed later matrimonial obligations will illustrate the excuses I receive for delayed payments: "My wife's hospital bill has added an extra burden during the last year," one man writes; "I am to be married in December," says another, "and do not find myself financially where I expected." "In September after my graduation," moans a third, "I was married, and my salary was reduced to a living wage. I, therefore, find it impossible," ete.

Here are a few more: "To be frank with you, I have had money enough to pay the loan at two different times, but six months ago I took the best girl in the world in wedlock." "If you ever began life on a small salary, with some indebtedness, in a city where the cost of living is high, you would appreciate," etc. "My expenditures are those of a married man with one child."
{{nop}}

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Matrimony seems to be thought an adequate excuse for all sorts of financial delinquencies, since fully seventy-five per cent. of those students who have availed themselves of the advantages of our loan funds in the past, find it the only excuse they have to offer for not meeting their obligations on time. So often is the excuse given that I have recently had inserted in the application blank which students fill out when asking for a loan, this question, "Do you contemplate marrying soon?" In all this that I have related something seems to me wrong. Is it our system, or our teaching, or is it that the student who makes the loan has an inadequate conception of his obligation, or does marriage like war constitute an adequate and legitimate excuse for a man's not meeting his financial obligations promptly?

There is another class of borrower, however, in college whom most undergraduates who have soft hearts and easy purse strings, and whom all college officials are acquainted with. These men are those who do not wish to take advantage of the more formal methods of obtaining help through the regular loan funds established by the institution, but who are only temporarily insolvent and who are expecting checks on the next mail or legacies at the convening of the next term of court. I had a man ask me for a loan once who had an aged grandfather upon whose death he was expecting rather generous returns. I had the strength of character to refuse the request, and though that was years ago, at last reports grandfather was as hale and hearty as ever.

These men seldom want a great deal, but they want it at once to meet the pressing obligation or to catch

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the waiting car. I think I have not, more than ordinary men, found it difficult to resist their plausible arguments, but my experience with them has been varied and interesting. They are the harder to resist because their plea is so reasonable and their need so urgent. I have done business in one way or another with a good many of them within the last twenty years, and though the most of them have paid, so far as I now remember, only six have strictly kept their agreements. Until a week ago it was only five, but last week a man to whom I had lent thirty dollars, paid me three days before he had agreed to do so and surprised and almost shocked me by adding twenty-five cents for interest.

"Do you know where La Rue is now and what he is doing?" one of my faculty friends asked me the other day.

"He's married and has a good job in Peoria," I replied. "Why do you ask?"

"Well, he borrowed a hundred dollars from me just before he graduated with the understanding that it was to be paid within a few months, and I've not seen hide nor hair of him since. If he were hard up I did not want to press him, but if he is able to pay I thought I might as well have the money as he."

Few weeks go by that I am not approached by students with the request that I endorse a note for them at the bank in order that they may make a short time loan. In my younger and less experienced days I used occasionally to do this when I thought I knew my man, but after I had paid a few of these notes at times which were often annoyingly inconvenient to me, I came to the conclusion that I should under no

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circumstances endorse a note for a student or any one else for that matter. If I had the money and felt so inclined I might let him have it, and if I did do this it would be with no idea of being able to count on its return at the time he agreed to do it. If he did pay it when he agreed to, it was just like finding it; if he did not I was not surprised. I felt always in such a case as Josh Billings in his beatitude "Blessed are they who expect nothing, for they shall not be disappointed!"

An experience of this sort was mine only a few months ago. A young fellow whom I knew very slightly presented himself at my desk with a promissory note in his hand for forty dollars all filled out and ready for my signature.

"I can't do it, Mack," I said, "I'm sorry, but I've paid my share of that sort of note, and I've sworn off."

"You wouldn't have to pay this one," he assured me.

"That's what they all said," I continued, "and I have no doubt they honestly meant it." He seemed so disappointed and in so difficult a place that I was rather sorry for him. "If I should sign the note," I asked him, "how would you meet it? Where is the money coming from?"

"I have a pretty generous allowance," he explained, "and I am sure I could easily pay ten dollars a month out of it if I could get this money, and I surely do need it very seriously." I hesitated a moment and then said.

"I'll lend you the money myself and take your note for six months. That ought to give you plenty of

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time." I gave him the money, took his note, ana ne left me. I did not see him again until after the end of the six months and then only because I sent for him. When he came at my call he paid a part of his indebtedness, made no explanation of his delay, promised to pay the rest within a few days, and passed on. That is the last time I have seen him. Well, perhaps it all went in a good cause, for Mack joined the army and fought for his country. My experience with him, however, is typical and characteristic.

Some one who reads this article may say that I am over-pessimistic, that my faith in the honesty and promptness of the undergraduate is weak, and that any inference drawn from the facts and incidents presented herein would tend to discourage any one who might have a tendency to help the needy undergraduate in college. I hope that this is not true. No one can surpass me in the confidence and faith I have in the college man. I think he will meet his obligations, but I think because of his youth and inexperience that he will seldom do so within the time that he first sets for himself; and if he can not do so he will seldom make any explanation or offer any excuse. He argues that if he can not pay, it does no good just to say so.

I believe, on the whole, that those men who have given money to aid needy students more readily to finish their college course have done well—better even sometimes than do those who endow libraries, or who erect fine buildings for educational purposes, because those who aid the self-supporting student are equipping men more quickly, and directly for life. Those, too, who might otherwise be developed into

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broad-minded, cultivated students, if they have to give all their time to earning a living, are often kept narrow and inefficient by the hard, cruel grind. If I were to come to the aid of the borrower in college I should do so with my eyes open, I should face the actual facts which experience with these things had taught me, and I should surround the granting of these loans with such restrictions as would make them comparatively safe risks.

Of course if the terms upon which loans are granted by the college are so rigid as to make it next to impossible for the needy undergraduate to meet them, the whole purpose of the loan is defeated. If the student must meet the conditions which a bank imposes then, barring the fact that the college loan is usually made at a somewhat lower rate of interest than one must pay at the bank, the borrower might quite as well patronize his local bank. I should not make such loans prohibitive, but I should grant them only after a careful investigation and study of the character and need of the prospective borrower; for after all the main safeguard in making such a loan is the personal character of the individual who is receiving the loan.

I should very seldom lend money to students under the junior year. If the under classman must begin to borrow he is likely so heavily to handicap himself with debt at the very beginning of his college course that he grows discouraged, gives up the task, and never graduates. He is too young usually to realize the meaning of debt. Since such a man seldom graduates, he, therefore, does not fit himself for rapid advancement in any line of work which he may take

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up, and he finds it difficult to save enough money beyond his living expenses to meet any considerable debt. The man who does not begin to borrow before his junior or his senior year can usually see the end not far away, and he struggles on to the finish. If he does not immediately marry he stands a good chance of shortly paying up his obligation.

I believe in a young man's marrying early, but ordinarily I think he should not do so while he is in debt. It is not so cheap for two to live as one and never has been, and the young fellow who takes a wife faces the probability of doctor bills, of increasing family, and of irregular employment, and these conditions are not conducive to the payment of old debts. For this reason, just stated, I have usually hesitated to recommend a loan to any applicant when it seemed likely that he would marry before his debt was fully paid.

The loan most easily obtained is usually the one least appreciated and least likely to be repaid. I believe it is a good thing for the student who wishes to avail himself of the privileges of a college fund to be required to offer some security. Life insurance is a protection in case of the borrower's death, but any one who has lived twenty years or more should not find it impossible to secure an endorser of his note, a member of his family or a friend, who at least has the reputation for honesty even if he is not to any large exten a property holder. The fact that two names are on a note shows that there is some one who is willing to vouch for the borrower's honesty. There is a certain responsibility upon the student, also, to make good, to meet his obligation, and to justify himself

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in the eyes of the man who trusted him sufficiently to put his name to a note. I used to feel otherwise, but an experience with hundreds of borrowers has changed my viewpoint entirely.

A student should seldom borrow, during any year, more than half the amount necessary to meet his college expenses. He should have saved something from his work during the summer vacation, and if he can get no help from home, he can always find leisure time which can be profitably utilized in adding to his income and the use of which for this purpose need not interfere either with his pleasure or his studies. A small debt is often an incentive to the man just out of college to work hard and save his money, but a heavy one is likely to take most of the joy out of life, and to discourage the debtor utterly.

Whether loans should be made to students with high scholastic standing only, depends upon whether one is interested mainly in scholarship or in citizenship, and though I should think it unwise to put much money into the intellectual development of the dullard, I should never confine my beneficences to high-grade students only. The average man is for purposes of citizenship quite worth while, and quite worthy of any help which may be bestowed upon him.

I should still like some day to found a loan fund for needy students, but I should not be willing to lend to every one who asks, or even to every one who is in real need. Sometimes the eager borrower is lazy; he is not willing to work as he might to keep himself in funds. Sometimes he is inefficient and lacking in initiative, so that he has not been able to avail himself of opportunities for other sorts of help

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which were at hand. Sometimes he has not lived within his means and wishes to borrow only that he may live more extravagantly than he should. I should not want to lend to any of these, nor should I make it too easy even for the best of fellows to get a Joan.

It is a good policy for the {{hinc|upperclassman}} who is hard up, if he has a definite purpose before him and an average mind and body, to borrow money to get him over the last hard pull of the senior year. I have always been sorry that I did not myself borrow more. Had I done so I could have accomplished more during my last year. But the man who bortows should really be a man who takes his obligations seriously, who meets them promptly, who, when he gives his word, keeps it.

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{{sc|One}} spring morning not long ago when I came to my office to begin the work of the day I found, as it is quite common to do, a young man waiting to see me. He was flushed and embarrassed as he entered my private office, and he asked me if I would consider what he should tell me in the interview which was to follow as entirely confidential. He begged that whatever facts and names he might divulge to me should be held strictly between ourselves. I gave him my assurance, and he continued with his story. He was the manager of an important undergraduate enterprise which necessitated his handling during the year some thousands of dollars. One of his duties at the outset had been to make a contract for supplies for the year. A friend of his, an upper classman, had come to him in the fall and had presented a proposition by which each was to receive a bonus of one hundred dollars in cash, if the contract should go to a definite local firm. He weakly and thoughtlessly yielded, hoping to get out of it or in some way to justify his action to himself, and now the contract had been fulfilled, and his friend was urging him to collect and divide the bonus.

"I have never consciously done a dishonest thing in my life," he said to me, "and I some way can not bring myself now to profit in this irregular way. If I take the money, I shall feel myself a crook all my

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life; if I tell my friend that I have changed my mind and do not think it right that we should take this money, he will be sure that I am not playing the game fairly with him, that I am joking, and am intending to collect the money and use it all for my own benefit."

I suggested to him a way out of the difficulty which was quite satisfactory, and he went off relieved and resolved for the future to keep in the straight path of honesty. His is only one of the many instances, which come to my attention almost daily in a large educational institution, of the business temptations which beset students, and of the close relationships between the undergraduate and graft.

The unsophisticated is likely to think of the college life as a protected, shielded life, a life which one spends in the study of books and of nature, afar off from the transactions and the temptations of the sordid business world. This may be true under certain conditions and in certain institutions, but not in the large universities of the Middle West.

In the simple life of the small college there is little opportunity, in the undergraduate activities as they are carried on, for profit or for dishonesty. No large amounts of money change hands, and the students who have charge of undergraduate affairs do not often have their characters put to the test of honesty. "In my own undergraduate days there were fewer than four hundred students in the institution in which I was doing my work. There was little money coming in from athletics, there was a deficit in our class annual, and no one was paid for working on the college paper, for the very good reason that it

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required labor and finesse for the business manager to meet the bills for its publication, let alone to pay any one for working upon it. We were satisfied to gain experience, though if there had been any loose money we should no doubt have shared it eagerly. Class functions and class invitations and student operas and plays and publications were either not a part of our undergraduate life or else their conduct entailed such a minor expenditure of money and was so simple in its nature that there was no thought or possibility of graft.

In an institution of eight or ten thousand students the case is very different. The student publications alone of the University of Illinois last year involved the letting of contracts and the expenditure of money to the extent of ninety thousand dollars, and practically all of this money was handled by students, and much of the profit divided among them. The expenditure of the senior class for their invitations, and ball, and breakfast, and class hats, and commencement caps and gowns would even at the most conservative estimate reach ten thousand dollars, and the contracts for all of these things were made by students, and the bills paid by students. The amounts may seem large, but when it is remembered that the number receiving degrees exceeded one thousand, the expenditure is very moderate. If one should go into it thoughtfully, he would be quite astonished to realize the thousand and one undergraduate interests which require the making of contracts, the collection of considerable sums of money often running into thousands of dollars, and the payment of bills by inexperienced careless undergraduates upon whom there

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is little effective check, and who themselves are unlikely if allowed to go undirected or unsupervised to keep any intelligent or intelligible account of their receipts or their expenditures. In any of the Middle West state universities the sums of money handled by students in the conduct of undergraduate affairs will run annually into tens of thousands of dollars.

The young men who make up the student body of any of our Middle West universities when they enter college are, many of them, not unfamiliar with the ways of the world. They know what it means to get or to hold a job through the influence of friends; they may not call it "pull," but it is the same thing under another name. They are not inclined to work "for their health," and if they do a piece of work, even if it be only having their names on a hat committee, they can not always see why they should not profit by it in some material way. They are strongly imbued with the commercial spirit. Much of the foolish talk which they have heard about college has been mixed with stories of graft in undergraduate affairs, and many fellows come to college with the idea that if you are anything of a wise guy you can pick up money almost anywhere about a college campus.

The editor of the summer edition of our college daily was complaining to me not long ago that he was having to do most of the work on the paper himself this summer, and that it was really more than he was able to accomplish.

"Haven't you a staff?" I inquired, with the memory of a long published list of names of editors in my mind.
{{nop}}

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"Why, yes," was his reply, "but you see they don't get anything out of it, and you can't expect a fellow to work for nothing these days." It is a significant fact that if you ask a young fellow in college now to perform any sort of service, the first question he is likely to ask is, "What's there in it?" It is the slogan of our times which our young men have learned at home from the conduct of politics and the conduct of business. We are supposed to preach higher ideals in college, but it is hard to supplant a doctrine of selfish personal interest and profit with one of altruism.

The fact that it is becoming more and more popular to go to college and that every year, with us at least, there is an increasingly larger number of undergraduates who must earn their living, has its influence, I have no doubt, upon this desire for graft. I do not mean to indicate that it is the men who have the greatest need for money to meet the daily demands for food and lodging who are most concerned in the illegitimate ways of obtaining money, and to whom these temptations come more strongly. Quite the contrary in fact; but when one-third of the men in college, as is the case with us, are concerned in some way in earning the whole or a part of their living there is bound to be a good deal of talk current relative to these matters, and when one is daily rubbing up against men who are bringing in a few dollars, it is not strange that one should look about him, even though not pressed by want or dire need, in an attempt to discover if there is not some easy money in reach which he may pick up. If no one were earning money, perhaps no one else would want to do so,

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but the sight or the rumor of other fellows adding to their incomes by steady work or clever financiering stimulates cupidity, just as when I go by an ice cream tefectory and see a few friends sitting in the window refreshing themselves with lemon stirs and bostons, my thirst rises.

When McIntyre came to me this spring and wanted me to help him collect a bill of fifty dollars from the freshman class for doing work which his office required him to do free of charge, I refused. "Why do you want this?" I asked, knowing that Mac got a generous check from home every month, "you have plenty of money"; not that that fact would have made any difference if he had been entitled to the money, but just to see what his reaction would be.

"Every one else in the house is making something," he explained, "and this seemed my chance. I can't see why I shouldn't make a little on the side even if I do get all I need from home." They were all in the game, and Mac didn't want to be on the side lines.

Another thing which, in a state university at least, helps to confirm students in their unwillingness to do anything unless they are paid for it, is the fact, I believe, that the fees which students pay at such an institution are so trifling as to be almost negligible. They pay little or nothing for instruction; many of their social affairs are in University buildings, their athletic sports and games are furnished at the lowest possible rate, the University offers them all sorts of entertainments free of charge, and pays a man to get the indigent a job. Since they get almost everything practically free, it is only a short step to the attitude

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of mind that if one does any general college service, or belongs to anything, or is a member of any committee there ought to be a generous rake-off.

With this training and tendency of students which I have discussed, with so many student enterprises so organized that they bring in relatively large sums of money, some part of which may legitimately be divided among undergraduates, it is not easy to draw the line at the point where honest remuneration ends and graft begins. An athlete may not take money for his services; if he does he becomes a professional and, if his act is discovered, he is barred from the team. General college sentiment would not now approve an athlete's being paid even indirectly for his services. It would seem out of place for a member of the glee club to be paid for singing at the regular concerts, though he may be a member of a paid choir at the same time that he belongs to the club and be subject to no comment if the manager presents each member of the club from the profits of the concert a sweater bearing an embroidered monogram, though it would stir up criticism and scandal if they received ten dollar gold pieces. The members of a committee appointed to choose a class emblem or a class hat could not receive salaries for having their names on the committee, but they feel entirely virtuous and above reproach if they accept a hat or two or a watch fob for their work; in fact they would be likely to suffer a real irritation if they did not receive such gratuities. The members of a dance committee get free admission to the dance and charge up as legitimate expenses all their regular personal expenditures

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for cabs and candy incident to the party, and these things are seldom looked upon as graft.

In some lines of student endeavor the undergraduate who manages the business is paid a stipulated sum or gets a definitely agreed upon percentage of the profits for his work and thought. The managers of the glee club and the student opera, and the lecture course, accept a bonus and little is thought of it; the managers and editors of all our student publications receive definite salaries and a share in the extra profits of these different publications which is often considerable, and they accept this as a right.

The question as to what constitutes graft and what constitutes legitimate payment for real services rendered, as I said at the outset, is not easy to settle. The manager of the glee club has no little responsibility. He organizes the club, he plans the trips and makes all arrangements for the entertainment of the members when they are out of town; he looks after the contracts for engagements, pays the bills, and puts in a tremendous amount of time in getting things in order and in keeping them so. If he should be paid fifty or one hundred dollars, should this be called graft? Again, the undergraduate who has charge of the commencement invitations does not always have an easy job. He is beset by solicitors, he must try to please as many members of the class as possible, he has a considerable amount of detail to look after, must read some pretty difficult proof (and usually does it badly) and be sure that the name of every member of the class is on the list. The invitations must be delivered on time and in exactly the

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numbers ordered by each individual. Should he get a rake-off?

Only a few years ago when the representative of a well known engraving company in the East was soliciting an order from the chairman of the senior invitations committee he presented two propositions. The invitations—five thousand of them or more—would be laid down at the college book store for thirty cents each. If a certain paper stock was accepted he would pay to the chairman of the committee for his trouble one hundred and fifty dollars in cash when the order was delivered, or if the chairman did not see his way clear to accept this offer—some chairmen do not—he would furnish a slightly superior quality of paper for the same price. There would be nothing on record or public about this transfer of the cash,—he would be handed the bonus in cash which was simply to show in a delicate way the appreciation of the company for this item of business. Was this a legitimate payment for services rendered which the young fellow was at liberty to accept without criticism, or not?

Our college daily, managed by students, does a yearly business of twenty or thirty thousands of dollars. The annual contract for the printing of this paper is let by a board of trustees composed of four students and three members of the faculty. A few years ago one of the students concerned was approached by a representative of one of the firms bidding for the contract with this proposition. His firm would agree to print the paper for a sum as low as the lowest bidder who should make application for the job; they would also make in every other detail

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a contract as favorable to the interests of the paper as any other contract offered. If the student concerned would use his influence and by his so doing they should secure the contract, they would hand him one hundred dollars in currency. The boy was a hard working fellow who was forced to support himself, the firm making him the offer was well qualified to carry out such a contract, and there was every probability that he could swing the business in their direction. So far as he could see he would not damage the paper nor cause any person inconvenience or loss if he should accept the proposition, and the money he was to receive would carry him easily through one of the hardest financial difficulties he had encountered during his undergraduate course. If he had taken the money, would he have been guilty of dishonesty and graft?

A former manager of one of our publications was approached by a representative of the firm that had done work on the publication when the manager referred to was in charge. "If you will help us to get this next contract," he said, "we shall be glad to pay you handsomely as a purely business proposition." The work which the firm had done had been second class, as the former manager well knew, but he volunteered to take the new manager through the work rooms of the interested firm, showed up their good points, evaded the weak ones, urged the claims of the firm to the new man's consideration and persuaded him to give them his contract. For all this he had his expenses paid and received in cash an amount of money far in excess of what he could have legitimately earned in four times the time consumed in his

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endeavor. Was he dishonest, and was the money which he accepted graft?

In giving these illustrations I have advisedly indicated that in each case the remuneration which these fellows accepted or that which was offered them was always cash, never a check or a draft, for when bills change hands, unless they are marked, there is no tangible record and no way for an outsider to run the matter down and get hold of it. Each one of these firms may say, as in fact most of them have said, that there was no such transaction authorized by them and nothing of this sort so far as they are aware ever occurred. The student, also, if he is uncertain as to the integrity of his conduct has no embarrassing legal witness to rise up to trouble him. If he is asked about the affair he may have forgotten, or he may evade the question entirely.

For my own part, I am convinced that we should be living under a healthier business and social régime in college if we could go back to the time when students worked in undergraduate affairs because they valued the distinction and the honor of the positions which were attainable, and because they were willing through such means to gain acquaintanceship and experience. There was stronger loyalty then, there was a keener college spirit, there was greater development of character, there was better sportsmanship, for a fellow is a poor sportsman who can not see his way to doing something for the advantage of his college or his class or his organization without receiving payment for it whether such payment be in greenbacks or gold watch fobs, whether it comes to him through the operation of regular college rules, or by

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irregular and hidden processes which he hesitates to discuss. We are, however, in most of our colleges at least, working under a different system, looking at the business of undergraduate affairs from a different viewpoint, and shall have to take things as I find them.

If I may answer my own question as to what really—constitutes graft in college I should say that it is receiving payment or profit without having the proper authority or sanction from those who actually pay the money or are responsible for its disposal; or without having rendered an equivalent service If the junior class votes to give fobs to the men who were in charge of the Prom, their acceptance of such a gift under this definition cannot be considered as graft because the class has a right to distribute its own money. If, however, the committee votes itself fobs without the approval or consent of the class, and buys them out of the proceeds of the dance, the case is different. The man who was in charge of the senior invitations, for example, if he should have accepted one hundred dollars might quite legitimately have been accused of graft, for no matter under what felicitous name the transfer of currency might have taken place, no one is foolish enough to think that any one was really paying this amount excepting those who are paying for the invitations and they are doing so without their knowledge or consent. The firm that offered such a bonus made itself safe by adding an equal or a larger amount to the regular selling price of the goods. The fellow who helped to land the contract with the firm that had previously done a second class business with him, in addition

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to perpetrating an ordinary common act of dishonesty was also a grafter, for the service which he performed even if it had been otherwise square was far less in proportion than the remuneration he received.

We have a university regulation to the effect that no organization is permitted to hold an entertainment with a view to raising money to be divided among its members. When the members of our dancing clubs, therefore, turn their cash balance into their own individual pockets they are receiving profit contrary to authority and are guilty of graft. Sometimes, perhaps, a practice like this is established so gradually and goes on so long that it loses its original significance and seems to become a legitimate commercial enterprise.

There is another sort of graft which contemplates a special privilege or looks for favors through relationship or acquaintanceship where a man has given little or nothing for what he expects in return. A student is sometimes accused of "working a graft" when all that is meant is that because of his nearness to an individual or his connection with an office or an organization he may be receiving favors to which he might otherwise not be entitled. If Jones is chairman of the Prom Committee, then Brown who is his roommate, even though he has done no work to merit preferment, expects to fall heir to some sort of soft job where the payment will at least equal if it does not exceed the labor. Fraternity men in authority or with appointing power are not at all likely to forget the needy or the eager brother when their jobs are being partitioned out. If Tom Jones is managing the student opera it is to be expected that

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a large percentage of the Zete's should be in the cast and in other places of emolument and honor; if Skinny Bill is in charge of the Mask and Bauble play then we are not surprised to find the whole Beta chapter taking tickets at the door. It is pretty hard when some member of the family is holding the bag for one not to try to get his fingers at least upon a few coins.

This form of graft does not always put the worst or the most incapable men into positions of trust; on the contrary the men selected frequently perform their tasks admirably, but it is simply another phase of the spoils system; it teaches a bad social principle, and is a form of graft detrimental to the best interests of the college. It is at best a weakener of the character of those who work it.

"I can not conceive," a senior recently said to me, "that any college man would ever fail to vote for a brother or for a friend if he were a candidate for office."

"Not even if there were a much better man running?" I asked.

"No fellow under those circumstances would be willing to admit that there are any better men," was his reply. But it is a rather vicious accompaniment of graft that makes it impossible for a man to recognize merit in any but his friends.

These things which I have been discussing are encouraged in college by two or three things. If we must speak the truth such practices are not at all uncommon in the business world, and students know it. The representative of one of the best known men's furnishing stores in Chicago not long ago ad-

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vertised his business and attempted to increase his trade by handing out half pint bottles of whiskey to all thirsty corners. We live in a dry time, so that although these little courtesies are not universally appealing they do in some satisfy a long felt want. I do not suppose the firm whose goods were thus being advertised knew the exact methods which were being employed by their solicitor, but he was known as one of the shrewdest and most successful salesmen on the road. A young landscape gardener who has been out of college for only a few years told me a short time ago that he seldom put in an order for shrubs to carry out the work of park planting in which he is now engaged without one or more salesmen offering to split profits with him to get his order. These dishonest ways of promoting trade are not unknown to many undergraduates, and though they are not universal they are far too common to make it easy to develop healthy business principles.

As soon as the undergraduate begins to do business in college he finds that competition among local merchants and other business men is keen and that a good percentage of them are out for the business and are willing to pay to get it. It is not so strange, then, that the young inexperienced student should fall a victim to the subtle arguments which over-enthusiastic solicitors and business men are willing to present in order to get their orders. "They practically all do it in one way or another," the representative of a big business house said to me not long ago, "and if one wants to do business, one has to come across. It isn't always money, of course, which we put up, but it is the equivalent of money."
{{nop}}

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I should not want to blame this practice entirely upon business houses or their representatives. Most students are of the opinion that graft is pretty general in undergraduate activities and many fellows go out for positions with the hope of finding or making opportunity for illegitimate profit. Some men, it is true, are surprised when they are offered money to let a contract; some even are incensed; but there are others who by subtle suggestion make it quite evident to business firms that they are willing to be bribed, and others even more boldly ask at the outset how much there will be in it for them personally. A local merchant told me recently that the class officer who was in charge of the business of letting the contract for a class hat or cap came to him to ask for a bid on the proposition. When the boy had received the merchant's bid he said, "You have offered to furnish these caps for one dollar and twenty cents each. I will give you the contract if you will make it one dollar and thirty cents and turn the ten cents extra over to me for my trouble."

"I shall be very glad to do that," was the merchant's reply, "if your class will so vote or if you will have announced to the class beforehand what is being done; but otherwise I cannot." The young fellow went away to consider the proposition, but he never returned, and another firm received the order.

These practices could be stopped if they could more easily be detected; but very few people take responsibility in the matter. The students who profit by such grafting seldom boast of it or make it a matter of talk; those who know of it but who take no active part shrug their shoulders and affirm that it is none

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of their affairs; it may be wrong, but the responsibility is not upon them to stop it. Merchants or business firms who are implicated, most of them far away from the campus, of course have nothing to say on the subject, and those who are approached and who do not want to enter into such irregular negotiations, ordinarily content themselves with turning down the proposition and saying nothing. When there is a transfer of cash there is no record of it, no witnesses, no checks or drafts or papers of any kind to show that the undergraduate has profited. Bills are made out in regular order and checks covering the total amount of these bills are always forthcoming, so that on the surface the transaction seems entirely above board.

Notwithstanding these facts, however, I feel sure that careful supervision by the faculty of the business transactions of student activities would help materially to reduce if not in many cases to prevent undergraduate graft as it now exists. Much of the graft does not come from a definite transfer of cash from the representative of a business firm to an undergraduate manager, though there is considerable of this; it comes through thoughtlessness and carelessness on the part of the student. He collects money from various sources and gives no receipts; he pays bills and does not make a record of them; he does not keep separate the money which belongs to himself personally and that which belongs to the committee or the organization which he represents; he spends money as he is called on to do so, and by the end of a week or a month he has no remote idea how his accounts stand—how much money is his own and how

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much is his organization's. This spring I called to my office a young senior who had handled the accounts of a prominent university organization to insist that he make a reckoning. He had kept no records; he had taken no receipts nor given any; he did not know whether he had collected fifty dollars or two hundred and fifty. He was sure that he had not handled much money, though what had come into his keeping he had put into his pocket without record and spent as his own. The only way in which he could in any sense atone for his carelessness, he said, was to meet the bills of the organization and if these were presented to him he would pay them. I am sure he will always feel that he got the worst of the bargain, though it is not at all certain that he did not collect considerably more than the bills amounted to. Such errors as this which I have just mentioned are all too common; the student falls into them thoughtlessly at first, and then finding his affairs in a hopeless muddle, trusts to providence to get him out.

Such difficulties could be avoided by requiring all undergraduates responsible for the collecting and the expending of money to give numbered receipts for all money collected and to pay all bills by check on this money after it has been deposited in the bank. Years ago I learned through dear experience not to mix any one else's money with my own. If I were a Sunday school treasurer I should carry in a bag to the bank on Monday morning the pennies and nickels I had collected on Sunday and never let them touch the unsanctified coins in my own pocket. When all students who handle money for undergraduate organizations are required to make a busi-

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ness-like report of their receipts and expenditures, and have furnished them at a trifling cost the necessary books and paraphernalia to keep these accounts, the graft that arises through carelessness will be reduced to a minimum Knowing that he will be required to make a report the undergraduate will be on his guard. If undergraduate graft is to be eliminated or even become the unusual occurrence in college life, it will be through the development of public sentiment. We are all of us more than we think kept conventional and clean and honest through fear of what people will say; we might sometimes be tempted to swerve a little from the path of rectitude if it were not for the fact that we should be talked about or made unpopular or criticized or ostracized for our action. We all wish to be: approved and thought well of. When the undergraduate who works a graft is looked upon by his fellow students as is any other crook or dishonest man, when his lack of integrity instead of making him thought a hero or a clever fellow brings him disfavor and unpopularity, when the sentiment of the world at large and of the college world is against such dishonest dealings and all who work them whether they be undergraduates or business men, the undergraduate will in large part be separated from graft.

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{{sc|My}} title recalls Tom Crow vividly to my mind. I noticed him first shortly after the opening of college. He was always late to my lecture, coming in heated and perturbed, if he came at all, and stumbling awkwardly over the feet of those who had been prompt, as he scrambled into his seat in the middle of the class room. His hair was usually damp and uncombed and his clothing unkempt as if while in the swimming pool or on the tennis courts some one had suddenly reminded him of his neglected intellectual obligation and he had hastened to his task adjusting his clothing on the way. In point of fact, as I learned later on inquiry, this was actually what had happened, for, since Tom had never before done any thinking for himself, his roommate had been engaged to do it for him, and sometimes was tardy in his duty. Tom showed himself a poor student; he was a likeable loafer who meant to do his work, but who could never get at it. He was so poor a student that when his mother came to visit him after his pretty complete failure at the end of the first semester she called on me.

"Don't be too hard on Tommy," she said. "I've always looked after him at home, and this new life is pretty nearly too much for him. When he was in high school I always used to give him his toast and

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coffee in bed, and while he was eating I got his bath ready and laid out his fresh clothes, and got his things in order for him to start to school. He'll learn in time if you are patient with him."

In addition to the fact that it was bad hygiene for Tommy to eat before he bathed, it was poor discipline which his mother subjected him to. He was an exaggerated type of the only son whose career in college was short because he had been coddled by a too loving and a too indulgent mother at home.

Let me explain at once that though I am not the only child, I am the youngest son, and so am writing without prejudice and not without experience. As a child I had more freedom and more privileges than any of my older brothers and sisters had been permitted to enjoy. I was the normal spoiled child, I think, petted by my older sisters and praised and coddled by father and mother. I went to school when I pleased, and worked when I wished to do so. When I was fifteen my father died.

It is a handicap, I am convinced, to be the only child or the youngest son or the son of but one parent. A beneficent creator when he wrote the directions for running the universe decreed that every normal child should have two parents, and I think that either a greater or a smaller number than this generally results in an ill effect upon the child; and he intended, also, until society made it unpopular, that there should be more than one child in every family, in order that one might help in the training and the education of the others. Sometimes a wise parent is able to overcome this handicap for his child; sometimes a clever independent child is able to manage

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himself or his parent so skillfully as to offset the handicap; but these cases are rare.

At this point I hear the indignant protesting mother saying, "Well, I'm perfectly certain that I have not spoiled ''my'' boy," and she launches out into a detailed recital of all his virtues and accomplishments and of the rigidty of her personal régime. I have heard the story so often and so vividly presented that I could recite it from memory without prompting, and sometimes I have been glad to admit that it was true.

"What is the matter with Percy?" the mother of an only child said to me a few days ago. "He works hard, he loves his work, but he doesn't get on."

"He is a spoiled boy," was my reply, "who neither loves his work nor works hard. He is a bluffer who works upon your sympathies by a recital of his woes and endeavors, and the results bring him more money and more privileges." She was a loving, indulgent, anxious mother who believed everything that her boy told her as if it had been gospel, and made adequate explanation of every dereliction and irregularity of which he was guilty. Her boy had not escaped the handicap.

I was talking to the father of a freshman who had failed in his college course completely. The boy was intellectually bright, but he had not studied, he had not gone to class, and he had fallen into bad ways and wasted his time generally.

"What is the matter with the boy?" the father asked. "Why has he failed?"

I did not answer for a moment, and then I met his inquiry by asking a second question.
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"How many children have you?"

"He is our only child," was the reply, "and we have done everything for him."

"You have answered your own question," I said. "He's your only child, and ''you've'' done everything for him." There had been nothing the matter with the boy; it was with the father.

It is true, as I have said, however, that some children escape the handicap of being the youngest or the only child or the child of one parent, and for the sake of harmony at the outset, we will agree that yours is one of these, that he has-not been made conceited by praise nor made selfish by indulgence. It is of the others, you will understand, that I am writing.

A college officer who comes into personal contact with scores of undergraduate young men every day will, as the years go on, have many things suggested to him relative to their home and their home influences, to their parents and to their ideals. Behind these boys he will come to see weak, incapable parents or hard-working, struggling fathers, and thoughtful, wise mothers, and influences that are stronger than words. He will come in time unconsciously to group these boys according to the characteristics they show, to separate, for example, the country boy from the city boy, for even the crude city boy has a vulgar crudeness all his own that is easily distinguishable from the rustic crudeness of the young fellow from the country. He will recognize the boy who has done right and kept clean from principle, and he will pick out the fellow without personal principles who has

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played the game safe with the home folks and kept out of trouble through policy.

The undergraduate who has had his secondary training in a military school reveals that fact almost invariably the moment he opens the door of a college office, by his standing at attention or by his persistent and recurring use of "Sir" when he speaks to a superior officer. If he did not reveal it at this point he would be almost sure to do so later by the reluctance and irregularity with which he attends his college exercises. The trouble with this sort of boy is that during his school life he was so completely occupied with routine that he had no time to himself and no opportunity to learn self-direction. When the day came that he should determine for himself how his time should be employed, he was helpless. The routine had been so rigid that he revolted in the opposite direction. Having always had his duty mapped out for him, he lacked the strength to do it for himself.

I have come to say that I can usually recognize, before he has been in college long, the youngest son or the only child, or the child of a single parent, or the child who is living at home. Children are injured by over-attention quite as much as by neglect; they may be too well brought up as well as too ill. If it is true that the watched pot never boils, it is equally true that the coddled child seldom develops self-reliance and independence. A good many years ago when I was a teacher in an academy a troubled mother came to me with her only son. She had worried over him, and worked with him, and directed

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him, and thought and planned for him, and goaded him on to his lessons with little avail. He was eighteen years of age and was scarcely ready for high school. She told me all these distressing details with much feeling as he sat by stolidly listening. He seemed to me a bright enough boy who was not listening to the tale of his intellectual shortcomings for the first time.

"What's the matter with Bob?" she asked in real distress. "Why doesn't he do better?"

"Too much mother, I believe," I answered frankly. For the first time during the conversation Bob looked at me and smiled and winked a knowing eye.

"You have been working out his problems for him during all these years," I continued, "let him do it for himself, now. Leave him here, and don't see him for six months."

"I have never been away from him a week in his life," she said. "He doesn't know how to take care of his clothes, or to look after himself. It would kill me to stay away from him that long."

"It will ruin him if you don't," I said. She was after all wanting very much to do the best for her boy. She left him, hard as it was, and for the first time in his life Bob was thrown upon his own responsibility. I need not go into detail. He liked the new régime, he did his work, and had his first experience in passing his examinations on his own initiative.

The picture is, of course, not always so black a one. Three of the undergraduates of my acquaintance this year who made the most conspicuous success in college, both from the standpoint of the faculty

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and of the student body, were either only sons or youngest sons. More than this they were living at home. They were, however, rather notable exceptions which tested the rule. They were strong enough to follow their own independent action, and their parents were wise enough not to ruin them by indulgence.

The fault of the type of young fellow of whom I have been speaking lies in his training. The youngest-son, in the ordinary Middle West families, at least, who send their sons to college, comes into manhood at a time in the family history usually, when affairs are more prosperous at home than they were when the older children were ready for college. The family has moved into a new house, mother has more leisure, and father has more money to spend. The oldest boy when he was in high school may have delivered papers, or mowed the lawn in summer and looked after the furnace in winter, but now that the family is in better circumstances, there is a man to take care of these matters and the youngest son has nothing to do but to keep up his school work and enjoy himself. He has a generous supply of spending money, he may even have a motor car of his own, and there is no reason why he should take thought of the morrow.

I was talking to two such boys only the other day—pleasant lovable fellows—who have as much spending money—as would have taken me through college. They ride around in a high-powered car, they squander money daily on the "movies" and in ice cream parlors, and neither one would think of mowing the grass on their front lawns if it were as

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high as their necks. The father of neither one of them is rich, but they are developing habits of laziness and extravagance, are often unhappy or bored because they can find no new pleasure or excitement, and though they are bright and clever, they are totally lacking in independence and initiative. They are the true types of the middle class youngest son and they will not be in college long until they will reveal the fact by indifference and discontent and dissipation, possibly, and a shirking of unpleasant and difficult duties.

Such a child at home soon comes to know how much the family exchequer will stand and what privileges he can count upon, and a few years of indulgence will teach him to get all he can. I was talking to a father this spring. His only son, a freshman in college, had grown tired of his course; it necessitated work, and he did not enjoy work. To relieve himself of this hardship he had run away, but finding life as a nomad more difficult than he had supposed it would be he had telegraphed his mother for money and had come back for a time, but now he was leaving college. He was not getting what he wanted, he said. I was urging his father to make him stay and finish what he had begun; he needed the discipline, and if he left now it was unlikely that he would ever come back.

"Charles will come back to college, I am sure," the father said, "any boy who has as good a place waiting for him after he graduates as he has will not be so foolish as to waste his chances by not getting an education."

"Doesn't he know that you'll give him the money

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and the place whether he gets an education or not?" I asked.

"Well, I suppose he does," the father admitted, and the father was correct. Charles has never done anything that he did not like to do, and he never will, and father will give the money just the same.

The mother left with a young boy to bring up is likely to take the obligation very seriously. She realizes at once what a loss it is to him to be without the counsel of his father, and she tries bravely to play the part of both father and mother. For fear that she will fail in this dual task, she scarcely lets him out of her mind or out of her sight night or day. The first error which she generally falls into is to make his life too easy. There is for him little or no sacrifice. If any one is to do without things she does it in order that he may have what he wants. He must do as the other boys do; he must be supplied with all the comforts that would have been his if his father had lived; she does not like to see him do difficult or disagreeable things, especially if she can do them herself or hire some one to do them. If he wants to take responsibility he is often not allowed to do so, until he soon comes to the point of not offering to take it. "I would rather make sacrifices myself," many a foolish mother says, "than to have my son deprived of the pleasures and opportunities to which he has a right." All this can not help but weaken the boy and make him selfish and thoughtless and extravagant. He comes to feel that he is entitled to a good time and that if he wants money it is up to his mother to get it for him in some way.
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Last Commencement I met the widowed mother of one of the members of our graduating class. She was keenly interested in her son's progress, in his pleasures, in the fact that he should have gotten out of his undergraduate life all that was possible. She told me what a sacrifice it had meant to her to send him to college and with what self-denial it had been possible for her to raise the needed money. She commented upon the extra cost of this last year, but she did not regret one dollar that had made it possible for him to have what he wanted. It was easy to see from her faded, out-of-date clothes what some of her sacrifices had been that had enabled her to send him the necessary money. And yet about the campus her son had been looked upon as a young fellow of wealthy family. He had gone with the fellows who spent money freely, he had never stayed away from dinners or dances or house parties, because he could not afford to go. There had been no hesitating on his part when money was concerned. And all the time at home his mother was working and pinching—and denying herself in order that he might live in selfishness and luxury, and all the time by this sacrifice she was doing him an irreparable injury for which he and the woman he marries will in the future have to pay a heavy price.

In another way these mothers in an unselfish endeavor to do the best for their sons and to supply the place of the father that is gone, often do them harm, and that is by never allowing them to do their own thinking, to look out for themselves, to make mistakes and by making them to learn how these mistakes may be corrected. These eager mothers choose

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their boy's clothes and companions, and courses of study. They map out his future and all but do his work for him. They think for him, and smooth out the way for him, and leave him no chance to develop self-direction or initiative. They get him up in the morning, and tell him when to go to bed at night. If he has a task to perform, they regularly set him to it; if he has duties and obligations he is reminded of them before he has an opportunity to rely upon his own memory or think out his own plan of procedure. He is never allowed to forget to be polite or prompt or thoughtful or regular when mother is by, and knowing that he will not be, he comes to depend upon the fact that if there is anything he ought to do mother will remind him of it or call his attention to it in plenty time even if it is nothing more than speaking to a caller or changing his underwear, and so he never learns to depend upon himself or to tax his memory with the slightest obligation either mental or moral. In her abnormal fear that he will omit some duty, the over-conscientious mother robs her son of the power, when he leaves her, of doing any duty.

A refined, educated mother sat in my office only a few weeks ago. Her only son had failed, and she wanted to know why. She had watched over him and directed him, and kept him immaculate physically; he had wanted nothing that he did not get. He had never made a sacrifice. She had petted him and loved him and scarcely ever let him get out of her sight. He was a good boy, she knew, she said, before he came to college. How had it all happened? But the facts were that he was not a good boy, and

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never had been. He had no independence, no principles, no desire to do well. He had talked to me very frankly. He had had a few "sprees" while he was in high school. "It was pretty hard to get away with it," he said, "for she watched me pretty closely, and I did not want to hurt her." His theory was that anything is all right if you don't get caught. Since he had left home he had been drunk, he was in debt, he had contracted a wretched disease, but he had no compunctions and little power of resistance. He is one of a type of boys spoiled at home.

In contrast to the illustration just given is one of another whom I know. She is a widow and a woman of influence and wide acquaintance. This summer her only son wanted a position and asked her to go to some of her friends who were in business and try to get him in with them. She declined to do this and showed him that it would be very much more to his credit and advantage if he should himself apply to people whom neither of them knew and secure a place upon his own initiative. It required courage and backbone for him to do this, but he was a happier and a stronger boy when he came home one night with a good job which he had got through no one's efforts but his own.

There is another phase of this error on the part of parents, especially on the part of mothers, to teach their sons independence and self-reliance and a sense of responsibility which is seen in their tendency to come to college with their sons in order that they may look after the boys and give them their care and their supervision. When this action is taken for financial reasons, because the family exchequer is low

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and a necessary saving of money can be effected by all living together I have nothing to say. I feel much as I do when a fellow tells me that he has to make his living while he is carrying his college work—it is a situation which has to be met and should be met without grumbling or complaint, but it is not one which is ordinarily best for the student. When parents come with their sons to college because they feel that by so doing the boys will be more healthy, more comfortable, or more moral, they are ordinarily making a mistake.

"I want my son at home with me as long as possible," a father remarked to me, "I do not like to think of his getting out from under his mother's influence." He did not realize that no boy who has been correctly brought up can get out from under the influence of his mother no matter how widely they may be separated in time or distance.

I have never known a young fellow who was restrained in college by having his mother or even by having both parents with him if he had any tendency to irregularities of character, more than he would have been had he been away from home. Subterfuge is so easy, explanations flock to his brain, and opportunities are infinite for evasion. There is always the "friend" to fall back upon who wants one to study with him or to work up a few experiments. The boys who live in town with their parents are the hardest sort to keep any kind of check on, and they seldom have the self-reliance that those boys have who are away from home and working out their own difficulties.

I appreciate the fact that it brings the keenest

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pleasure to parents, especially to mothers, to make these sacrifices, to perform these services, to have their children with them and to give them their constant thought and attention. It requires a wise head and a strong will and often real mental suffering to keep the hands off. I remember the saying of a well-known physician that cuddling was good for a mother but harmful for her baby; so experience has taught me that this loving, anxious care for youngest sons and only children, this indulgence and sacrifice on the part of parents, this constant thought and planning for their present and for their future no doubt develops and strengthens the characters of the parents but it is seldom good for their sons.

"What fault do you find with my son?" a mother asked me a few days ago when we were talking on this subject. "Isn't he a credit to me; has he not succeeded? How have I spoiled him?"

I parried her question by saying that she was, perhaps, an illustration of the mother who has sensibly met all these conditions and who has not robbed her son of his independence by doing his thinking for him. I knew very well, however, that though he was a fellow of excellent intellect who had done his college work creditably, he had been over-fastidious and ladylike, disliking to soil his hands with hard work. He had been made selfish and self-centered. He had not succeeded at first; it was only after years of contact with shrewd men in a profession that tests men's characters for real worth, and which holds up snobbishness and superficiality to derision, it was only after he had married a sensible woman who knew how

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to stimulate him to his best endeavor, that he showed that there was really good stuff in him.

Such boys as I have been discussing are not always failures in college; on the contrary they not infrequently get high grades and do the routine work of college excellently, but their training almost always shows in their characters. They are too often selfish and extravagant; they are on the look-out for concessions and special favors; they want a longer vacation than other students in order that they may satisfy special desires. They have been so used to special consideration all their lives that they are unable to understand why they can not receive it when they get to college.

"I ought not to spend so much money as I do," an undergraduate confessed to me recently, "mother can't afford it; she is making sacrifices for me constantly. She does her own work and takes care of the furnace, and gives up most of the pleasures she would enjoy, simply that I may have a generous allowance. She is always sending me boxes of things to eat, and entertaining my friends, and looking out for my comfort, and I selfishly let her do it." This selfishness of his showed in his relations with his friends of whom he had too few, it showed in his college work which was usually in a bad way, and it was a constant blot upon his character. He was exacting in his demands upon those with whom he associated; he borrowed notes and books which were never returned until they were sent for, he asked for help in his work whenever and wherever he could get it; he had never made sacrifices or depended upon him-

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self at home and it was hard for him to begin at college.

Last Christmas I had a dozen letters from as many mothers whose only sons had not been home since the opening of college in September begging me, in violation of the college rules, to let them come home a few days early—they were homesick.

"Won't you please let my son come home four days early," one mother wrote, "I have not seen him for several weeks, and because he is our only child I know you will make this special concession in his case." When I answered that I regretted not to be able to grant her request the father wrote and persuaded a special friend of mine with whom he was acquainted to write also to plead for the special privilege.

Though it is true, as I have said, that some of these younger sons and only children succeed in carrying their college work satisfactorily, that they overcome their handicap, yet a very large percentage of them fail or do their work in a commonplace way. This is not strange, for they find it difficult on their own initiative to do anything regularly or thoroughly. There is no one to set them to their tasks, and they have seldom formed the habit of setting themselves to duty and its accomplishment. They have mostly been told what to do, and so now when there is no one to tell them to study, to get them up in the morning, and to get them off to their college classes, they are likely to find themselves in bed at ten o'clock in the morning when they should have been at chemistry at eight; they are pretty sure to put off their study until to-morrow when there is a vaudeville to which

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they may go to-day. It is not difficult to see how they find their way to the Dean's office very early in their college course. They find the college life more strenuous than they had expected, and never before having done anything that was difficult or disagreeable, they do not see why they should do so now.

"Why did you not let me know that my son was not doing his work?" a mother wrote me not long ago, "and I should have come down and stayed with him until he got his work up. I have never let him get behind while he was in high school, and I can not understand why he is failing now." The trouble all lay in the fact that previously his mother had been his conscience; he had not learned self-direction in any sense; and having no director he loafed and slept late in the mornings.

It is the spoiled boy at home who in college develops into the loafer and the indifferent student. His parents often do not set for him especially high standards; they are pleased if he does not fail; they are satisfied to have him merely intellectually commonplace. And since they are contented, he has for himself no high intellectual ambitions; he prides himself that he is not a grind and pats himself metaphorically upon the back when he evades probation.

It is this same spoiled boy also who in college evades everything that is unpleasant or difficult. He is in few college activities because to get into activities requires initiative and sacrifice, and it demands usually more than ordinarily high scholarship. He has not learned to economize either his time or his money; he does not know how to make sacrifices, and he can not give up the petty gratification or pleasure

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of the moment in order that he may later enjoy a greater and a more worthy pleasure.

I can understand the interest of parents in their children and their desire to save them from sacrifice and hardship and pain and struggle, but as they are shielded from the difficult they are often harmed; in trying to help them we often hinder. Protecting and coddling them unfits them for the hardships of life which they are as sure to meet as the sun is to rise.

I said at the outset that my father died when I was fifteen. Up to that time I had taken no responsibility. I had had no tasks, no difficult problems. I had made no sacrifices. I had lived a life of pleasure and irresponsibility. Circumstances in the family were such that at my father's death it was imperative that I should run the farm on which we were living. I must do a man's work. I must be up in the morning by four o'clock without being called, and out in the fields plowing and sowing and reaping and looking after all the varied interests which have to do with farm life. If my strength was slight I must work faster or longer in order to accomplish as much as the older and stronger workmen. I kept at it eight years and until I entered college. It seemed then a cruel hard life for an inexperienced child. Often when the load was heavy and the problems difficult to solve, in my heart I rebelled against my lot; but I kept on, in spite of the rebellion, and finished my tasks. Mother encouraged me, but she could give little help, little direction, little suggestion. I must meet my own difficulties and solve them alone, as I have since learned every one must do in life and in death. I look back now to this

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experience as the best which could have come to me; it was my salvation. It gave me hard muscles and a strong body and a strong will; it showed me that one must have backbone and principles if he would win the respect of men; it taught me courage and self-reliance and initiative; through it I was able to find myself, and by it I was helped to overcome the handicap under which many another youngest son or only child is struggling.

I was trying not long ago to help the father of an only son to solve his difficulties. The boy had been dismissed from college because he had failed through loafing and irregular habits. The father was a man of moderate means, but the boy had had every indulgence and no responsibility.

"What shall I do with him?" was his query.

"Put him to work for a year," was my reply; "give him something difficult to do, and let him see how hard it is to earn his living."

"I have a farm," he went on, "I could put him out there; but it would be a hard life. He would have no pleasure; the surroundings would not be such as he has been used to, but I'll do it."

"If you do," I warned him, "you will have a more severe struggle than the boy. After your disappointment has grown a little less keen you will go out to the farm some day, and you will see the boy dirty and perspiring and tired and your heart will be touched; you will say, 'Why should I torture him in this way,' and unless you are a strong man you'll bring him away with you."

"I believe I shall," he said shamefacedly, "I believe I haven't the courage to do otherwise."
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"But you could make a man of him," I pleaded as he left me.

A friend of mine, a wise woman with one son, had more courage. The boy, who was in the high school, got it into his head that he would like to earn a little money, and having a job offered him accepted it. This work necessitated his getting up at five in the morning and working until time to start to school.

"It must be rather hard on you," a sympathetic neighbor said to his mother one day, "getting up so early in the morning to get William's breakfast and to get him off."

"But I don't get up," was the mother's reply. "When William took the job I explained to him that he must manage himself; if he lost the place through failure to get there on time, it was his own fault. So he bought a 'Big Ben' to awaken him at the proper time; he gets his own breakfast, and he has never been late one morning. It took a lot of courage and self-control for me to hear him coming down stairs before daylight these cold winter mornings and not to get up and help him off, but William's character is worth more to me than my own selfish comfort in looking after him." She has been a thousand times rewarded in the years that have followed in the strong, sturdy, self-reliant son to whom she now looks up. Her way is the only way I know to make men of character and self-reliance and independence.

No one gains strength except through struggle; self-reliance comes through meeting hardships. There is no strength of character without sacrifice, and as we make it easy for our children, as we save them from the hard, unpleasant things of life unduly

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we do them damage. It is the boy who has learned to do a task that is given him whether he likes it or not, who can direct himself and look after himself, who does not shrink from difficult and unpleasant things, who does not hesitate at sacrifice or self-control, who has been taught to think of the comfort and pleasure of others as well as of his own—it is this sort of boy who is going to get on in college and whose home training will show before he has been in the college community a week. Such boys are to a college officer like the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. The spoiled, humored boy who has been kept from hardships and sacrifice, no matter with what loving care, will hardly escape a weak youth and a selfish ineffective manhood.

A brown thrasher has a nest in our sweet honeysuckle, and for weeks we have been interested in watching her movements. Just now she is teaching her children to fly, and it seems to an onlooker no trifling task. I said "children," for though we have never so trespassed upon the privacy of our shy tenant as to look into her dwelling, I am sure from the way in which she has been conducting her child's education that there is more than one little thrasher in the nest. It was no only child who was being put through his exercises this morning.

The first sound that caught my ear when I wakened was the voice of the mother, firm and insistent, directing and encouraging her child. When I went to the window I saw the prospective young aeronaut, tailless and nervous, perched on the telephone wire. He was very tottery and was whimpering audibly, but I could tell from the strong notes of his mother's

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voice coming from the lilac bushes that she was not to be moved by his tears. He must take the initiative; he must make the leap. She kept after him vigorously flying toward him in a most threatening manner occasionally, until finally, screwing up his courage, he spread his little wings and landed safe in the honeysuckle. A moment later I saw the mother fly into the nest with a big juicy worm in her bill. It was bad pedagogy, but she had taught him self-reliance and self-direction. Later in the day he seemed to have developed a considerable initiative, and was helping his mother with the housework by bringing home a few choice worms for the younger children's supper.

It is not easy to train either young birds or young people properly. The most of us who have been pushed out early and have had to rely upon ourselves hesitate to do the same thing for the young people whom we had under our direction. We would fain save them the danger and the pain. So many youngest sons and only children have been kept so completely from that which is unpleasant or difficult, they have been so coddled and pampered that they shrink back when the test comes. They grow selfish and lack initiative and self-reliance. They do not like that which is difficult. They have whimpered, and mother has told them that they need not learn to fly.

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{{sc|There}} was a letter in my mail this morning from a young boy just out of high school. He was desirous of going to college, and like many another man with high ambition, he was without money.

"Could you find for me?" he asked, "some position which would not interfere with my studies, and which would bring me in an income of not less than fifteen dollars a week?"

I was forced to write him that I could not; that almost any job which he might obtain would interfere with his studies, and that if he were to earn fifteen dollars a week, unless he were possessed of some specific trade or skill worth a high rate of remuneration, it would be only by working six hours a day or more, and such an amount of time given to outside labor would interfere very seriously with any one's studies.

There are a great many people who labor under the mistaken notion that it actually is helpful to a college student's scholarship for him to work. I have known parents who were quite able to meet their son's college expenses, but who refused to do so under the false impression that they were doing the boy a service by forcing him to earn his living. "It will make a man of him," they affirm. "It will teach him the value of a dollar." It may, but it will seldom if ever conduce to making him a good student, and that should be his object in going to college.
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President Lincoln in a note to Mayor Ramsey once wrote: "The lady bearer of this note says she has two sons who want to work. Set them at it if possible. Wanting work is so rare a want that it should be encouraged." A college officer in my position at the opening of the college year would not be inclined to agree with Mr. Lincoln, for half the correspondence which comes to my desk during the summer months has to do with men who either want to work, or who say they do, in order that they may defray their college expenses. There are so many of them that their correspondence becomes almost depressing at times, for I realize the disappointments and the difficulties which very many of these boys will encounter after they reach college, and their unfitness to do any definite work well.

"I have been out of high school three years," one young fellow writes, "and have not been able to save any money. I want, however, very much to go to college. Can you secure a place for me to work where I can earn my board and room and such extra money as I shall need for my other small expenses?" This man, who has given all his time to work for three years and who has done nothing more than live, expects easily to carry a college course which in itself requires most of a man's time to do justice to, and at the same time to earn his living on the side. I get many such letters from those who feel that earning one's living and going to college are in no way incompatible. So much has been written about the fellows who have started to college without a cent and who have later been valedictorians of their classes and ultimately President of the

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United States, or at least a member of his cabinet, that the average high school boy has little conception of what sacrifice and deprivation such a procedure involves; if he did understand he would nat so often undertake it, or he would do so after more careful deliberation.

The man who works his way through college seldom does so because he enjoys working nor, excepting in rare cases, because he has any interest in the particular line of work by which he earns his living. He works from necessity; his chief thought, commonly, is not centered upon the efficiency of his service nor the value of his work to his employer, but upon the amount of cold cash it is going to net him. Very few boys who are working their way through college are interested in the work they are doing for its own sake or for the personal development there is in it for them; they have little thought of perfecting their skill in such work; they are looking forward eagerly to the time when they may leave it and take up something they really have interest in. They are for that reason in many cases indifferent, inefficient, and {{SIC|expensvie|expensive}} help, who lack the joy and incentive of interest in their work.

During my own undergraduate days I earned my living as a compositor on the student paper. There was no enthusiasm in any of the "typos," as they were called, to perfect themselves in {{hinc|typesetting}} excepting as such perfection would lead to immediate financial returns, and no idea of going permanently into the printing business; type-setting was for them simply a makeshift. They were interested chiefly in getting a long "string" and in picking off the

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"fat" jobs from the hook. They were, of course, never annoyed if incidentally they helped in getting out a creditable paper, but that was merely a side issue; the main thing was the pay envelope. None of us would have given a moment to type-setting if a legacy had been left us, or if we could have cajoled a rich uncle into sending us a satisfactory monthly allowance; we worked because it was necessary to eat and to pay our room rent.

Too many people attempt to work their way through college. Many of our colleges to-day are overrun with students with no money, with only commonplace ability, and with little initiative and resourcefulness. It is only the exceptional man without money who should go to college. Many men say that they would not be able to save money if they went to work, but it is as easy to economize and to save money out of college as it is in, and) the commonplace student should either not go at all, or he should work and save money enough to allow him to devote the greater part of his time to his studies; otherwise he is likely to fail. The man who works his way too often makes a poor living, and gets little college credit; he might better stick to a good job and give up the thought of the higher education than half starve and finally flunk in college. The names of scores of boys occur to me as I write this sentence—boys of only mediocre ability—who tried the struggle and failed.

In a democratic institution where a large percentage of students work, the tendency is for even the man who is under no such necessity to try to add to his income. When a fellow's roommate is receiving

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a pay check every month, it seems to a good many men, even though they do not stand in need of the money, inexcusable not to do something. Sometimes the man who needs the money least is most skillful and clever in earning it. I have in mind two young men who were adept at salesmanship but who were quite able to meet all their college expenses. They constantly endangered their college work through the unreasonable amount of time they put in in their business enterprises. Their father, who was a shrewd, close-fisted business man, was extremely proud of their earnings, never realizing that in spending so much of their time in making a few dollars they were detracting very materially from the efficiency of their education.

Most of the things which have been written of boys without education, like Lincoln, who ultimately became President of the United States, or of fellows with only fifty cents in their pocket who got through college on their nerve and made Phi Beta Kappa, are romantic, but quite misleading. These things have been done (there are the immortal Garfield, and Daniel Webster, of course), and they are still being done by men of unusual mental and physical equipment, but they are not easy to do, and they are not always desirable to do. The men who accomplished these things did so in spite of their handicaps and not because of them.

I have known many a man who paid in privation and sacrifice more than his college training was worth; for he was so engrossed and his time so occupied in the struggle for existence that he lost the greater part of what he should have obtained from

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his college life and associations The memory of Allan comes to me as I write. He was at best mediocre intellectually, and socially he was completely untrained. It was his dogged stubborn persistence only that carried him through. He was like a bull dog which had taken hold and could not let go. He had little resourcefulness, little initiative, so that there was nothing open to him but the most menial physical tasks. He had few friends and he was often without sufficient food. He slept in a stable during more than half his life in college and did the dirty scullery work at a cheap untidy down-town restaurant for his meals. He reeked constantly of stable odors and of the heavy smells of frying food. His wretched life told on him physically and mentally; he grew hard, bitter, sullen. He felt, not wholly without reason, that every one was against him, that he was fighting alone and a losing fight. He got his degree, but he left college coarse, soured, repellant, ill-trained, without courage to fight longer and without hope for the future. He has not accomplished as much since he received his college degree as he might reasonably have been expected to do without education.

The boy who works his way through college, and by this I mean the student who gets no help from any other source excepting his own efforts, must first of all have concentration, for he will of necessity have less time to devote to his studies than have those fellows whose entire time is at their disposal. There is a pretty general idea that the man in college who does not earn a good part of his living is on the whole a loafer and a spendthrift, who has so many

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vacant hours at his disposal during the day that, unless he gets into some sort of deviltry or extravagance, he is likely to grow horribly bored. Quite the contrary is true; for the college course as now planned, if it is done well, will give any ordinary young fellow enough to occupy his time quite creditably. The man, then, who besides doing his college work has to earn his living, will need to give his whole time to it, should be able to accomplish more in the same length of time than the average fellow, and must be satisfied to have little leisure in which to read, or play, or develop social graces, or do as he likes.

A young fellow—strong and healthy looking—dropped in to see me one day this week. He was ambitious but broke. If he came to college, he must make his way. He had on hand scarcely more than enough money to pay his initial tuition and get his books. We went over his plans together, and I thought that perhaps he might try it. "There is one thing I did not tell you," he said just as he was ready to leave, "I have always been interested in athletics, and if I come to college, I shall want to play football."

I threw up my hands, for even playing football sometimes gives a man little enough time for his studies, but if a man plays football and earns his living, he has little time for sleep, and none for his studies. The athlete is lucky if he passes his courses with creditable grades; he can seldom give much thought or time to earning his living.

The boy who must work should be mature and strong, and by that I mean usually nineteen or

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twenty years of age. The burden is often too great for a young boy to assume, for such boys are often forced to live irregularly, and to keep irregular hours either to bring up their college work or to do their outside tasks. Not long ago a young fellow, still physically immature, called at my office to ask my advice. He had little energy, he said, and little interest in his work. He found it difficult, when he sat down to a task, to accomplish much. I discovered on inquiry that he was working for a physician. He was forced to sit up until midnight to do his college tasks, and he had to get up at four or at latest at five o'clock in the morning to accomplish the things necessary to hold his job with the doctor. He was, therefore, getting never more than five hours of sleep a day, and yet could not understand why he was so lacking in energy and ambition. I have always felt that it was a wise and thoughtful physician with whom he was living. This slender, growing boy was attempting an impossible task, and in addition to failing in it—for he did not carry his work—he was in a fair way permanently to injure his health.

The student worker should be resourceful and adaptable, able to fit in anywhere, and able to use his brain in his work. It is the man who first meets an unsolved condition or satisfies an unsatisfied want who makes good at earning a living. Last fall a young freshman came to my office to ask me if I had any knives or scissors lying about which needed sharpening. He carried with him in a neat leather case which resembled a Corona typewriter, with its traveling clothes on, a small emery wheel and some

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simple apparatus for repairing and sharpening tools. I had just been trying to hew a broken lead pencil into shape with an impossibly dull knife, so that his coming seemed like an angel's visit. I gathered up all the paraphernalia in the office which permitted of sharpening, and he went at it. They were in a few minutes in excellent condition, he collected a quarter, and I sent him over to my house to make the rest of my family happy. I kept my eye on him during the year, and was not surprised to find that he was making a good living during his leisure moments because he had had intelligence enough to meet an unsatisfied want.

Several years ago, before the business of pressing men's clothes and keeping them in condition had been taken up generally, one of our freshmen rented a room, bought the necessary apparatus, and agreed for one dollar a month to press a suit of clothes each week, and to call for the clothes and deliver them. It was at that time an innovation, and even with one or two assistants, he soon had more business than he could take care of. He had a business head, he kept his agreements, he did his work well, and he was soon one of the financially independent who could oversee his business and let some one else do the manual labor. I always had the assurance that he would get on wherever he went, and I have not been mistaken. He is successfully running a fruit farm down in Florida now, and last Christmas I had a pleasant note from him accompanied by a box of delicious grapefruit which caused my family to remember him kindly for many a morning.

The skilled laborer, the man who has a trade or a

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talent will get on more easily than other men. Last year a young sophomore found himself without money and without a job. He saw an advertisement in the college paper for a cook in one of the short order restaurants near the campus. He had helped his mother cook at home, he had had a month's experience cooking in a summer camp for boys; he had some nerve, so he applied for the place and got it. The best part of the story is that he gave satisfaction, earned his board, and made a respectable salary besides.

The undergraduate who last year at the University of Illinois made the most money of any one who was trying to earn his living, did so by writing songs. His poetic efforts were in no sense remarkable; in fact I am not sure but that the same thing might be said of most of those words and music which are ritiging in our ears most often as we go down the street, but what this young fellow wrote seemed to catch the popular ear, and he reaped the reward of his appeal. He had a certain talent that was not great, perhaps, but it was not common.

It is the man who lets his brains save his strength, who makes the most money. In fact it is most often the man who does not work at all physically but who uses his head to make his plans and who hires some less clever thinkers to take the hard knocks,—it is this sort of fellow who really earns his way through college most successfully. A wide awake junior last year made arrangements with a city wholesale house to take orders for butter. Early in the fall he made a preliminary canvass of all the fraternity houses and general student boarding clubs,

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and took their orders for the year. Each house is sent so many pounds a week directly from the city. There is no further ordering and no delivering by the student; all he has to do is to send out the monthly bills and make his collections. With little real work he has made considerably more than enough to pay his college expenses. When he gets through college he will have several hundred dollars to his credit in the bank with which to start business. "I could clear two thousand dollars a year at the work," he admitted to me, "if I wanted to give the time to it, but I don't believe in making too much."

I have said before that the man who must meet all of his expenses while doing his college work must be mature and physically strong. A young fellow past twenty-five, who graduated from one of our Middle West state universities last year illustrates my point. He had learned to operate a linotype machine and was beside this a physical giant. When he came to college he was put on a night shift in one of the local printing offices. He did his studying in the afternoon and in the evening; he did his full day's work in the printing office after seven o'clock in the evening, and he got on with from five to seven hours of sleep a day and incidentally earned eighty dollars a month throughout his college course. He had so much money in the bank when he finished that he was able to marry on the day of his graduation and set up housekeeping for himself. I should not, however, advise many people to try to duplicate his task, for very few undergraduates would have either the skill or the physical endurance to do the work that he did. With all his strength, too, he knew his limi-

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tations. His work, his studies, and sleep took up all his time. He had no recreation, no social pleasures, no real fun.

Fifty years ago when the farmer's son with an empty pocketbook and a desire for learning set out for college, he carried with him a bag of potatoes or a sack of corn meal upon which to subsist frugally while he toiled at his books. It is done differently to-day. A few years ago the sons of the families of two farmers with whom I am acquainted solved their financial difficulties and met their college expenses in an entirely individual manner. They borrowed a few of the family cows, drove them across the country, found a lodging place for themselves and their charges near the campus, and lived comfortably and independently during their college course by selling and delivering milk to boarding clubs mornings and evenings. When they left college they still had their original capital intact, and took it back home with them in as good condition, barring the wear and tear of four years of service, as when they came.

Barbers seem always in demand about a college community, though I have known but one to finish his course. Musicians usually find employment, especially if the college is situated in a country place, as ours is, where most of the recreation and amusement of the students they must themselves furnish. There is always a good deal of dancing—too much in fact many people say—connected with a large co-educational institution, and where there is dancing there must be music—{{hinc|ragtime}} or otherwise. At the University of Illinois most of the local orchestras are composed largely of students, and

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many of them are controlled or managed by student leaders. These men all belong to the musicians' union and receive the regular scale of wages, which is a pretty generous one, set by the union. Since most of the engagements of these orchestras come at the end of the week, the members often have a chance to play two evenings and one afternoon a week, and though the physical strain is a hard one, they find it possible to sleep up on Sunday and so be in fair shape for the regular scholastic work of the week. I have known a large number of fellows who in this way met all of their necessary expenses and a few who were able to make more than they really needed while carrying their college courses, but the number of these last is small.

The skillful salesman with a line of goods which the public wants or which it can with a minimum expenditure of energy be made to want, can get on well in college. Just the other day, as I was walking down the street, I encountered an energetic junior who seemed to be bent on some business enterprise.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"I'm making a house to house canvass for the sale of neckties," was his reply.

"Making any money?"

"As much as I need."

But unfortunately there are not many natural or skillful salesmen, and when one has no natural talent in this direction, he had better wait for his season of practice until he is not in actual need of money. The experience gained in learning to sell things is valuable, but it sometimes costs more than it is worth if the embryo salesman is trying to earn

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his college expenses. The last thing I should advise the indigent undergraduate to do either during the college year or during the summer vacation is to take up salesmanship and especially to take up the selling of books, for unless he has peculiar talent in such work, he is likely to fail, the optimistic literature sent out by the publishers of subscription books to the contrary notwithstanding. Every spring there come to our institution, as I suppose to all other similar ones in the Middle West, representatives of the houses publishing subscription books who give their effort in securing the services of undergraduates to go out over the country during the summer to sell these wares. Some of the men who take up the work must succeed or the publishing houses would go out of business, but it is also a fact that many of those who take up the business do badly and give their time and energy very largely for experience.

The great majority of young fellows who are without money and who wish a college education are equally without talent or special skill. It is, however, very often the tales of what men with special talents have done that goad on the commonplace man and deceive him into the belief that he can do as well in earning a living as his better qualified classmate. When he finds that all that is open to him, all, indeed, that he is fitted for, is waiting table or washing dishes or taking care of furnaces at so much an hour, perhaps, the glamour of earning his way through college and graduating with money in the bank fades quickly. Money earned in this way, and this in actual fact is the common way, counts up's lowly and is a heavy drain upon the worker's time.

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The first thing a man should ask himself who is contemplating self-support in college is what special thing he can do that will help him to earn money readily.

I have always advised the ordinary man without Money and just out of high school to wait a while before entering college. Two or three years of work will give him more maturity and so fit him better to withstand the heavy strain of doing two difficult things at once, as he will have to do when he carries his college course and earns his living at the same time, and if he is any way nearly as economical before he enters college as he will need to be afterward, he will be able to save a considerable sum of money to tide him over the first few months in college when he is getting his bearings and finding out what he can best do. No man should enter college who has not money enough to take him through the first half year without his working, and it would be better if he had made arrangements for an entire year. I say this in spite of the fact that a good many fellows struggle through the year successfully without taking these precautions, and in spite of the fact that many people urge the high school graduate to go immediately to college whether he has money or not. It is be cause of the great number of men who fail utterly or who have so little time for their studies that they accomplish practically nothing, that I feel as I do.

The man who has to work his way through college should be as well dressed as possible. He ought not wherever he goes to advertise the fact that he is in financial straits. He will not need better clothes than other fellows, but he will have to give them more

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careful and constant attention, because he will often have to do work that is dirty and because he will have more temptations to carelessness in dress than many other men. Too many college men who are self-supporting divulge the fact to every one they meet by their generally woe-begone and run-down appearance. The four years which a man spends in college give him pretty confirmed habits of life, and these include certain habits of dress. If in college he wears sloppy untidy clothes, goes with his shoes unbrushed and his trousers covered with grease spots and bagging at the knees, it will be hard for him to develop habits of neatness and care in dress after he leaves college. He should have substantial, neat, well-made clothes that do not invite attention because they are of the latest extreme cut or because they are completely out of style, and he should give them regular care. He must do this because a working man subjects his clothes to harder service than do other men, and at the same time he must wear them longer and still have them look well.

A good deal has been said in one place or another of the social ostracism of those who are forced to be self-supporting in college. In so democratic an environment as a state university we are not likely to see much of that. I have not found in my own ex perience that it made any difference to a man's social standing whether he worked or not. There is not a social fraternity at the University of Illinois which does not have among its members men who must earn their living. Such men are not thought of less or more, nor should they be.

The man who is working his way is entitled to as

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much respect and consideration as other men; I have seldom been able to see that he is entitled to more than are other men who are doing their college duties well. Self-support in college is not a matter either for self-congratulation or self-humiliation. The man who has to work is not the subject for special sympathy or special favors. He ought not to ask or expect to be exempted from the duties which fall to all students; he should not be annoyed if his omissions and his irregularities are looked upon in the same light as are those of other students. The young fellow who expects the college authorities to grant him special privileges, who thinks himself entitled to a larger number of cuts, or to longer vacations than those normally granted by the college simply because he works, is lacking a little. It is the man who meets the conditions of life into which he goes without complaint and without asking for favor that has the right stuff in him.

There is a quite general feeling among those who have never given the subject any serious thought or study that the man who works his way through college is more likely than other men to succeed in later life. I do not believe this, and I should be very glad to believe it if the facts warranted it. Men go to college for the training of the mind. The very fact that the self-supporting undergraduate must spend hours each day in earning a living, keeps him from the very thing for which he is making his chief sacrifice, and takes away from the very preparation which is fitting him for success in after life. The man in college who meets the necessity for self-support cleverly and skillfully, who uses his brains to

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help feed him and clothe him, is no doubt permanently helped by this effort, but the number of self-supporting students who really do exhibit skill and finesse in their own support is very small. On the whole I believe that the future of students is injured rather than helped by their undergraduate labors for a living, and I should not find it hard to furnish many examples from real life to substantiate this statement. There are, of course, examples to the contrary, but these simply serve to prove the rule.

Two years ago, I sent out to all of our undergraduates, one-third of whom, perhaps, do something toward self-support, a letter of inquiry. I wished to get the opinion of the men who were working as to whether such work was helpful or otherwise to their studies. It is true that the perspective of the man himself is perhaps a little too close for him adequately to judge, but at least the answers were interesting.

To the question: "Do you think your studies suffered because of outside work?" thirty-nine per cent. of the students replied in the affirmative, and sixty-one per cent. replied in the negative. Fifty per cent. thought that every student should do at least a small amount of work. The reason given in nearly every case by the working students was the conventional assertion that the holding of a job teaches a man the value of a dollar. Other arguments in favor of working were that outside work compels concentration and study, teaches economy, regularity, self-control, self-reliance, and conservation of time. They said that the worker gains an acquaintance with the ways of man and the ways of the world. He avoids loafing and uses to advantage

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those hours which would otherwise be spent in idleness. A good job keeps a man from acquiring bad habits and inspires in him respect for democracy.

Those who took the opposite view alleged that col—lege is no place for earning a living. There is no time for the broader things of education if a man must earn his way, whether wholly or in part. The opinion of many of these fellows who have earned their living and who do not look with favor upon the practice, is that outside work deprives the student of the opportunity to engage in athletics, social and other college activities, and so keeps him from one of the most valuable experiences in college life. It often makes him conceited, over self-reliant and too much in love with his own accomplishments. He is likely to undervalue real culture because he has had no time to give either to understanding what it means or to acquiring it. The fact that students work outside results very often in the college graduate's being a craftsman rather than a broadly educated man. Most of the work done by students in college in their attempts to earn their living is not helpful to them later in the professions which they fill. It is injurious to their life work and detracts from their efficiency. The good which a man may normally expect to get out of four years of college is thus very much lessened. As one man says: "A fellow who has earned his living has most of the joy and all of the culture taken out of his college life."

My own observation of the men who work their way through college is that too many who are unqualified attempt the task. Many a boy pays too high a price for the education he receives. Men do not

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always realize what they are missing or how much their studies are suffering from their outside work. As I see it through the experience of thirty years of pretty active contact with the man who works his way, the fellow who can get an education in no other way should accept the situation bravely and not whine; he should neither be proud of it nor ashamed of it. The fellow who works his way when he need not do so or who simply wishes to show his independence, is foolish and not using his time to the best advantage; and the father who forces his son to earn his way when he could just as well furnish him the money, himself needs educating.

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{{sc|I had}} not been long in college before I learned that political parties and political organizations, and politicians are quite as evident among college undergraduates, and are considered quite as necessary as they are among the voters of a commonwealth. There were few students in attendance when I entered college, but it took me only a few weeks to see that political lines were as closely drawn in that little community as in state or national affairs, and that if I desired political, and to some extent social, advancement I must ally myself with one side or the other. The literary societies were the dominant political parties at this time, and the one that I joined was in control of the political power of the institution. I should not have admitted the fact at that time, but in all probability its political prestige was one of the deciding factors in determining my choice, for I had myself more than a passing interest in politics. My political future was therefore assured. No one got a place on the college newspaper or the class annual or on class committees unless he had a stand-in with the political party, ''alias'' the literary society that was in power. It was scarcely ever a case of fitness for the office, although within limits fitness may have been considered—it was rather a case of who your friends were and how well they were organized. Charlie Gibson was no doubt very much better fitted to he editor of the college paper, than

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was Lin Wilbur, but Charlie had few supporters and fewer admirers of his talents, and he belonged to the wrong political party, so that settled his case. I remember that Lin told me with some chagrin that when he was approached by his friends who asked him to become a candidate, the spokesman of the party said, "It isn't because you are the best man, Lin, that we are asking you to run, but because you can be elected." The organization was simple, but it was effective; we were able to predict two or three years ahead who would hold the important offices, and we scarcely ever missed it, nor do the politicians of to-day.

I was talking not long ago with one of the old timers who was deploring the fact that things have changed so completely since he was in college, and, from his point of view, changed for the worse. The fraternities, he said, had come in and had undermined the influence and work of the literary societies which, he averred, had done so much to train men to think and to speak effectively. I pointed out to him that the former supposed province of the literary societies had been usurped by the English department and that in reality the literary societies in his time and in mine were the most carefully organized political machines extant; that they would have made a present-day democratic central committee ashamed of its crude work, and further that the fraternities were simply playing in an amateurish and weak way the political game that the literary societies had taught them. I cited a few things to him that had occurred while he was in college, and after he had thought these over a short time, he decided that per-

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haps things were not so bad now as he had supposed, and that the political game is as old as time. It was worked as skillfully when Jacob organized the home forces and "rimmed" Esau out of his birthright as it is to-day.

Politics in college are not run very differently from city politics, or state politics. As the college increases in size the organization must become more complex, the difficulties of control grow greater, and more genius in leadership is required. A friend of mine who, during his senior year, had been elected to the position of president of the athletic association of one of the large Middle West state universities said to me that the planning and organization of his campaign for this office required more thought and work than was later necessary to get him elected to the state legislature from his home district, on the Republican ticket, in a Democratic community.

If one desires to be elected to any general office in a large university he must make his plans early. I am more and more astonished when I am brought to appreciate how early they must be made. I have no doubt, for instance, that at this moment the political forces in the sophomore class of the University of Illinois are fully organized, and that the plans are all made, the candidates all chosen, and many of the appointments to committees decided upon for the management of the class when they shall have reached senior standing. The unexpected events which always occur even in the best of family and political organizations will necessitate numerous changes in these plans, no doubt, but I am quite sure that such plans are already formed.
{{nop}}

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So far as my information and experience goes, every institution, large or small, has its politicians who control, in a more or less complete way, undergraduate affairs and undergraduate offices. Sometimes they do it well; sometimes very much to the contrary. If the authorities of any college think this is not true in the institution with which they are connected, I am convinced that they have not probed under the surface of undergraduate activities. To hold the strings that may be pulled, to shuffle the cards in order that one may get a good hand, to try to get into a position of control or of preferment is as natural and as human in college, and out for some people, as to look out for three meals a day.

In college, as out of it, the successful politician is always a part of a well-knit organization. This organization may be an open and a recognized one acting under a given name and with college authority, or it may be an unauthorized and informal one, unknown to the general community. It may be the literary societies, it may be the fraternities, or it may be some democratic organization whose ostensible purpose is to oppose organizations in general, but no man ever got very far politically or in a business way without building up around him some sort of machine. The secret organizations about most colleges whose membership is discreetly kept under the rose, are for the most part political, though their adherents claim strenuously that politics never enter into their deliberations. One of the most carefully organized political machines in the institution of which I am a member has regularly held that political machinations are unknown within its member-

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ship, yet it manages every year to name most of the successful candidates for office and to control most of the undergraduate affairs which have connected with them either profit or honor. The only explanation of why members of Greek letter fraternities, in most of the colleges in which they exist, hold much more than their proportionate share of class offices and political jobs in general is because these men are organized, and so have little trouble in getting their men by. The man in an organization comes to expect appointment or election merely because he belongs to an organization, and the public very often comes, also, to expect the same thing.

I have not thought it necessary to explain, excepting by implication, what I mean by politician and politics. What I do mean by politician as related to college is the man who through diplomacy and finesse and conscious planning and organization gets control of undergraduate affairs, decides who shall run for class president, who shall be editor of the college daily, who shall be chairman of the Junior Prom committee, and who shall run whatever in student affairs needs running—in short the man who in the college community is the power behind the throne. The mayor of a city is not necessarily the most influential man in the conduct of municipal affairs; in many cases he is merely a figurehead who was chosen by the real politicians of the community to be a foil for their schemes and plans. So, too, in college. The recent president of one of our sophomore classes was in no sense prominent or influential. He was picked for the place by the real leaders who got him elected and who told him what to do,

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and who selected his committees for him and planned the class functions without reference to his views or his comfort or pleasure. It would not be unlikely that they even told him what young woman he was to take to the Cotillion. He was in no sense a politician; he was simply a tool who was managed by politicians, who are the real bosses of every community.

The politician in college is a man upon whom there are many responsibilities if he will assume them. He is restricted, it is true, in his movements and in his opportunities for exploitation, by conventions, by college traditions, and by precedent, but even these if he is bold and aggressive he may often over-ride. Through long years of practice there have come to be somewhat rigidly established in every college, even though there are no fixed rules in print, customs, and expense rates, and recognized methods of procedure which one finds it difficult to deviate from. But even circumscribed by these the man in general control of undergraduate affairs has things pretty much his own way in the direction and management of the social life of the college, the general activities of classes, the policies and control of publications, dramatics, and all the other activities with which students are concerned. Sometimes he keeps his hands out of athletics, but the illustration is not far to seek where even in the determination of athletic affairs the politician has not been averse to determining what should be done, and who should be selected to do it. The larger the institution the more likely he is to attempt universal control of affairs.
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All this is not so simple nor so innocent as it might at first seem. In an institution that numbers its students by the thousands any man in prominence in undergraduate activities is responsible directly or indirectly for the expenditure of considerable sums of money. In any one of a score of our prominent institutions, for instance, the chairman of the committee in charge of any large dance, conservatively speaking, has control of the expenditure of at least a thousand dollars. The chairman of the senior invitation committee last year at the University of Illinois expended two or three thousand dollars. The manager of a modern college daily may easily have pass through his hands during one year eight or ten thousand dollars, and in most cases these officers are appointed by the class president or elected by undergraduate vote. Often, then, appointments come purely as rewards for political loyalty, for standing by the candidate for office. More often than otherwise such positions are plums thrown down to the friends below who have given the aspirant for office a leg up the political tree. The amount of money which in these days is directly under the control of the college politician is rather startling when we come to sum up the total. Its control, it is true, is not infrequently reasonably well {{hinc|safe-guarded}} by college rules and college supervision, but even the most careful supervision has its loopholes which the shrewd undergraduate is not slow to discover, and not always averse to slipping through.

It is the man in control of undergraduate affairs, too, who ultimately makes customs, who establishes traditions, who determines ideals, good or bad, for

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those with whom he works, or for those who come after him. I had a talk only a few weeks ago with the chairman of one of our underclass committees. The committee, which was a pretty large one with duties which were quite trifling (to select caps for the sophomore class), had been appointed in the early spring. Because of unusual conditions, it had not had a meeting, had done no business, and was not likely to do any. The topic of discussion between us was a rather extravagant bill for stationery for the use of this committee. The argument of the committee chairman in brief was that though no business had been transacted and though none would be transacted by the committee, the members were entitled to such trifling spoils as stationery, because by merely representing the class in an official way they had earned something, and because stationery had from time immemorial been a perquisite of class committees. He was not concerned with the fact that some one would have to pay for it or that his committee had rendered no real service. It had rendered a worthy service, he held, by allowing itself to be appointed. I do not know whether or not he was a member of that distinguished political party which was first responsible for the doctrine, but he was quite convinced of the justice embodied in the statement "To the victors belong the spoils."

In any community, civil or collegiate, there are not many politicians. Most people are indifferent to these things,—they are not interested in them. I am surprised and annoyed over and over again to find how indifferent they are. Ninety per cent. of the college community are indifferent as to who

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has charge of undergraduate affairs One candidate, to most men, looks as good as another. It takes the thunders and the eruptions of a political campaign to stir up the layman, and often even these have little effect on him. "I don't care who is elected, just so they let me alone," is the common cry in college and out of it. Most people are glad to have the other fellow run things, provided they are themselves not disturbed or called upon to help in the running—otherwise the politician would have a more difficult time than he now does. Few, also, are willing to give the time that it takes to be a successful politician, for the majority of undergraduate students are conscientious and give their main time and thought to their studies, the general opinion to the contrary notwithstanding. There is no doubt but that it takes an unconscionable amount of time to manage political matters. Those who go into our national political life usually find that they have no time left for any other business, and so the college man finds—if he is a successful politician—and his term grades usually suffer. His scholastic salvation is found only in the fact that few undergraduates begin their political career until after they have learned how to manage their studies, so that after they go in for politics they carry their work on their former reputation. In these matters, again, the college politician differs little from his more experienced brother out in the world.

Speaking of the time it requires for a man with political aspirations to accomplish his purposes, brings to my mind the case of a student who at the beginning of his junior year conceived the idea of

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securing the position of editor of the college daily in his senior year. The office was a profitable and a prominent one; it carried with it a remuneration sufficient adequately to meet all his expenses during his last year in college, and it made him almost certain of election to the senior society—an honor which most college students rate very highly. The office at that time was obtained through a general vote of the student body, and the election came late in May. From the opening of college in the fall this ambitious politician pursued his strenuous political campaign. Every day of the week excepting Sunday—he devoted several hours to making acquaintances, and building his political fences. He visited students' rooms, he met students on the street, he buttonholed them on the campus. Before the end of spring he had built a political fortress that was impregnable, and he had personally seen in his own interests every one of the thousands of voters on the campus. Then when the election was on and he was just about ready to begin to pass out the party rewards, he found that his studies were in such condition that he was not eligible for election. He had, however, accumulated a considerable amount of experience, political and otherwise, and I have no doubt could hardly consider the time wholly wasted, even if he did lose the election; but few students would be willing to give so much time or could afford to give it, for the sake of winning any college office, and no college office with which I am familiar is worth the sacrifice of time which he made.

One of the regrettable things about college politics is that real merit so often counts for little. Fitness

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for the office is too often little considered if considered at all. Popularity, prominence, availability, and, more than all of these, frequently, manageability are the qualities which bring a man success in the political game in college. The most popular man in college is the successful athlete. Youth, both feminine and masculine, will continue to admire physical beauty and physical accomplishments no matter how vigorously we who are older and more experienced may eulogize intellectual power. The military conflict through which we have passed will not tend to dim the glory of the hero in physical combat, and will intensify this sort of hero worship in the minds of college youths generally.

Though the athlete in college, if he does not neglect his athletic business, is the worst possible candidate for official position or political activity because, on account of the exactions of his sport, he has no time to give to such things, yet, since he is so constantly and so favorably in the public eye, he can with less personal effort be elected to office, and so is frequently tempted through ambition and vanity to make the race. It is a safe conclusion, however, that the athlete in office, whether the position be chairman of the hat committee or president of the Young Men's Christian Association, is there primarily for advertising purposes, and will do little work and do the office little credit. The fact that he is entitled to it, as he so frequently claims, seldom gives him the feeling that he is also under the most serious obligations to fulfill the duties of the office which he has assumed.

Prominence of any sort is almost equally sure to help a man in college toward political success. If

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an undergraduate has attained success in any line of endeavor, excepting in intellectual lines which nowhere, in the world, so far as I know, gives a man any political prestige, he is at once thought of as fit to be at the head of one undergraduate activity or another. The debater in some localities has vogue, the society man can not be wholly overlooked, and the "good fellow," whatever that may mean, is almost next in prominence to the athlete.

The man who can play both ends against the middle is a likely candidate. If one is popular with his own party and does not arouse antagonism in the other, he is often thought the most available candidate because he is most likely of election without a hard fight, and no politician likes a hard fight if victory may be gained easily. The ease with which a man may be managed is often an important factor in his selection as a candidate for office.

Very often an innocent, pliable, harmless person is selected because nothing particular can be said against him, and he has so little independence that when he is inducted into office the real politicians will have no difficulty in inducing him to back their schemes. There is in reality, it may be said, a considerable political advantage in this sort of candidate at times, for he has attracted so little attention from the authorities beforehand that through his instrumentality many things can be done quietly which would be suspected and detected in a better known and a more independent man. The worst political gang I ever knew in college always were able to point with virtuous pride to their candidates in whose personal record it was seldom possible to find a flaw. It

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is not enough to know who is running for office or who is holding office, but rather who is behind him, who is managing him, if one expects to control the situation.

There is a growing feeling among college politicians, I am sorry to say, that whatever activity an undergraduate engages in he is entitled to some tangible return. In my own undergraduate days election to office or appointment to membership on a committee was in itself considered an honor and a distinction which more than compensated for the work or effort necessary in the performance of the duty assigned. Now everything is different. The candidate's first question is, "What is there in it?" Now the man who considers whether or not he will become a candidate for office or accept a position on a committee is quite likely to view the whole proceeding from the standpoint of personal profit. Sometimes this profit is expected to be in hard cash; at other times it takes the form of passes, of tickets to entertainments, of free stationery, or free cabs, or free stamps. Many office-holders do not get their fingers far into the bag, but they are not satisfied to play the political game and hold office for the mere sport of playing; there must be a small stake at least. Even the man who helps a fellow student to election by voting for him expects something. Last year I was speaking to one of our class presidents who ran unopposed for the office. It seemed to me that he was making his class committees (all of whom would receive some gratuities for their services or supposed services) too large for any reason.

"Why do you do it?" I asked.
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"They all helped me pretty faithfully in my election campaign," he replied.

"You didn't need help," I protested; "you would have been elected no matter if they had not worked, for there was no rival candidate."

"But there would have been," he said, flushing, "if I had not given them to understand that, if elected, I would take care of them satisfactorily."

It is quite safe to say that the college politician would seldom be moved in his selection of a cabinet of helpers and advisers by any appeal as to their fitness and experience. He does not pay much attention to his rivals, no matter what their claims to merit may be, when it comes to the partitioning out of offices or committee jobs. Any one who is familiar with the political complexion of a college community could pick ninety per cent. of the appointees to office if he were told who the appointing officer is.

"I want to appoint the best man in college to be chairman of the invitation committee," an upper class president said to me not long ago.

"The most reliable man you could choose is Briggs, whom you defeated in the election," I suggested.

"What would my friends think of me if I appointed him?" he asked.

"They'd think you had independence and nerve, and you ought to be able to stand that," I replied. But he had neither.

The most comforting part of all my years of experience and acquaintance with college politicians is the fact that every year I find the man who has inde-

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pendence, who is not willing to be managed, who does not approve of political chicanery, and who disappoints and surprises the friend who expected to profit from his election.

Not long ago a young junior came to me to get my opinion as to his fitness for the position of president of one of our important student organizations.

"You'd be a poor man for the place," I said to him frankly. "You are not aggressive, you are not independent, and the men behind you are lacking in the right political principles."

"I think I'll surprise you," he said, and he did. He succeeded in the election, and before he graduated I wrote him that I considered him the best officer his organization had ever had. He was punctilious in the performance of the duties of his office, and these were not few. He would not be managed, he would not tolerate irregularity or dishonesty, and when his friends shirked the obligations of the positions to which he had appointed them, they were supplanted by other men who were willing to do the work well. He was quiet, apparently unaggressive, but firm, shrewd, and honest. I never knew whether or not my adverse criticism stimulated him to do his best, but I do know that I wish every college had more undergraduate officials like him.

Another similar illustration occurs to me. The man in question was chosen to run for president of the senior class because it was taken for granted that he would handle affairs to the financial advantage of his friends. He allowed himself to be supported in his political campaign by the most untrustworthy politicians on the campus. After his election he

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called his appointees together and very frankly told them that he recognized the fact that he had been elected because a number of people who had supported him expected to profit by his supposed crookedness. He was sorry so completely to disappoint his friends who had trusted him, he said, but he had determined when selected to run for office to stand for no graft and no dishonesty. He would expose any one whom he caught engaged in any shady action. If he had appointed any one who did not care to work under these circumstances that person might resign. There were no resignations, and there was an absolutely clean administration. The chairman of the invitation committee told me afterward that a representative of an eastern engraving company offered him one hundred and fifty dollars in cash if the chairman would place the order for the invitation with his company. "I knew that the president would not stand for it," he said, "even if I had been willing to do so, and I turned him down and placed the order with another company."

The party fealty of specific organizations about a campus is usually unbelievably strong. For twenty years or more the same organizations with us have been ranged against each other on every political issue that has come up. We have always been morally certain that if the Phi Delts voted for a candidate the Phi Gams would be to a man against him. Organization members have seldom voted as individuals; they have voted as the organization determined, and the organization usually determined to stand with the party whose cause they had regularly espoused. The chief argument that I have ever heard

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for the establishment and continuance of inter-fraternity organizations is that such affiliations bring men of various fraternities together, that they widen acquaintanceships, undermine prejudices, and break down party lines. I think it does widen a man's acquaintances for him to belong to such an organization or organizations, but as for affecting his prejudices or in any way influencing his party affiliations, I think the inter-fraternity organization with us has not had the slightest influence. No matter how many friends a man may have made through these outside relationships, when it comes to voting he stays with his old party. I have known one or two men who refused to vote for a fraternity or party brother who was running for office, but such instances are so rare as to make the individual guilty of such independent thinking seem almost freakish.

The great body of undergraduates and the vast majority of the faculty have given little thought to the power and influence of the political leader in college even if they have gone so far as to recognize his existence. He, far more than the teacher of ethics, is responsible for the moral and intellectual ideals of undergraduates. He has an immeasurable influence over the undergraduate attitude toward graft, toward integrity in business, toward virtue and cleanness of life, and he is on a level with his student companion and talks to him directly and in a language which he can understand. I have seen the spirit of the whole undergraduate body disturbed and changed through the influence of one man; I have seen vicious undergraduate customs set aside and almost completely wiped out in the same way.
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A few years ago the University was torn from one end to the other by the practice of hazing. Nothing else did the institution so much damage, for it angered the supporters of the institution and bade fair to undermine and divert their interest. The legislature was not willing to give its support to an institution in which such a practice prevailed. The chief stimulus to hazing was the posting by members of the sophomore class, followed by a similar action by members of the freshman class, of certain inflammatory proclamations which stirred the members of the two under classes and brought them into personal contact with each other. This distributing of the proclamations was done very quickly and very secretly at night, without announcement, so that it proved extremely difficult to catch the perpetrators. I used always to have a sort of premonition as to when the fray would begin, but there was nothing certain.

It occurred to me one fall that I would get at the leaders. The president of the sophomore class was a shrewd fellow not likely himself to get into trouble and quite sure to direct his forces in any combat from a safe vantage ground. I called him in and explained to him the whole situation, and the effect which hazing was having upon the growth and progress of the University.

"I haven't done any hazing, and I will give you my word that I will not personally put out any proclamations," he said quietly.

"I believe you," I answered, "but you know very fully who has done the hazing, and you know equally well when and by whom the proclamations are to be

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posted. You can control both; you are the recognized leader of the sophomore class. You must exercise your control. If the proclamations go up this year, and if the hazing continues I'll hold you responsible." He said nothing more, nor did I. The proclamations were not posted, and the hazing ceased, and in fact it was scarcely ever revived again. The politician killed it. I could multiply illustrations indefinitely to show how the recognized leaders in college, or those real leaders who are quite as frequently unrecognized, have changed customs, have controlled difficult situations, have promulgated the loosest or the most rigid principles.

The opportunity of the college politician for good or for evil is almost unlimited. He is a far more vital force in the college community, because, he is so often an unseen or an unrecognized force in determining the morals and the ideals of the student body, than is the Young Men's Christian Association, or the whole body of student pastors, strong and helpful as the influences of these instrumentalities are.

The college official who is held responsible for discipline or for the control of student activities and who does not keep in the closest touch with college politicians, who does not make friends with them and try to understand their machinations will be likely to get on badly. When trouble is brewing he will have no premonitions; when it comes he will be likely to be in ignorance of its source. So long as he can lay a restraining, or a directing hand upon the college politician he has solved the most of his problems of discipline and of student control. If trouble

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impends, he will know where to look for it; if it fails he knows who is responsible and who can correct it, for the college politician dominates student sentiments and student activities.

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{{sc|I might}} as well frankly confess at the outset of this paper that I have seen a good deal of cribbing from the time I entered college to the present day, and I have been told of a great deal more than I have seen. As an undergraduate I knew men who never pretended to get through an examination without relying upon some subterfuge or trick or dishonest aid, and who would put more time twice over upon the devising of a cunning complicated crib, than it would have taken to learn by heart the whole text upon which they were preparing to be examined. I have known other men, keen-brained and studious, who could have written with high credit any reasonable examination which the instructor might have set, and yet who regularly and foolishly carried a crib to the examination and used it.

I remember asking a young sophomore once who had been caught in the act of using a crib in a final examination, and who was dismissed from college for his dishonesty, why he had done so. He was an intelligent fellow, and was easily in the highest ten per cent. of his class.

"It was a case of making ninety per cent. without the crib or ninety-five per cent. with it," he said, "and I was anxious to win preliminary honors."

His manner was as cold-blooded and matter of fact in the discussion of the situation as a careful house-

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wife might assume in swatting a persistent fly. I had had no experience with cribbing until I came to college. If the seekers after knowledge in the little rural community in which I lived were addicted to trickery and mental larceny I was happily never aware of it. It was something of a shock to me and rather a doubtful compliment when in my first college examination the man sitting next to me asked me for the solution of the third problem. When I hesitated not quite understanding what he really meant, he turned disgustedly to his nearest neighbor and copied the problem verbatim. I do not know that our college is worse than others in this respect; I have talked to instructors from neighboring institutions who claim that there is no cribbing in their classes, and I have visited other colleges where such careful precautions are taken that cribbing is almost a physical impossibility, but in institutions in the Middle West organized as ours is, I am of the opinion that conditions do not materially differ.

The most surprising thing to me about the man who cribs is the attitude which his fellow students assume toward him. Those of his friends who acquire their college credits in a manner similar to his own look upon him with real admiration. If he is not detected in his dishonesty, and so does not come to grief, he is regarded as a good sport and a shrewd fellow. If he is caught in his irregularity, he is looked on in somewhat the light of a martyr, whom ill-deserved misfortune has overtaken. Even the honest man, who minds his own affairs, writes his own examinations, and keeps himself absolutely within the bounds of integrity, is seldom affected by

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the dishonesty around him. He thinks no less of the cribber; the dishonest man is in no sense a pariah in his eyes. It is not his funeral, he says. If the man wants to crib, that is his business. It is a personal right, like chewing tobacco, or eating frogs' legs which no one should interfere with. If the modern undergraduate should have propounded to him the question that Cain tried to dodge in the Garden, he would unquestionably refuse to accept any responsibility as to his brother's conduct; it is up to every man to look out for himself, he would maintain. Even with girls the case is not different. I have known the most popular and the most influential girls in college to crib their way through an examination without apparent shame, who seemed to lose by the act nothing of their influence or of their popularity. If cribbing is common one does not lose caste by being guilty of it.

I used to have the feeling that the man who cribbed in an examination did so because he felt that he had to do so—he was in a corner from which he could not extricate himself without resorting to some illegitimate means—I thought it was usually a matter of a sudden overwhelming temptation to which the man yielded because the pressure was more than he could resist. Quite the contrary is usually true—nine-tenths of the people whom I have known to crib did not need to do so at all so far as passing the course in question was concerned. They cribbed because they thought it was easier, because they did not like the instructor, because other people were doing it, because they thought the examination was unfair, because they were pressed for time, because they

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thought they were being watched and they felt that it would be a good joke to outwit the proctor; and even when they were not caught, very few of them ever profited through a higher grade from the cribbing. Most men who are detected in the act of cribbing and who are facing discipline as a result aver that the time in question is the first time they have ever been guilty of the act. This may be from the fact that the man not caught the first time develops so much adroitness as never to be caught, or it may be that he has forgotten his past record.

A man when brought face to face with the facts will usually admit his guilt, especially if the facts are presented by a single individual. Most young women will at first plead innocence. The explanation lies probably in the fact that the man feels that he has less to lose by admitting guilt than does the woman, for, as things now are, a man's damaged reputation is far more easily repaired than is a woman's.

The cribber, unless he is detected, suffers very little remorse. I am familiar with the class of melodrama in fiction which pictures the young fellow guilty of crime or dishonesty racked and torn by the tortures of an accusing conscience; but in fact it is usually only when he is in doubt as to the success of his subterfuge, or when he knows that he has been detected and that public disgrace is staring him in the face, that he begins to think and to suffer, It is wrong only if you are caught, is his philosophy. He excuses himself largely on the ground that the examination is a game, like love and war, and that anything one does is fair and unobjectionable which circumvents the instructor. When you cheat an in-

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structor, he argues, it is in the same class of virtue as beating a corporation or evading taxes, an overt act which any one admits is to be winked at.

By cribbing, the student argues, he is simply beating the college, which stands to him as a sort of unfeeling, overbearing despot like the railroad corporation to the traveler. If on the other hand a fellow student is involved the whole situation changes. The cribber will usually suffer indefinitely rather than have a pal come to grief through his error or his carelessness or crudeness of work. In such an instance he is usually quite willing to suffer anything in order that another undergraduate may get off.

Just a few weeks ago I had before me two sophomores who had been detected cribbing in a final examination. They were equally guilty, and in accordance with our regular custom where there are no extenuating circumstances, they were dismissed. The older of the two waited after our interview was over to say to me that he felt himself more to blame than his companion. He was older, he alleged; he should have set a better example. Besides the younger man, who was by the way in no sense a personal friend of his I knew, was a promising athlete. The college could not afford to lose him. He was anxious then, he said, to bear the whole punishment of the misdeed if by any arrangement the younger boy might go free. It was a generous offer which, perhaps, showed more truly the boy's real character than his error in conduct had done, but it was one which I did not feel at liberty to accept.

Another instance, also, shows the attitude which the cribber takes towards his fellow students. Two

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juniors had been suspected of dishonesty in an examination and had been reported to me. One was without prominence in student affairs, the other the captain of an athletic team counted upon to win. An examination of the evidence showed beyond doubt that one of the two men had copied from the other, though it was not clear which one. I discussed the situation with each separately, and with apparent frankness they told me the facts. The athlete was innocent, he said. The older man confessed that he had been the dishonest one, and was dismissed. Years afterward I learned that the men had talked the matter over before coming in to see me and had agreed to lie, the man of little prominence being the willing sacrifice in order that the craven coward athlete might be saved. It makes me angry still when I think of it, distorted sense of honor though it was.

A short time ago, in order that I might better understand the student viewpoint with respect to cribbing, I prepared and sent to a selected list of four hundred undergraduate men, a questionnaire. The queries were as follows:

1. What percentage of the members of your classes do you think sometimes crib?

2. Is this percentage larger in some kinds of courses than in others, as for instance, mathematics, rhetoric, chemistry, etc., and if so, in what kinds?

3. Under some kinds of instructors than under others, and if so, under what kinds?

4. What form of cribbing is most common?

5. What seems to be the most common reason or defense given?

6. If you have ever cribbed what was the situation?
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7. If you were charged with cribbing by what kind of committee would you prefer to be heard,—a committee of older members of the faculty, a committee of younger members of the faculty chosen by the students, or a committee of students? Please state the reason of your answer.

8. Do you think it more objectionable to receive information than to give it?

9. Would you volunteer information to a committee of the faculty concerning a fellow student who to your knowledge had cribbed?

10. To a student committee?

11. Would you give information in either case if asked to do so?

12. What kind of punishment or procedure if any do you think is likely to be most effective in curbing the practice of cribbing?

The list to whom the questionnaire was sent was a carefully selected one comprising members of all classes, representatives of all organizations, and men of all types and affiliations. I explained that by cribbing I meant to include the using of text books or other written helps, the receiving of help of any sort from other students, or the giving of help of any kind to such other students. Students were not asked to sign their names to the papers returned, and it was indicated that the information obtained would not be used in any way to the detriment of individual students. A large percentage of the papers were returned, and every one, so far as I remember, seemed to answer the questions seriously and frankly. The papers were "keyed" in such a way as to make it possible to tell which came from men living in fra-

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ternity houses and which ones from men not so affiliated; other than this there was no mark upon the papers to identify the writers. In almost every case the fraternity man was more radical or more pessimistic than his independent college mate, a situation explainable, perhaps, from the fact that fraternity men, living in a somewhat more congested way than other men, are likely to have closer associations, to know more about what is actually going on among each other and, because of their close personal friendly relations, to be franker and more open in confessing their derelictions.

Naturally the replies to the questions varied widely in specific instances, but it was interesting to see how closely in the main the majority of the students agreed. Seventy per cent. of the men admitted that they had cribbed at one time or another, and fifteen per cent. of those who sent in replies ignored the question. Those who affirmed that they had never themselves cribbed were more optimistic with reference to the universality of the practice than were the others, though not more rigid in their suggestion as to discipline. One man said that in attempting to discover how widespread the practice of cribbing was he had made inquiry of twenty of his {{hinc|class-mates}} and friends, and that nineteen of the twenty admitted that at one time or another they had used some illegitimate method in an examination. Some of the men said they had never given the practice any consideration or attention, they had paid attention solely to their own business, had seen no one engaged in dishonest methods, and so had no opinion to offer. More than fifty per cent. of those answering, how-

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ever, were of the opinion that the practice of cribbing is quite general.

The majority were agreed that in courses, examinations in which require the memorization of a considerable number of dates, or formulae, or isolated facts, cribbing is more prevalent than in courses which admit more readily of the discussion of general principles. In descriptive geometry, one man said, he thought everybody cribbed. History, mathematics, some courses in economics, and chemistry, it was said, are the courses in which most dishonesty is practiced because in examinations in these courses it is easier to prepare material that can be readily and advantageously used.

It was generally agreed, also, that certain types of instructors stimulate the students to crib more than do others. Very little cribbing is done under the instructor who treats his students fairly, who seems to look upon them as honest gentlemen, and who is interested in the success and progress of those he is teaching.

"The most cribbing is done," one student wrote, "under instructors who do not play the game fairly with the class, who would rather than not ask questions on an examination which they feel sure their students can not answer. There is more cheating under inexperienced instructors who are working for a higher degree, and who feel that they must fail a certain percentage of their students in order to give the impression that they are deep and efficient."

Another man said, "The instructor who places confidence in his students gains their respect, and as a rule they treat him squarely. Students are

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proud of the fact that they have cribbed successfully under a man who is always watching for cribbers."

The following quotations, also, were interesting: "Cribbing will be carried on more under an instructor who does not get into personal touch with his students. The instructor who is human will have little trouble with cribbing." "I have heard it said that the sarcastic instructor who by his manner virtually says to his students, 'cheat if you dare, I bet I catch you,' is the one the student delights in beating at his own game." "Cribbing is most common under a very strict or a very lenient instructor." "Any instructor who is specially sarcastic or who does not deal with his students in an open and friendly way is sure to have those in his classes who will try to get through in any conceivable manner."

In reply to the question, as to the form of cribbing most common there was little agreement, the consulting of notes carried to class, looking on another student's paper, and verbal communication between students sitting crowded together being thought most common.

More than thirty per cent. of those who replied to the questionnaire held that the main excuse offered for cribbing lay in the fact that the specific examination in question was unfair and that examinations in general are in no sense an adequate test of a student's knowledge. If the instructor knows in the main what the individual student will be likely to know before he gives him the test, why, the student asks, should he give him the test at all; but in asking this question he fails to realize that unless the examination were given the student will not make the mental

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effort to gather together the body of facts and information which the instructor knows he will possess if the examination is given. In addition to the allegation that unfair examinations induce cribbing, the justification of the practice, in order of frequency presented, are fear of failing the course, ignorance of the points in question, and the fact that other people do the same thing I once heard a man claim that the reason he had never honestly scheduled his property with the tax collector was because his neighbors never did. If he scheduled his property honestly, he claimed, when his neighbors withheld a large part of their possessions, he would pay more than his just share of taxes. The cribber argues similarly: he can not afford to be honest, for when his companion cheats the honest man suffers in comparison for his honesty, and that he is not willing to do. Besides evading the responsibility for personal integrity, he argues from a false premise in taking for granted that the man who cribs by so doing increases his scholastic average. I believe it could be proved, if it were possible to get at the real facts, that the cribber very seldom profits scholastically from his trickery. The excuses which the men offer for their delinquencies, were varied, but I think no one really tried to justify himself. The excuses were all simply subterfuges to ease their consciences and in no case deceived even the men who offered them.

With reference to the tribunal before which they were to be heard if charged with cribbing, by far the larger number were in favor of a committee com posed of older members of the faculty, the reasons given being that the judgment of such a committee

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would be saner, the experience of the men broader, and that their decisions would be tempered with a finer quality of mercy. Those who preferred to be judged by the younger men were of the opinion that such men, whether students or members of the faculty, would be more lenient and, because they were still concerned with undergraduate problems or were so slightly removed from them, would understand and sympathize more fully with the student in trouble than would the older man. So far as actual justice was concerned they were nearly all convinced that the older men would the more completely attain this end in their decisions, but they thought the guilty would get off with a lighter penalty the younger the judges were. This last conclusion was the more interesting to me in view of the fact that through my personal associations with various men on disciplinary committees over a period of several years, I have found almost invariably that the undergraduate and the younger member of the faculty is likely to be harsher and more severe in his judgments of men found guilty of dishonesty when it is put'up to them to impose a penalty than is the older and more experienced man.

Seventy per cent. of those answering the questions thought it more objectionable to receive help than to give it, though the arguments advanced to justify this point of view were few and frail. Seven per cent. did not answer the question. One man asserted that it was impossible to refuse to give help when asked without being more of a martyr to honorable ideals than most college men are willing to be. "Under our present moral code," another man says, "a

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man who is asked for aid has to run the risk of popular dislike if he refuses to give it. This a student does not feel like taking upon himself." On the other side a third student says, "There is no difference between receiving and giving aid. If I give opium to a dope fiend, I am no better than he; if I am a servant and give a burglar the key to my employer's house, I am no better than the burglar; if I supply a fellow student with information to copy, I am as bad as he is, because I help him to be dishonest."

There was little difference expressed by the men in their willingness to volunteer information with reference to cribbing, whether the committee in charge of discipline were composed of students or members of the faculty. In each case about eighty-five per cent. of the men said they would not volunteer information under any circumstances, three per cent. did not answer the question, and the remainder were willing to give information if the conditions under which it were given were made sufficiently innocuous. There was a pretty general lack of feeling of responsibility suggested by the replies The condition of affairs was possibly to be regretted, they admitted, but when at the end of the semester a student is pushed into a corner by a heartless instructor who endangers his intellectual life, what is to be done? It is hardly to be thought of that the suffering undergraduate should be still further set upon by his classmates in an attempt to beat the truth out of him, but rather, if opportunity is afforded, that they should run to his assistance. So strongly are some of the illogical arguments presented that one is al-

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most persuaded for the moment that not only is honesty ''not'' the ''best'' policy, but that in reality it is no policy at all.

The most frequently emphasized suggestion for improving conditions was to do away with final examinations entirely and depend upon weekly quizzes, or to make the questions asked so general as to render a crib useless or unnecessary. In making these suggestions the writers ignored the fact that there is quite as much cribbing done on daily work and weekly quizzes as there is on final examinations, and that by laying the emphasis upon these methods of testing a student's work they simply shift the danger point or get from the frying pan into the fire. The honor system, more careful proctoring, and the separation of students so widely at examination time that communication is practically impossible were also suggested as methods of cutting down cribbing, though the opinion was expressed by many that no method could be devised which would wholly banish the practice. Expulsion, suspension, failure of the course, public confession, and reprimand, loss of general college credit, and the giving of the widest publicity to the offense and the offender were among the remedies suggested for reducing the amount of cribbing. Perhaps one of the most sensible suggestions was that students known to be guilty of cribbing should be permanently barred from participation in college activities. From my experience with students and from my knowledge of the importance which they attribute to participation in college activities, I am sure that many a student would prefer to

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be dismissed from college than to be prohibited for any length of time from participation in activities.

"Abolishing specific numerical grades," one man suggests, "would take away from many students a strong temptation to crib. Those who desire to excel are, under a system of numerical grades, often influenced to crib in order that they may take intellectual precedence of their classmates. If specific grades were done away with, this condition would not exist."

Another man writes, "I do not believe that a university is a place to begin the primary teaching of honesty. A man's habits and principles are formed when he comes to college. A young fellow should be educated in principles of honesty in the home and in the graded schools. If he has not learned these before he comes to college he is entitled to no leniency. No one should be given a degree from a university who has grossly cribbed."

The attitude toward the practice in most of the papers was one of indifference or of justification. Especially in discussing the subject of giving help to a classmate in trouble was the moral sense of the writers dull. Instead of looking upon such a practice as objectionable there was the almost universal tendency to condone it or even to recognize it is a virtue. The fellow who would not help a classmate in need of information in an examination when he was politely asked for it was without heart a great number felt, and lacking in the proper brotherly spirit.

No other problem of student life has given me so

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much concern as the problem of cribbing and the cribber. I believe sincerely, as one young fellow said, that if the freshman entering college could come into an atmosphere where cribbing was not tolerated and where the man who was seen to crib or was known to crib lost caste and was looked upon with disfavor he would be given a respect for truth and honesty which would be of incalculable value to him throughout life. If a man could live for four years among students who looked down upon dishonesty—of every sort, the experience and the training would be of as great value to him as anything the college could teach him.

The man who cribs is lacking a true sense of honesty, and the companion who helps him is impelled by a false sense of honor. Leaving out of consideration the questions of the morality of the practice, which is perhaps the main question, but which unfortunately will be likely last to appeal to the undergraduate, the question of expediency comes in. By cribbing the student weakens himself, robs himself of training, lessens his self-reliance, and so reduces the probability of his success. The cribber comes in most cases not to depend upon his own strength and judgment. When he strikes a hard problem, when he gets into a corner, when he meets intellectual difficulty, his courage fails him, and he calls at once lustily for help. And it is the self-reliant man, who can marshall all his powers and be sure of them, not the man who is always looking for help, who is wanted in every business. If a student in mathematics allows some one to work his home problems for him and then cribs from his neighbor in the final examina-

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tion, what does he expect to do after he leaves college when the questions which involve such mathematical computations are before him for solution? There very likely will be no one to work them out for him and no friendly neighbor engaged with the same difficulties from whom he may crib. He has followed a practice in college which has left him helpless after he is out.

A young chemist whom I once knew, whose college work required the analysis of a rather large number of unknowns, by chance happened upon the table of results which had been worked out by the instructor and by skillfully changing his own results slightly so that they might be within the percentage of variation and error allowed, was able to meet the requirements of the course without really going through any of the work. He was detected and dismissed, but even if he had been clever enough to carry out his intentions he would ultimately have been the loser, because he would have lacked the training and the experience to pursue the calling for which he was preparing. The cribber does not think of the future; he is concerned wholly with the present safety of his skin.

"But one has to get through some way," a cribber said to me by way of excuse for the dereliction in which he had been detected.

"How about the influence of this upon your general character?" I asked.

"You don't think that because I wasn't square on this measley little examination I would lie or steal or cheat my employer, do you?"

"Why, yes," I replied; "I think you are much

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more likely to do so. If you are tricky and shifty and dishonest with one man, even if he happens to be only your instructor, the chances are that you will find it more difficult to be entirely above board with other men even though the relationship which you stand in to them is a different one."

The cribber is, then, not quite so safe a man to trust, his principles of integrity are not so solidly grounded, his standards of honesty are somewhat more flexible; he does not quite ring true. He would pick up a needed umbrella with fewer compunctions of conscience than others of his mates; he would repay a small loan with more reluctance; he would borrow your clothing, or your stationery, or your stamps with less elaborate ceremonies than the really honest man and would be among the last to return them. He has a treacherous memory with reference to other things than dates and formulae and details. The irregularity of which he is guilty is in many cases, I am quite willing to admit, a venial one, but it leaves his character a little soiled. The lowering influence, also, which such an act on the part of an upper-classman or of a leading man in college has upon a student just entering is incalculable.

"How can you expect us to be honest?" a freshman asked me last year. "It is true the upper-classmen in our house warn us constantly against cribbing, but it is not because they feel that it is wrong. They simply think that we are not yet wise and clever enough to get by with it; they are afraid we shall be caught and that they will be annoyed by the disgrace of the exposure. We know all the time that they crib

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even while they are warning us against the dangers of it, and we are stimulated to try it ourselves, rather than restrained by their warnings."

The cribber, if he is successful, is likely to be a grafter. Having managed to get something for nothing, or to suppose that he has done so in his intellectual {{SIC|relationshpis|relationships}}, he is not satisfied until he takes a hand in activities, and when he gets into activities he is not there for his health alone, nor for the public recognition, or honor which may accrue. He is out for the loot. It is easy for him to argue that since he is entitled to some compensation for the services, real or imagined, which he has performed, it is quite unobjectionable for him to pay himself, since the red tape to be unwound, if he should seek remuneration in the regular way, is often tiresomely complicated, and the possibility of his getting anything at all is distressingly remote. He is an advocate of efficiency and uses a short-cut method by appropriating what he considers himself entitled to and salves his conscience, if it gives any indication of activity, by saying that they all do it anyway, and if he doesn't take the money some one else will.

All this is a sad preparation for good citizenship. If a young man can be depended upon to do the honest thing only when it is easy, only when all other men are known to be honest, only when it is to his personal and financial advantage to be so, he is little fitted for responsibility and service, and yet such conditions are quite in accord with the doctrines of the man who cribs.

I was in conversation, not long ago, with a business man who held a position of the greatest promi-

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nence and trust in one of the largest corporations of the Middle West. He confessed to me that he had had little education and training as a boy before he became a part of the business. What he knew he had acquired through practical experience, through hard knocks, through willingness to work, and what he had accomplished he had done without influence or pull.

"How does it come, then," I asked, "that you have been placed in so prominent a position at so early an age?" for he was still a comparatively young man.

"There is but one reason," he replied. "I have a single virtue. I proved myself to the company by many tests to be absolutely honest. It is that quality which gave me my position, and it is through that quality that I hold it." I told the story later to a cribber.

There is one solution, it seems to me, to the difficulty, one cure for the evil of cribbing,—the creation of a strong healthy student sentiment against it. Rigid discipline will help, but it will not wipe out the evil. Whatever discipline is enforced must appeal to the good judgment of the better class of students as just. Whenever in the minds of the body of undergraduates the character of the discipline enforced by the faculty seems cruel or over-severe, one of the main purposes of discipline, the deterring of misdeeds, is lost; for the student who is thought to have been disciplined too severely becomes at once, in the minds of his friends and companions, a martyr to be sympathized with and pitied and made a hero of. When such a condition arises the evil is rather likely to increase than to lessen.
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The evil of cribbing would be far more easily controlled and the cribber more rapidly eliminated if the members of the faculty were as a whole alert and helpful. In fact many of them are indifferent, and many more are asleep. They are in most cases, I am sorry to say, as indifferent to the situation as is the undergraduate himself.

"If my students want to crib in my classes," I often hear an instructor say, "they may; it isn't up to me to act as a spy and a policeman over them. If they do crib, I should rather not see them, and even when I might be led to suspect that they were doing so, I prefer to think well of them, and to treat them as if they were gentlemen." And no one better than the student knows exactly how the individual instructor feels about these matters, and no one thing is more potent in helping to confirm him in the habit of cribbing than this same indifference on the part of his instructors.

"You can't tell me that 'Bobby' doesn't know about that cribbing that goes on in his class," a junior said. "He's too sly a dog not to get onto a practice that is as open as cribbing in his class. He doesn't want the trouble or the unpopularity that would result if he reported the men, and so he prefers not to see what is going on." But in refusing to see it he lost the respect even of those who were cribbing under him, and indirectly encouraged one of the most vicious practices in college. A good many members of the faculty feel that their honor has been compromised when they report a man suspected of cribbing and those in charge of disciplinary matters do not find him guilty.
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"I shall never report a man again for dishonesty," an instructor old enough to have more sense, said to me not long ago.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because I reported Hanley last year, and the committee let him go."

"But there was no convincing evidence that he had cribbed," I protested.

"Perhaps not," he admitted, "but the whole affair put me into a very embarrassing position, and such a position as I don't propose to get into again soon. If my men want to crib I'll flunk them or ignore the fact."

Another class of instructors refuses to take any responsibility for the cribber because they allege that when he is caught the penalty imposed is not to their liking. One man says that he will report no more men who are dishonest because the penalty of dismissal for half a year or longer, which we ordinarily impose upon men above the freshmen year, is too severe. He prefers, he says, to handle his own cases, which means that it pleases him best to pay no attention to them, or to delude himself into the belief that there are none. Another instructor refuses to take the subject of cribbing seriously because from his point of view the penalty imposed upon the guilty ones is a joke. He would expel or behead every man guilty of the slightest deviation from the path of integrity. Thus both the conservative and the radical indirectly helps to confirm the student in his habit of irregularity.

The type of instructor who by his manner virtually gives a challenge to his students to crib regu-

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larly helps in the practice. When you tell a student that you are so clever that you will be quite willing to have him fool you if he can, you have given him a dare, and his brain at once begins to work in a determination to outwit you. The instructor in whose classes there are more cribbers than in any other I know is the one who alleges that he takes nobody's word, and who announces that if any undergraduate cribs in his class he will find it necessary to get up pretty early in the morning. If instructors would be less indifferent, if they would use more common sense, and if they would report for discipline all students who are detected cribbing, the number of cribbers would be materially lessened.

The cribber could be discouraged if more precautions were taken in the conduct of examinations. No one can deny that, when we take into consideration what hangs upon the result of the test, the temptation to dishonesty in final examinations is not small. No faculty, therefore, it seems to me, can possibly justify itself until it makes the conditions under which examinations are given as thoroughly as possible conducive to honesty. With a little care in any institution the student undergoing examination could be so situated that even if it were not impossible for him to cheat, it would at least be difficult. As it is now in many institutions, the undergraduates at examination time are so crowded together that it is almost impossible for them to be honest if they desire to be. Students using the same questions are sitting elbow to elbow. If they look around it is easy to see what the man on each side and in front of them is writing, and communication by word of mouth or by

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means of notes passed is as easy and free as talk at an afternoon tea. The instructor usually looks on indifferently, engaged in reading the newspaper or in the solution of some of his own intellectual or domestice difficulties, or he quite as likely strolls out of the room entirely to do an errand for his wife, or to get a breath of air for his health. There is no adequate supervision, no adequate proctoring. The students are not on their honor, and they know they are not, and even if the instructor announced that they were, they would seldom accept the announcement as authentic since it had been made without discussion with them and without their consent.

The honor system would help, but it would be worse than useless unless it were backed strongly by student sentiment. If three-fourths of the student body were of the opinion that the practice of cribbing is wronz, that it should go, and that they are not only willing not to crib themselves but that they will report every man who is known to crib, the practice would soon be upon its last legs. It is not so difficult to interest a considerable number of students to the extent that they will agree to honesty of procedure themselves, but it is altogether another matter when it comes to their assuming responsibility for the conduct of others. "I would myself agree not to crib," students say to me over and over again, "but I would not report a man whom I saw crib or even talk to him about the matter." But this, it seems to me, is the logical solution of the whole matter—student sentiment and student responsibility. So long as cribbing is an affair between faculty and students it may be ameliorated, but it will never be fully cured. It

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is only when the student loses favor or standing or caste with his mates through dishonesty that he will take the matter of cribbing seriously. A student can stand anything else better than to be distrusted or disliked by his own undergraduate associates.

Not long ago we had in control of our student paper one who could find little to approve of in our university organization and control. Everything was wrong: the system of teaching, the development of research, the construction of buildings, the supervision of student activities, the general attitude and composition of the faculty, were all hopelessly and irrevocably wrong. He stirred a good deal of feeling among the authorities, he irritated and offended scores of our faculty, but the more opposition he aroused the better he liked it, for it gave him the feeling of a reformer. He had a considerable following of undergraduate sympathizers, he won the approval of a certain number of instructors who were glad to have him voice the sentiments that they might have been afraid themselves to utter, and he did not care a picayune what the administration thought of him. But one day he entered upon another field. Delighted with his success as a stirrer up of trouble among the faculty, he began a heavy onslaught upon a disreputable student practice. He was somewhat surprised on the day following the appearance of his editorial to find that his old friends were not so cordial; his former acquaintances looked at him coldly as they passed him or crossed to the other side of the street to avoid meeting him; the cold shoulder was given him wherever he went. It was all right to criticize the faculty; the criticism of their own personal

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derelictions and evasions of duty did not take so kindly with his undergraduate friends. He never wrote another editorial on the tabooed subject, for he could not stand the unpopularity which such writing brought him; he did not have the courage to go against public sentiment as expressed by his associates.

So cribbing and the cribber will go when the cribber losing social standing, is not looked upon with favor, is not regarded as a gentleman. So long as undergraduate sentiment toward this sort of dishonesty is indifferent or tends to condone it, the practice will continue. General student sentiment against the man who practices dishonesty in his college work would cause him to disappear over night.

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{{sc|For}} many a generation past the athlete has been the undergraduate idol, the big man in college, the god whom the incoming freshman worshiped and to whose attributes and accomplishments he hoped through physical tribulations to attain. There may have been a time, when our great grandfathers were in college, that the orator or the scholar was most envied and emulated by the ambitious undergraduate, but, if so, that time is long past. The student crowd will go wild over a successful athlete, shouting themselves hoarse in proclaiming his excellencies, and fighting like demons to get a chance to carry him off the field. No one molests the orator or the scholar or follows him down the street with an ovation. They have an unobstructed path from the scene of their accomplishments to their lodging houses.

Don't misunderstand me: I am in no sense advocating or defending this condition of affairs; I am simply making a conservative statement of facts. Scholarship may be and should be the goal toward which the ambitious undergraduate in general is struggling, but physical strength and physical accomplishment is in reality what youth most admires. We might as well recognize and acknowledge the fact, change it if we can, and become resigned to it if we must.
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We had for many years at the University of Illinois, permitted—I scarcely dare to say approved—by the faculty, an underclass contest or "scrap" which took place early in the fall and which furnished an outlet for the class feeling and class rivalry which has been extant in colleges between freshman and sophomore classes from time immemorial. The contest took on various forms during the twenty-five years or more of its continuance. It was always a test of physical strength, directed at rare intervals by some little brains; it was rough, not without danger, and occasionally to the onlooker it presented strong symptoms of brutality, though I believe, through the providence which is said to watch carefully over fools and children, no contestant was ever seriously hurt. Ultimately through the influence of certain members of our faculty, nervous or soft-hearted, the contest was barred. The main arguments against it were the danger involved, the fact that such a contest was undignified and out of keeping with the character of college gentlemen, and most strongly urged, perhaps, was the argument that our college man of to-day is more refined, more intellectual, and less given to rough boisterous sport than was true a generation or two ago. I may be pardoned, I hope, if I decline to believe this statement. The young college man of to-day is in many respects as barbaric as he was a hundred years ago, he is just as fond of a fight, just as much an admirer of physical strength and physical contests as he ever was, and that is why the athlete is going to continue to be for the growing youth a hero, and in college the person to be most admired and emulated.
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The athlete in college was not always so worthy of emulation as he is at present. I do not have to go back farther than my own college days nor even s0 far as that to recall instances of men who found their way into colleges for the sole purpose of developing or exhibiting their physical powers, of making an athletic team, and without any intention of adding to their intellectual strength. Mr. [[Author:George Ade|George Ade]]'s crude young Hercules in the "[[College Widow]]" whose ostensible purpose in entering college was the study of art but whose real object was to help make a winning football team, might find a counterpart in many another college. I myself can recall a big hulk of human bull who had been employed about town in driving an ice wagon and who was drafted by a few local enthusiasts to enter college in order that he might play center on the football team. He was a crudely impossible yokel, and unfortunately of little use, for he had no brains to manage his brawn, and proved more of a hindrance than a help. Such proceedings as his are happily at an end in self-respecting colleges, and the athlete of to-day is a very different character morally and scholastically than he once was. For membership on one of the Middle-West conference teams, at least, a man must be a bona-fide student, must be in good standing, and must have carried a full year's college work in the institution which he wishes to represent. Our own athletes for years have maintained a scholastic standing considerably above that of the average man in college and in many cases, in fact proportionately in quite as many cases as the men not in athletics, have attained a standing which has entitled them to elec-

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tion to such honorary organizations as Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Xi, and Tau Beta Pi. In conference colleges the athlete as a class is not a flunker, for when he becomes a flunker he can no longer represent his college as an athlete. No more is he satisfied merely to pass, for he has been taught that intellectually, at least, a miss is not nearly so good as a mile, and that his physical safety lies in making his intellectual calling absolutely sure.

The athlete is the best known man in college. The man who made high scholastic average for the year is occasionally pointed out; the editor of the college daily, or the student colonel of the cadet regiment may swagger a little as he walks across the campus; the fellow who took the rôle of leading lady at the spring performance of the Union opera may cause a few admirers to crane their necks as he passes, but every one knows the athlete. When "Shorty" Righter made three home runs in the last baseball game with Chicago and settled the conference championship for that year, he was a bigger man in the eyes of the undergraduates than if he had been president of the steel trust or Ambassador to the court of St. James. There wasn't any one in the country, they were quite convinced, who had anything on "Shorty."

The athlete sometimes excuses his too vigorous participation in physical affairs to the consequent detriment of his studies on the ground that it is for the good of the college—it is all for the love of Alma Mater. There is very little to such talk. The real athlete is such from pure love of it. He longs for a fight; he enjoys being in a contest; he is overflowing

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with strength and animal spirits; it gives him pleasure to win, and if through his winning Alma Mater gets an incidental mention he is not annoyed. Few athletes consider the time they put in in practice or the punishment they receive in a game as a sacrifice; the joy of contest and of victory more than outweighs all the sacrifice and pain endured. If there is doubt of this in any one's mind let him watch the successful athlete as he looks over the sporting sheet of the Sunday paper following a successful game or meet and reads his own eulogy and sees his own photograph; there is very little thought of Alma Mater in his mind at such a time.

Because he is so well known, there is no one else in college whose daily life is so much under observation, whose habits and ideals and accomplishments are so much discussed and whose dicta count so much in setting the standards for the college community What the athlete thinks and does determines what is right; what he says settles a matter for all time. He can quell a riot or stop an objectionable undergraduate practice with a word, if he will. He is often so harassed by the severe exactions of his athletic training and by the necessity, under this training, of keeping up his college work, that he has little time for leadership in any active way, and though he stands out in a notable manner as an example which the students in general are likely and willing to follow, he usually makes a poor chairman of a committee, an indifferent president of an organization, and a not very active member of anything that requires aggressive leadership. He takes the popularity, and the prominence, and the adulation, but he side-steps the

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responsibility which this prominence brings him. I have known a number of athletes who were elected president of the Young Men's Christian Association, but I do not now recall one who was any good in the office; as class officers and as presidents of student organizations they have pretty generally been figureheads, put into office for advertising purposes only, as prominent men in real life sometimes lend their names to the furtherance of some enterprise or to the advertising of some nostrum in which they have little real interest.

There are exceptions, of course, many of them, and one I recall which is a joy to remember. He was a big husky guard on the football team who made Tau Beta Pi and who was elected president of his fraternity and who really was president after he was elected. He counseled the freshmen like a father, and they adored him. He was a veritable D'Artagnan in leadership; he set all the fellows an example in conduct and morality and scholarship that they never forgot.

On account of his popularity, also, there is no man who can so easily be elected to office as the athlete. His prestige carries him through; what he has done to win athletic prominence for the college, his followers argue, entitles him to the reward of the office he seeks, and forgetting that his other duties are already a tax upon his time and his strength, he yields to his ambition and to the insistence of his friends. I have wished over and over again that he might have had the strength to decline when he was urged, for he seldom assumes seriously the responsibilities of his office. It would be better usually for all concerned if

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he would be satisfied to stay in his own field and trail along in second place when it comes to politics.

The successful athlete as a student in these days has much to commend him. Of course there is the man who is in college primarily for athletics, who is satisfied merely to pass, who has no intellectual ambitions, and who is willing by any unscrupulous methods to get by. He cares very little how his work is done just so he passes. Such a man, however, is not now common, and he seldom lasts through the college course; somebody gets wise to his methods and he passes on. One such man, whose work was in pretty serious condition, wrote me not long ago. He was anxious that by some act of providence or the faculty he might be made eligible, and when I assured him that this was impossible he replied, "Of course there would be no use of my returning to college if I could not take part in athletics." I felt the same way as he did about it, and suggested that he go to work. It is not of this sort but of the normal man in college of whom I am speaking, who is seriously and honestly preparing himself for the business or profession of life, and who considers athletics a secondary matter. The student who would be an athlete learns first of all that if he would keep up his studies and not neglect his athletic training he has little time to waste; if he would succeed he must learn concentra—tion, he must utilize every available minute. He learns to get his lessons during the vacant hours of the day; he knows that when he comes in at night from practice tired and sore, that he can not afford to loaf much after dinner or to let his mind wander when he gets at his books. He will grow sleepy early

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in the evening from exhaustion, and if he is to be alert and fresh the next day he must get to bed soon. All this, if he is wise, and he often is, teaches him some of the most valuable lessons he can learn in college—the value of concentration and the value of utilizing his spare hours, and these lessons are valuable not only during his undergraduate days but immeasurably more so when he gets out of college into the more trying and strenuous work of life.

More and more the athlete is learning the value of self-control and morality. The young fellow in training learns to control his temper, for he finds often that when he loses control of his temper he loses control of himself. He learns, too, to take adverse criticism without being offended by it, for he soon sees that to take offense gets him nowhere. He learns not to expect praise for work well done, but to be pleased if his efforts do not bring upon him a storm of criticism and reproach. The hard physical exercise which the man in training gets, helps him in the control of his physical passions; if a man wants to live a decent clean moral life, he will find that the strenuous exercise he gets in the development of athletic ability will help him toward this end more than almost anything else. The man, on the other hand, whose moral ideals might not be otherwise high, is not infrequently led to see that he must choose between a self-controlled, temperate, clean life and failure to accomplish his highest possibilities in athletics. In all my experience with undergraduates I have seen few things that would act more vigorously as a discourager of immoral practices than an ambition for success in athletics, I have seen over and over again

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the loose dissipated habits of a young fellow changed completely because he developed a desire for athletic success and was willing to learn self-repression and self-control in order to attain his desire. The athlete, too, who might have a tendency to break training or to yield to the temptation to immoral practices is frequently held somewhat in restraint by public opinion as expressed by the undergraduate crowd. The athlete who would risk the success of his team by indulging in dissipations of any sort would soon find himself, in most college communities, pretty thoroughly in disfavor. Very few of us realize, I imagine, just what part this fear of public opinion has played in our own individual cases in keeping us in the straight moral path; sometimes when we should be inclined to hold that it was our staunch principles which held us back, it was quite as likely the fear of what the neighbors would say if they should find out our irregularities. We say, often, that we don't care what people think of us, but when we say it we are joking.

The training which the athlete gets is not advantageous merely from a physical standpoint; I have many times been convinced that it is least valuable from such a standpoint, because the college athlete is not infrequently overtrained, and when he gets out of college and relaxes this training he finds himself in a critical if not in a dangerous condition. The chief advantage that accrues from athletic training is its effect upon the man's judgment and upon his character. The man wanting to make an athletic team in a big university can not afford to yield easily to discouragement; if he does he will never make the team.

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He has a score of men working for the same place, often, many of them more experienced and better trained than himself. Success often means years of persistent practice with one failure after another. Other things being equal, it is the man who sticks who ultimately succeeds.

I recall a slender green country boy who came up to college from southern Illinois. He had the ambition to do the pole vault, but it seemed at first little more than an ambition. He came out for practice every day during his freshman year, but his accomplishments were rather commonplace. "Plucky little sinner," the coach commented, but that seemed about as far as it went. He might keep on the squad; that was about all. He stuck to it through the sophomore year, gaining form and making gradual progress, but he was still far below the best in his attainments. Most fellows would have dropped gut and taken a place among the rooters on the side lines.

"I really believe Gordon is improving," the coach ventured to remark during the boy's junior year when he was still sticking to his regular practice. "We may hear from him yet." And we did; for he took second place in the spring meet in his junior year, and when he waa a senior he won first place in the Western Conference. He had learned what it means to laugh in the face of defeat and to push on ta the accomplishment of an ambition, and he had set an example of persistence and grit to his college mates which is still a campus tradition. The lesson which he had learned of sticking to a difficult job until it is accomplished, no matter how long it takes, has shown

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itself in the way in which he has fought difficulties since he left college, and in the way in which he has climbed steadily to success. Whenever a boy balks at a difficult task or begins to lose confidence in his ability to make good, I tell him of Gordon.

Dinwiddie had two ambitions when he came to college; one was to become a good engineer and the other was to make the baseball team. He got a good room over-looking the athletic field so that he could get the inspiration from seeing other athletes out practicing, and would need to waste little time in getting into the game when his turn came. He had a good mind, and he was not afraid of work, so that there seemed very little difficulty in the accomplishment of his first ambition, but the second was not so easy to attain. He had been the star player in the little country town from which he came, it is true, but that is a very different matter from playing left field on the varsity. He went out on the first cut from the squad in his freshman year, but he kept on with his practice with his class team and with his fraternity nine. He hung on a little longer in his sophomore year.

"Give it up, kid, and try croquet," some of his pessimistic friends suggested; but he had no intention of giving it up; it was one of the things for which he had come to college, and he was not going to be turned from his purpose. During his junior year he was kept on the squad during the season, but he got no active participation in the game; all his rivals for the position which he wanted to play seemed just a trifle better than he, and he sat silently on the bench all season, waiting eagerly to be called

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out. All this time he studied the game, he listened to the suggestions of the coach, and he kept up his practice religiously throughout the spring and summer. When the men were called out for practice in his senior year he seemed to have got his batting eye.

"You'll make it, Mark," the coach told him encouragingly, "if you keep up that gait," and Mark did make it.

Would any one hold that this persistence, this refusal to accept defeat, this willingness to work and to accept criticism through one season and another without apparent hope of success did not have its effects upon the characters of these men, and does not have its effect upon all men who submit to it?

In addition to this refusal to accept defeat which becomes a part of the character of a real athlete, is the training in judgment and quick decision which a man gets. The athlete has little time to decide on his play in any game. He must gauge a ball, or determine upon a play instantly and his decision must be right or he will endanger or lose the game. He can not stand round looking for a hole in the line; he must be through it the instant he has discovered the weak spot. He must solve his opponents' play almost before it is made and must learn at the same time to assist his fellow players in the work which they are doing. He is trained in accuracy, in alertness of mind, in quick decisions. He can not give up when he is tired, he can not fall out when he is hurt, he must fight the game through to a finish with spirit and enthusiasm. Four years of this sort of training, I am convinced, leaves an ineffaceable stamp upon a young fellow's character and is seen in his business

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methods in after life. It was a very significant fact to me that more than ninety-five per cent. of our athletes who were in attendance at the various Reserve Officers' training camps of the country in preparation for the war, reccived commissions at the close of the camps. They had learned to follow directions, to obey, and to fight.

There is of course an element of danger in most strenuous athletic games, and this danger is often the cause of a great deal of parental opposition to a boy's going into such athletic games, but there is danger in almost any activity that is worth while. A friend of mine in 1917, was talking with a young fellow who had just enlisted in the army and was preparing to go to France.

"Doesn't it frighten you terribly?" she asked, "to think of the danger of your being killed?"

"No," he answered thoughtfully, "there are so many things worse than being killed."

Even though there may be danger of physical injury in most of the strenuous athletic games played in college, there are so many things more to be feared than the possibility of getting hurt, that if I had a son I should be quite willing that he should take that risk in order that he might have a chance at the benefits of the training and the exercise. The parent who wants to keep his son out of football or basket ball because of the danger which he will encounter in these games is frequently encouraging him to be a molly-coddle. The ability to face danger and to endure punishment is what helps to make men out of boys, and it is worth risking because of the strength of character which it develops.
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It is hard for the young fellow who has once got the athletic fever into his blood to get it out. After a hard game or a hard season, especially one followed by defeat, I have often heard an athlete vigorously affirm that he was through with the whole business. There was nothing to it, he avowed, and when he laid aside his athletic togs, he swore he would never put them on again. Perhaps the next season he was tardy in coming out at first, but he could not stay out of the game long. Neither danger, nor pain, nor exhaustion, nor possible defeat daunted him. The game had got into his blood and he had to take it up.

I have a vivid recollection of "Cap" the night after we had been defeated by Chicago. He had played a masterly, though a losing game, and had come away bearing on his body the scars of hattle. I called at his house after dinner to offer him my congratulations on the game he had put up and my eondolences on the unsatisfactory outcome. He was a sad looking figure. His nose had been broken and some one had kicked him in the eye, which was discolored and swollen shut. His whole body was bruised and sore and he was in a furious temper.

"This is my last appearance, pos-i-tív-ly," he growled. "There's nothing in it. A man's a fool to let himself be mangled up the way I am. I'm out of it. Never again for me. If I ever have a son who wants to play football I'll lock him up or strangle him. It's me in the future for the peaceful life."

I said nothing, for I knew the outcome. He was in the next game as chipper as ever, and the next fall he was the first man out on the field, when it came time for practice. He could not keep away from it

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any more than the average man can who has got the spirit of it into his system. When the call to arms came "Cap" was one of the first men to leave the peaceful life that he had so vigorously espoused, to face the hardships and the dangers of war.

In spite of my respect for the athlete and for athletic training, I have always felt that as far as an advertising asset is concerned the athlete has been very much overrated. Few students in these days go to college mainly because of their interest in athletics or in going to college choose an institution mainly because of the reputation of its athletic teams. If the boy himself who is entering college had the entire decision in his own hands the matter might be different, but since, even in the United States, father and mother still have a little to say in determining the place where son shall pursue his education, the character of the athletic teams of the institution under consideration usually plays a minor part. It cannot be left wholly out of consideration, but it is seldom the determining factor in the decision.

"A winning team is a fine advertisement for the school," the undergraduate constantly holds, and I am willing for the sake of argument to grant that it does its part, but I am equally sure that if it were the sort of advertisement that could be "keyed," if we could get from our undergraduates a frank, truthful statement as to the influence which, in each individual case, induced them to select the college of their choice, it would be found that successful athletic teams are in reality rather ineffective in adding to the attendance of any institution. That fact, however, does not in any way lessen my interest in the

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athlete and athletics, nor make me think any the less that the college that puts money generously into the training and development of its athletic teams and that encourages physical exercise generally among its students is acting wisely.

As I have studied the careers of our athletic students after they have graduated and gone out of college I have been convinced that the benefits of athletic training do not end at graduation. It is true that the man who wishes to make a case against the athlete can: present illustrations to show that even though the men engaged in athletics may average well there are still some very notorious dullards who make or try to make our athletic teams. The athlete who flunks is like the Sunday-school superintendent who becomes an embezzler. His intellectual or moral failure, as the case may be, is the more widely advertised and commented upon because of his other relationships. The ordinary student in college may fail and nothing be said of it; when the athlete fails the fact is commented upon at every fraternity and boarding house, is often the subject of serious faculty discussion, and is made the topic for an associated press dispatch in the newspapers. The flunking athlete is like a drunken man in a crowd—he seems far more numerous and attracts far more attention than the quiet sober citizen who goes unobtrusively about his business. For this reason his occasional lack of scholarship is much exaggerated and disproportionately commented upon. It has been my experience in executive affairs in college that it is easier for almost any other man to receive special consideration or special concessions when in scholastic difficulties

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than for the athlete. Whenever it is announced that the man who is asking for mercy or for reconsideration is an athlete there is very likely to be the stiffening of the jaw and the bending backward of the authorities, in order that there may be no thought on the part of any one that they are not walking and acting in accordance with the rule. Perhaps it is just as well so.

The college athlete who has gone out into the more active duties of life is a fighter; in college he has been trained to fight against difficulties, and he carries with him the results of this training. He is not afraid to tackle a hard proposition, he is not easily discouraged, his judgments are more rapid and more accurate than those of other men, and he is willing even in an apparently losing game to make a try—to stick. His athletic training has taught him endurance and has given him a physique which will stand hardships, and nervous strain, and long hours of work. He has usually learned, also, how to take care of his body, and so how to make the most of the physical and mental resources at his command. For these reasons his chances of success in any work which he takes up are greater than those of the man not so trained, and that success is quite generally somewhat in advance of what might be expected from a study of his scholastic record. The effect which his athletic training has had upon his body, and the effect which athletic practice has had upon his character and his mind, all conduce to his energy, his resourcefulness, and his self-reliance and so make for his success. He is likely to get on faster and to go farther than are men of similar ability who have nat had his training.

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The struggles and sacrifices which he made in his undergraduate years are more than compensated for by the returns which come to him in later life.

I have read the most that has been published in recent years concerning the evils of inter-collegiate athletics—the extravagantly large amount of money necessary to support such a system, the confining of athletic training to a very limited number of students, the gambling, drinking, and other moral dissipations incident to big games, but though I have known personally as many undergraduate students, athletes and otherwise, as any college officer in America, I am convinced that these evils have been very much exaggerated. I cannot deny that {{hinc|intercollegiate}} athletics is expensive, and it would be foolish to maintain for a moment that it is not accompanied by abuses and evils—I can think of no other activity, not even religious activities, that is free from them—but in my experience as a director and supervisor of undergraduate activities it has seemed to me that nothing else has done so much as athletics to develop real college loyalty, to unify a heterogeneous undergraduate body, and by giving an outlet for youthful enthusiasm and youthful spirits, to aid in the maintenance of healthy college discipline. It is true that athletic contests have at times been the opportunity for undergraduate outbreaks and disturbances, but these occasions have on the whole been rare and not infrequently a case of "great cry and little wool," of wide newspaper publicity and relatively little foundation for the facts alleged. I am sure that if it were not for the athletic contests and the

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athlete I should as a disciplinary officer have a much harder time than I now have.

There is the argument that the athlete supports a sort of physical aristocracy which maintains a monopoly over athletics and physical exercise and makes it possible for the physically elect only to obtain the exercise that all need. We should develop a system, the promulgators of this argument say, which would force every one into athletic sports and secure regular and pleasant exercise daily for every one in college from the freshman to the President. Such a physical millennium sounds alluring, and the theory is beautiful, but the result is about as likely of attainment as those implied in the theories of our socialist friends; they sound attractive on paper, but they are impossible of realization. In every college with which I am familiar there is a predominating percentage of students and faculty who, unless a chain were put about their necks and they were dragged to the fray would take no part in athletic sports at all. There are even more than we might suppose who take no pleasure in exercise themselves and who find no relaxation in watching other people engaged in sports. Whatever can be done to interest students and faculty in sports generally, I believe is a desirable thing, but such interest is not decreased by the development of athletic teams. As I have seen the athlete his training is worth all that it costs—to him, to the college authorities, and to the undergraduate body as a whole, in the development of character, in discipline, in college loyalty, and in the binding together of the students as a whole.

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{{sc|I caught}} sight of Jack and Eddie and Mac sitting in the Arcade as I passed this morning on my way down town. They had evidently got up too late for breakfast and were "hitting a coke" before they subjected themselves to the strain of a ten o'clock. The last bell had rung, but they were taking their time and giving Eddie opportunity to finish the risqué tale of his last conquest. Mac had already been out of classes this semester for five weeks because of a slight illness, but that seemed to him an asset rather than a liability, for the instructor knowing he had been ill, could not reasonably expect him to get into the work vigorously all at once or to come to classes regularly or on time. Jack had been out to a dance the night before, and not being prepared had cut his nine o'clock, and Eddie was taking the cuts which as a senior he thought himself entitled to. They were good illustrations, these three happy-golucky souls, of the college loafer—irregular, irresponsible, unambitious—the type of men who are the real menace to-day of undergraduate life in college.

It takes a man of some energy to be a real devil, so that the loafer at first seldom gets into anything that is difficult, or dangerous, or not nice; he doesn't initiate things; some one else makes the plan, though he may trail along behind in an escapade and seem to be a real part of the procession. He is a passive,

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talkative being; he loves ease, leisure, sleep, coca cola, cigarettes, chocolate bostons, and girls. He is a stroller, a hanger on. If, as I am writing these paragraphs, I should look out of my window upon the broad green expanse of our back campus, I should catch sight of him walking lazily under the shade of the tall elm trees of Burrill Avenue, or sprawled upon the grass, a girl by his side, a smile on his face, his books and his intellectual obligations forgotten. He knows the last dance step, the latest gossip, and he has seen the last bills at the Orpheum. He would be entirely innocuous if he were not allowed to run at large. The trouble is he infects the crowd.

It is not difficult to understand the environment which conduces to the development of this type of student. At home he has neither been given nor has he assumed any responsibility. He has had no duties, no regular set tasks; he has done no work; often he has been mother's darling. It has usually, at home, been a problem as to what should be done with him in the summer vacation when there was no school, so he loafed around lazy and discontented. He has seldom done well in his preparatory school or high school; he has passed, but neither he nor his parents have had any ambitions for him to be a grind or the valedictorian of his class. If his mother were asked she would probably say, "We are very well satisfied with what Clarence has done in high school; he is not a natural student, and has never been very strong, so that we have never pushed him nor wanted him to {{hinc|over-study}}." And Clarence has done as his parents desired and has never overstudied.

He comes naturally to speak of himself as "no

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student" and to take a certain pride in the fact that this characteristic in some way differentiates him from the common herd of undergraduates who do their work because they like it, or who go at things with energy because it is their duty. He takes his commonplace work as a matter of course, just as many people assume without trying that they can not learn to spell.

"You had a shamefully low average last semester," I remarked to Brinkerhoff the other day, "for a man of your training and ability."

"Well, I'm no student," was his self-satisfied reply, which was only another way of saying, "I'm a hopeless loafer, and you ought to be satisfied that I got through as well as I did." There was no shame on his part, no resolve to do better, simply a resignation to the inevitable.

The loafer in college is not always a boy who has been brought up in luxury; he not infrequently comes from very humble surroundings; but wherever he has been brought up he has never developed any love for work. When he enters college it is without ambition, without any definite purpose or object; he has little idea of what he wants to do, no love of books, no interest in study, no vision of the future. He does not know whether he wants to go north or south, whether he would like to study art or ceramic engineering, whether he would prefer to spend his life as a missionary or as a vaudeville star. Some of the other fellows were coming to college, so he threw a few changes of clothing into a suitcase and came along, just as he might have joined a camping party or taken a hike into the country. Some of the most

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confirmed loafers I have known have been men who had to work for a part of their living. Loafing in college is not, as many people think, a matter of money, but of temperament.

Yesterday a father came into my office to discuss with me the possibility of his son's entering college.

"What course does he want to take?" I asked in order more intelligently to answer his question.

"I don't know," was the reply. "We have not thought much about that. I don't believe George has decided on anything yet."

"What is he interested in? What sort of work or study does he like best?" I continued, trying to get myself square with the intellectual compass.

"He has never shown any special interest in anything yet. We hoped that after he got to college he would develop interest in some line of work."

"Is he in love?" I ventured, determined to get somewhere if possible.

"Well, he certainly does like the girls."

It is this sort, interested in nothing but his senses and his emotions, that develops into the loafer. A boy will seldom show more ambition in college than he has shown at home; if he has had no vision or purpose there, he will be unlikely to find one in college. We do not change our characters by changing our lodging house, and if we have disliked work in Chicago we shall hardly take to it in Champaign.

"You haven't done much for Babb in college," a fellow townsman of his said to me when I was on a visit to the country town from which the freshman referred to came. "He's as lazy and worthless as ever."
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"If you have had him here for nineteen years and have done nothing for him, how can you expect us to reorganize him in six months?" I inquired.

"I thought you were able to do everything in college," he replied. But we are not.

I have found the greatest interest as an executive officer in college in getting the peculiar viewpoint of the loafer. When I call him for irregularity, and if I am shrewd enough to prove to him that these excuses which he has offered were not thought sufficient on his part to keep him from certain social pleasures in which I have seen him indulging, he leans upon the prop of all loafers and asserts that the rules of the college permit a certain number of cuts to all students, and he has not yet exceeded his limit. "Anyway," he goes on, "a fellow can't go to class all the time." One of the most common excuses of the loafer for not attending class is that of not being wakened in time by the proper person. I have a letter now on my desk from a young fellow dropped from college for poor work who says: "A good deal of my trouble was due to the ineffective waking system in our house," meaning that the freshman whose duty it was to come around and wake him up, sometimes went to sleep at the switch. The next most popular excuse for absence is that he was busy studying for another course than the one he cut. It never seems to occur to him that there are regular hours of study far more than adequate for the purposes of even the good student, and that it is seldom if ever necessary to cut class in order to study. Cutting class with him is a habit as regular and as persistent as smoking, for every loafer smokes.
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He either smokes because he puts in so much time loafing that he needs some recreation to keep him from getting lonesome, or he loafs because he has smoked so much that it has robbed him of the energy sufficient to do anything else. The odor of the Fatimas which he has burned up floats across the desk to me as he comes in to ask me for an excuse because of illness; before he steps off the campus he has lighted another to stimulate his waning interest in life, and wherever you meet him,—between dances, at his room, on the street,—he is drawing strength and comfort from a pipe or a cigarette. It is the badge of his fraternity.

"Why do you smoke so much?" I asked Rheims, whose restless manner and putty colored complexion and yellow finger nails told the story of his devotion to Nicotine. "You know it hurts you."

"Yes, I suppose it does; but why do you want to rob a man of all pleasure?" That was too much for me.

It is hard for the loafer to study; there are so many easier, subtler, cleverer ways to get by. He means to do it—to-morrow, Sunday, next week, before the end of the semester,—but he is such an awfully popular fellow, he has so many friends to entertain, so many dates to keep, so many extra-curriculum duties to perform, that he has little or no time to give to study. He borrows your notes which he has been too lazy or too busy to take himself, and never returns them until you go to his room and hunt him up; he questions you about your outside reading and tries to get the gist of its content so that he may be spared the labor of doing it for himself, he sits by you dur-

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ing the quiz hours and stealthily cribs your ideas which he rephrases so that they seem his own. More's the pity, sometimes he does it so well that he gets a better grade than you do who have gone through the assigned reading with puritanic conscientiousness.

The loafer is usually a very charming fellow; he is selfish, but diplomatic and well-mannered. "How does it happen," I asked one of the clan not long ago, "that you do so little work about the fraternity house while Moore is always at it?"

"Moore has no diplomacy," was the reply. "I saw at the start that if I didn't talk back and was always polite and courteous to the fellows, they seldom 'fagged' me; Moore is impudent, and he has to do all the work while the fellows sit around and are amused at my line of talk."

He loves to talk and he generally talks well and knows it. He is usually popular in any crowd, for he has never brought on brain fag through overwork or {{hinc|overstudy}}. He can be found at every fraternity house sitting before the grate fire spinning his yarns to any hour of the night. He dislikes going to bed even more than he dislikes getting up in the morning, and will never think of going so long as he can get some one to keep him company. Not infrequently he has in him some touch of the genius. He has talent without motive power. As I write this sentence my mind drifts back to Jim Watson. "Why don't you stir up Jim?" I asked the president of his fraternity one day, "he might amount to something if he would work."
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"Oh, Jim," was his reply, "Jim's an awfully good fellow; he's charming; no one could say anything cross to Jim. He's an artist; he's a poet; he's a dreamer; he could do anything if he would."

He was correct in his diagnosis; I simply phrased it a little differently; Jim was the most delightfully artistic loafer in college. He was the sort of fellow of whom people were always saying that he would be a great man if he ever got down to work; but he never did, and he's the most commonplace citizen to-day of the country town in which he lives.

Some people argue that college is a good place for the loafer even if he will not do his college work with credit. He learns to know people, he picks up a smattering of useful information through his daily rubbing up against those who do study, and whether he puts forth much effort of his own or not he comes constantly into contact with people of culture and experience and refinement. He is of no great harm to the college, they say, and the college may be of untold benefit to him. Perhaps so.

I remember a number of years ago we had in the University—I had him in fact in some of my own classes—a big lazy loafer who so far as any of his instructors could discover never "cracked" a book. He had one virtue; he never cut a recitation even though he never recited, and he was also an impenetrable wall in football. One day the president of the institution, who at that time had general charge of all delinquents whether in scholarship or in other things, was looking over Mr. Hicks' scholastic record, which was no credit to any one.
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"We can never keep this man," he said to the athletic director, "even though he can play football. I shall have to send him home."

"Perhaps you are right," said the director, "but if you do you will shut him off from any further chance of intellectual improvement. He's an exemplary loafer who for the first time in his life is associating with people of cultivation and of ideals. The University is doing him more good than he is doing it harm, it is helping to make him a man, and so far as I can see he ought to be allowed to stay a little longer." Whether the argument was a specious one or not, the president consented, and the man stayed on and played on. He is a respected successful city banker to-day,—he had money—so that perhaps in this case at least the athletic director was right.

I have myself often been the victim of the charms of these fascinating loafers. In their own houses, and in mine, I have been forced often to yield to the magic of their personality. They are good fellows, many of them; they have within them infinite possibilities, unlimited power, if they would only work.

A good deal has been said and written about the dissipations and immoralities of college life, and much that has been written is false. I have been associated with college students more than half of my life, and I have known thousands of them personally. The undergraduate is not free from the temptations and the evils which other men yield to. There are men in college who drink, there are men who gamble, and there are men whose lives are not clean, as there are in every community, but the sum total of these

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and the evil which they perpetrate is far outweighed by the loafer in college and the vicious influences of which he is the source. It is almost without exception the man who has nothing to do or who having something which he ought to do yet does not do it, who is responsible for the sins and dissipations of college life. It is loafing and lack of a really worthy ambition to give a man balance that leads students into all the other sins and indiscretions of undergraduate life. There is no other evil in college to compare with it, and none so difficult of remedy or of correction.

"I am coming back to college," one of them wrote me this week, "and I know you will be surprised to hear that I do not expect to give you any more trouble."

"If you are intending to go to class regularly, to study faithfully, and to do your work like a man," was my reply, "I shall welcome you with open arms; if you are going to loaf as you have done in the past, I wish to the Lord you would stay where you are."

It is hard for the loafer to reform. Sometimes he can do it in a new environment and under generally new conditions, but the man who has wasted his time in college and who stays out a semester or a year with the hope that he will gain ambition and self-control is often disappointed or disappoints his friends who may have placed faith in him. As soon as he strikes the old crowd and the old campus the spell is on him again; he is like the reformed toper who catches the odor of the highball. Last spring a young fellow who had been out of college a year returned to try

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to finish his work. He had previously been a confirmed loafer who had by strategy and luck barely escaped dismissal.

"I'm sorry you have come back, Baker," I said to him. "I've expended about as much physical and mental energy on you as I think you are entitled to. I should not care to give you a permit to reënter unless I can have some assurance that you are coming back with a definite purpose to do your work faithfully and well." He gave me the assurance, but there was no real enthusiasm in what he did. He cut class and fooled away his time trying, of course, to keep safely within the limit that would bring him passing grades, but he was the same old loafer as before.

"I am hurting no one but myself," is the favorite excuse of every young fellow who by irregular habits is injuring his mind or his body, but the loafer can truthfully make no such assertion. No young fellow loafs long alone; he spends little of his time reading even trashy or vicious books; he is not given to solitude or meditation. He must gather friends about him and they go out together. There never was a loafer in college who did not ruin some one else in order that he might have a pal to accompany him on his daily orgies of pool and billiards and poker, and soft drinks and fussing and vaudeville and the movies and local gossip, or whatever it is with which he whiles away his hours.

"You don't need to be afraid of my leading any one astray," a young fellow not in college said to me when asking my permission to live in one of the fraternity houses.
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"Have you a regular job?" I asked.

"Yes, in the daytime," said he.

"What do you do at night?" I went on.

"Nothing," he confessed.

"Then you are a bad man to live in a house where students are supposed to study at night, for nobody does nothing alone."

I said at the outset that the loafer very seldom initiates things, and this is true, but he falls easily into disreputable habits. The student who does not spend his time in study, is not at all likely to be spending it in making his own character or that of the world better. Most of the men who have failed or gone to the bad in college have done so because they had learned to loaf. There are few things so good for the developing and strengthening of character as work. If one has duties to occupy the major part of his waking hours, he is pretty safe.

The loafer is a far greater foe to scholarship than is the man of what we ordinarily speak of as distinctly bad habits. Even if he does his work, and very frequently he is lucky or clever enough to pass, he has no desire to do well.

"A pass is as good as one hundred to me," I hear him say repeatedly, and he preaches the foolish doctrine so assiduously that many innocent and inexperienced freshmen believe him. I said foolish doctrine, for not many practices have succeeded in getting more men out of college than this one of calculating how near one can come to failing and yet pass.

"I don't think I should have been dropped," a loafer pleaded with me. "I meant to pass; though I did not care to get a high grade; in point of fact the

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way I had it figured out I did pass, but the instructor evidently did not figure as I did."

"Evidently not; they don't always," was all I could say.

The loafer is a hindrance to all kinds of progress. If he gets elected to office it is for the honor and not with the idea of doing any work, and the interests in his keeping go to the bow-wows; if he is on a committee he is late when it meets or he never comes at all; if he is a member of an organization, he lies down sluggishly and retards all advancement.

I was at a loss to know last fall why an organization in which I was interested was getting on s0 badly.

"Who is your president?" I asked one of the members.

"Baird," was the reply, "and he's too lazy to do anything himself and too conceited and self-satisfied to let any of us do what ought to be done." Most loafers in office play the part of the dog in the manger admirably. The loafer has done more to undermine the faith of sensible, practical people in the value of a college training than any other class of student. Men can pass over without comment a dozen first rate fellows whose lives have been broadened and whose ideals have been strengthened and whose usefulness to the community has been increased by their college training, but the loafer never gets by them. He is an argument hard to meet.

I was trying to persuade Old Man Elliott who runs the hardware store in the country town where I spent my childhood that he ought to send his son to college. The boy had done well in high school; he was

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ambitious, and the old man could well afford the money. I was getting on pretty well when Bill Haws in golf togs ambled down the street leisurely, a cigarette in his mouth and a vicious looking bull dog tugging at the chain which he was holding. Bill had registered at Michigan once and had been fired because he wouldn't work. The old man looked at him a moment and shook his head. "Do you think I want my boy to look like that?" he asked. And yet Bill Haws had not been injured by college. He had been a loafer always; it had been bred in him by his indulgent father and by his foolish mother, but the college got the credit for his unambitious lethargic life, as in such cases it always will.

When President Lincoln was being beset and reviled for retaining General Grant, whom many considered incompetent, at the head of the Northern Army, he replied, "I can not spare this man; he fights." It is this sort that the college needs—men who have a purpose and determination to carry it through if it takes the skin off, men who will fight the hardest intellectual battles stubbornly and persistently. There is no success, there is no ultimate salvation for any excepting through hard, persistent regular work; and for that reason, it seems to me there is no place in college for the loafer. Especially do I feel that this is true in a state university. The young fellow who goes to such an institution pays in tuition scarcely a tenth of what his education is costing the state. Every wash woman and laborer and artisan, every farmer and clerk and merchant in the state is paying a part of the cost of this young man's education, and is doing this with the thought, if he

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has thought of it at all, that the student should become a better citizen. Such an institution is no place for loafers; it is a place for men with ambitions, with a purpose, with willingness to work and a desire to make the most of themselves and to do what they can for the upbuilding and the betterment of the communities into which they go. The quicker a college gets rid of its loafers the better it will be for the loafers and for the college.

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{{sc|The}} two sorts of activities in college life which invariably make the front page are the activities of athletics and the activities of social life. Athletics, of course, occupies the center of the stage, but the "fusser" is a close second to the athlete when those engaged in college activities are bidding for first mention in the newspapers. In the case of these two activities, as in many another, prominence brings a flood of adverse criticism, and the two things in the life of the undergraduate student of to-day in the big universities which are most severely railed at and criticized by the newspapers and by the public in general are inter-collegiate athletics and the students' social life.

Everybody, including those who live in college towns and those who are in the state at large, seem to agree that the social life of the undergraduate in college is excessive, that he goes too much; in fact it is quite generally believed by a great many that his life consists of very little else than social pleasure, and that he spends his time not in study, as he should do, but in running from one social orgie to another. The young women, especially at a co-educational institution where there are usually several times as many men as women, are thought to be intemperate in social matters to the extent of breaking down the health of a large percentage of them

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and of permanently acquiring a sort of social delirium tremens. Local women, at mothers' meetings and at afternoon sewing circles or bridge whist parties, look very serious and shake their heads knowingly when they talk of the awful social goings on over at the college.

"Believe me," some maiden of uncertain years affirms, "I wouldn't let a daughter of mine do as those girls do. It's scandalous, and would ruin any constitution."

Now the real fact is that the average young woman whom I know in college, and my acquaintance is not limited, has very little social life, and the average man, and I know thousands of them, has still less. Rather than there being too much social life, as many allege, I am convinced that there is too little. The trouble lies in the fact that what there is, is too restricted in character and is entered into by too few people. A study of the dances given at the institution with which I am connected will show two things: granted that the number given is large yet it is true that never more than ten per cent. of the whole student body is dancing at any week-end and often not one half this number, and it is true also that twenty-five per cent. of the student body does at least ninety per cent. of the dancing. The social work is unevenly distributed.

I have spoken of dancing as if it were the main social activity in which college students indulge. In an inland college town in the Middle West this is not far from the fact, though there are athletic games which bind more strongly than any other activity the undergraduate body into a more unified group;

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there are the church sociables which reach a considerable number of students, and there are also vaudeville and moving picture shows which at one time or another lure most of the students within their doors. Where the college is not situated upon a river or a lake there can be no skating, no tobogganing, no boating, and no bathing, excepting of a strictly domestic character. The undergraduate, who at the week-end, when his college work is done, is looking for somewhere to go with a young woman for pleasure or relaxation is practically always limited to dancing or to the local moving picture or vaudeville shows, and of these two opportunities the former presents the more refinement and the less evil and is most frequently taken advantage of.

Both of these forms of social pleasure seem to the unthoughtful onlooker indulged in to excess by the undergraduate body in general because he does not analyze the constituents of the crowd that make up the patrons of these social activities. He hears the {{hinc|rag-time}} music pounded out as he passes a dance-hall in the evening, he sees the crowds pouring out of a vaudeville play-house, and he concludes that students in general put in most of their time either at a vaudeville show or at a dance. He does not stop to caleulate that perhaps not five per cent. of the student body is dancing and not ten per cent. at the theater, nor does he conclude, as he should, as he walks through the student district and sees the student lodging houses lighted from cellar to garret that on almost any Friday or Saturday evening of the week at least seventy-five per cent. of the undergraduates are in their rooms after eight o'clock not engaged in

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any active social life at all excepting such as one may enjoy through associations with the fellows in his own lodging house.

If the observer who believes that the social life at any college or university is excessive would study for a time the composition of the crowd that frequents the vaudeville theaters and moving picture shows, if he would for a time regularly attend the college dances, as I have done for the past twenty years, he would see that it is largely the same people who support the shows and who are familiar with the regular change of bill from week to week and from day to day. I have talked often with the men who furnish the music for these shows, and they all admit that there is a deadly similarity in the crowds that come daily to these shows. The undergraduate gets the show habit as he may acquire the habit of smoking or drinking, and one habit is as dominating as the others. I imagine that very few college officers have attended more student dances during the last twenty years than I have, and the thing that constantly surprises me when I do attend is the limited number of students which frequents these parties. It is possible before I go to a dance to guess correctly the names of ninety per cent. of the fellows who will be there. Of course, if it is a fraternity dance the problem is easy, for the attendants at such a party will be the active members of the organization, but even when I am invited to the Junior Prom or the Sophomore Cotillion or the Military Ball or a Union Dance I have come to know the dancing crowd, and I can safely predict who will be in the grand march before I get into the reception line.
{{nop}}

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Only a few weeks ago I was discussing this same situation with one of our college officers who was deploring the fact that our girls were going out to parties to an extent that was proving ruinous to the health of many of them, and she thought the University should pass some pretty rigid regulations to control this situation.

"How many of our girls," I asked, "do you think make up the list of these social debauchees? How many ought to be locked up or sent home or put into a sanitarium?" She thought for a moment and then replied, "Forty, perhaps," and then thinking again, "twenty would very likely include all of them." And this is less than two per cent. of our girls. I am of the opinion that not more than that proportionate number of our young men are excessively given to dancing and similar forms of social activity. I am sure that seventy-five per cent. of the undergraduates whom I have known have too little social life; instead of the social activities of our college being intemperate, the fact is that they are controlled by a monopoly of a very limited number of people. Five per cent. of our students, to state the case generously, have too much social life, twenty per cent. have about what normal young people require, and the remainder of the undergraduate body have too little, and so get out of college crude and inadequately trained in social matters.

This condition of ill-training is intensified considerably in an institution like the state university, because of the large number of technical students in attendance, many of whom are more interested in acquiring information than in getting a real educa-

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tion, and who look upon time as wasted unless it is put in in the acquiring of cold facts which may later be put to use in the earning of money. Graduates of city technical high schools and junior colleges who continue their technical training in college too often know and care very little about anything which does not seem to them practical, and social finesse they think is for girls and liberal arts students. They fail to see that as much money even, if that is all they want, is earned through finesse and courtesy and an ingratiating approach as through a knowledge of facts, or if that is putting it a little strongly, at least it may be said that no matter how thoroughly one may be trained in information or facts these are seldom of much use to a man in any business unless he can get the ear of some one and hold it without physical force or intimidation.

I believe that colleges in general give too little attention to the social training of their students. The authorities have the feeling usually that there is too much social life, that young men and women will look after these things themselves, and that the best thing the college authorities can do is to sit on the lid and discourage excess as much as possible. Thea authorities, also, are not unlikely to feel that study and social pleasures are antagonistic, forgetting the adage that all work and no play makes for intellectual slowness, and that every normal human being needs some social exercise. The feeling that every student will see to it himself that he gets all he needs might be correct if social opportunities were open in college to all students alike, and if all students had equal

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interest in these things and equal cleverness in adapting themselves to new social conditions.

It is the regular fusser, however, well dressed and "high man" with the ladies, who in every college community with which I am familiar, gives more time to society than to his studies, and monopolizes, to the exclusion of his sturdier companions, the social life of the college. Every organization has one or two such men, and they are so adroit in getting rapidly from one place to another that they seem much more numerous than they really are. Sometimes they devote themselves to one young woman exclusively, though this concentrated devotion is seldom for long, and almost never results in anything serious or remotely related to matrimony; sometimes like the busy bee they flit from flower to flower never stopping long enough in any one parlor to form more than a speaking acquaintance with the inmates. Some fussers try hard to get their names into every social pot that is boiling.

I have a young freshman in mind—Harold I think his fond mother named him. He goes tearing down the street while I am at breakfast to meet Ethel and to carry her books to an eight o'clock, at eleven I see him riding with Grace in her dual power car, and at three, as I look out of my window upon the back campus, I catch a glimpse of him strolling languorously with Blanche. I have no doubt that before dinner he has paid court to other susceptible hearts and that by bed-time he has sat in the easy chair at one sorority house at least. He is a hard worker, this callow young freshman, but it is not at

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his books, and unless he takes the Dean's warning he is not long for this intellectual world.

The fusser who devotes himself to one girl is quite interesting. I do not mean here to include the young man who is mature enough to know his own mind, who is far enough along in college to think seriously of the future, and whose prospects are sufficiently definite to make it possible for him intelligently to contemplate marriage. This class of men is not a very large one but, however many or few there are, I leave them out of the question. The man I have in mind is the one who is playing with emotion, who thinks or imagines that he is in love, and who grows as restless if he must be separated from the object of his melodramatic adoration for a few hours as does an inveterate smoker deprived for a half day of his cigarettes. Such a man can never be a student. If he gets out his books for an hour in a half-hearted effort to absorb a little information he is likely to accomplish nothing. His mind wanders to the last walk he took with her or to the next engagement he has made, and his eyes are fixed dreamily upon her framed picture on his desk. He may stick to the books for a few minutes, but it is not long until he remembers, perhaps, that she is leaving Lincoln Hall at this hour, and he rushes out to meet her and to—walk home with her.

Such a man while in this state of mind has an even chance of flunking, and no chance at all of doing respectable work. He would be more useful running a soda fountain than in college and very little use anywhere. I have occasionally tried to reason with him, but I can recall very few cases where I

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accomplished much worth while. The social enthusiast who thinks he is in love is not amenable to reason; such a disease as his must usually run its course, must wear itself out; there is very little that either medicine or advice can accomplish, and yet if anything could be done for him it would be by a physician or by a psychologist.

The game in which the fusser is sitting is not a cheap one; if a fellow is to stay with it long he will need to have a good income. There are parties and cabs and flowers to be considered; there are automobile rides and all sorts of excitements to be paid for, and refections and confections innumerable to be provided. He must constantly be on the alert for fear some other more adroit or more generous suitor should get ahead of him. It will not seem surprising, then, that the fusser is an easy borrower, constantly behind in his bills, and regularly overhead in debt. Not even poker played by a man of bad judgment, inept at the game, is more disastrous to an undergraduate's monthly allowance than is the game which the fusser is trying to play. I was talking not long ago to a father who has two sons in college to each of whom he gives the same monthly allowance, and this allowance is not an ungenerous one. His elder son was always in debt, always complaining of the stringency of the money market; the younger boy was satisfied, solvent, and could always show a respectable balance in the bank. The father was disturbed and unable to explain the trouble. I assured him that the explanation was a very simple one; his elder son was playing the social game; he had joined the sentimental army of fussers. When

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the father showed an inclination to doubt the accuracy of my diagnosis of his son's case I drew out a good sized florist's bill against the boy, long overdue, which had come to me in the morning mail from a local establishment with the polite annotation that any effort which I should be willing to make in bringing about a speedy settlement of the claim would be gratefully received. The father was convinced.

It is the fusser who monopolizes the organized social life of every college. He is seen at every party, glued to a single partner throughout the evening. He may come late, but he never wants to go early, ten o'clock may find him yawning, but midnight sees him freshening up remarkably, and if the party is a formal one and is allowed to run until one or two o'clock, he is just getting his second wind at these hours and is eager to continue his toddling until sun-up. It is he who opposes any attempts to regulate the hour of bringing parties to an end on the ground that such regulations interfere with the personal rights of individuals. The longer the party runs, he thinks, the more fun it is, for he never allows his real college work to interfere with his studies. He would drop dead from fright if he contemplated continuous study for six hours, but eight or nine hours of continuous dancing gives him great exhilaration. The fusser in college reminds me most vividly of the country greenhorns in pioneer days who felt that it was a waste of time to call on a young woman on Sunday evening unless they could sit around yawning until three o'clock in the morning.

It is he, too, who frequently breaks into the man-

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agement of social functions, since by being on the managing committee of a party he thereby secures free admission and so cuts down his expenses. If this graft includes free cabs and free candy for the girl, so much the better; he is just that much ahead.

The fusser, stretching his legs before the grate fire in his lodging house, lying in the barber's chair getting a face massage, or sitting on the front porch watching the crowd go by, has but one topic of conversation. He is not interested in the supremacy of a democratic government in Russia, or in athletics, or in food conservation; he is not interested in labor agitations, or in his studies; or in anything that makes for the betterment of the community or the state; his only topic of thought and conversation is girls, singly and in groups, individually and collectively. What he doesn't know about girls has not been written or thought of or talked about. He knows them all absolutely, and he has them all tabulated and cataloged and properly estimated. He usually does not agree with you at all in your own personal estimate of any individual young woman in question and is sure that if you had had his experience you would know a deal sight more than you do. He knows a lemon from a peach in any garden of girls in which he may be wandering, and he is eagerly willing to give you the benefit of his skilled judgment. You may be bored by his talk after you have listened to him for a half hour, but you could not in reason doubt his taste or his conclusions.

I have seen a healthy, enthusiastic freshman come home from a pleasant happy evening with a sensible normal girl have all the joy and enthusiasm taken

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out of him by the knowing fusser to whom he confided the details of his call. The poor freshman is pitied, laughed at for his taste, and told that he has been wasting his time upon a "dead one." It is the fusser who sets the styles in girls as well as in dancing and in social forms and conventions.

The fusser is a social aristocrat. It annoys him to meet at any social function one whom he does not know or who is not in his own particular social set. If he is a fraternity man, and he very frequently is, it galls him to have to associate with "barbs"; if he is a liberal arts student he feels annoyed at having to come in contact with the cruder "ags." If he goes to a dance, he clings to his partner throughout the evening; he avoids bourgeoisie crowds of common undergraduates, he considers any general college function cheap and vulgar; he likes best to get into a small exclusive organization for social activities where one does not meet so many uninteresting people whom one does not know or care for. Anything that makes for social democracy he discourages or frowns upon, and if by mistake he stumbles into a democratic social gathering, he is unspeakably bored or gets a lot of sport out of the experience by taking his place at a distance, not entering with any heartiness into the pleasures under way, and by making fun of whatever is done or of whoever comes along. He looks upon the whole performance as a crude, vulgar jam which affects him only to give him ennui or pain.

I was talking to the president of one of the most prominent of our undergraduate organizations at a Union dance last spring about these very matters.

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He had spoken to no one apparently during the whole evening excepting the young woman over whom he had been hovering until he condescended to give me a word and a hand-shake. "These parties are a horrible bore," he ventured, "one never meets any one whom he cares to know or to associate with," and the young woman with him simperingly assented to the doctrine. His object in speaking to me, I found, was to ask my advice and to obtain my consent to his organization of a little group of men, a kind of a social monopoly, which would make it unnecessary for him to come into contact with any excepting the most select—he to make the selection. I tried to show him the advantage of a wide acquaintance, the opportunities for training and improvement in the democratic associations which were open to him in just such social functions as he was then a part of; but he could not see it; it did not appeal to him; he was altogether selfish and narrow in his social activities; he hated the crowd. He was a good illustration of the typical fusser, who desires to restrict and dominate the social life of college for his own advantage and his own narrow, petty, selfish pleasures.

There are a great many young women in our co-educational institutions who encourage this type of man. He keeps the furniture in sorority houses dusted and polished through his various calls; he contributes chocolate bon bons to satisfy the feminine craving for saccharine; he has a fluent flattering tongue, and he is ready to play the gallant at a moment's notice. He so well satisfies the social needs of the moment that it seems useless to many so-

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cially nervous girls to encourage the friendship of a solider and a less showy man, for fear they will have less social excitement and fewer opportunities to make social engagements. The popular girl and: the fusser in college are both of a piece and together do much to spread a false idea of what the actual social life is of the average young person in college; both should be eliminated wherever it is possible.

The fusser in college is a social menace. His purpose in enrolling as an undergraduate is not to accomplish really good honest college work; the college is for him simply the theater in which he is to have a chance to stage a little social drama in which he will be the star actor. He wants to professionalize and commercialize the social life of college. All he sees in it is an opportunity to make money or to have a regular and continuous good time.

"I don't expect my son to do much work in college," a foolish father said to me a few years ago. "I want him to have a little social life, to enjoy himself, to acquire polish. He'll get plenty of chance to work after he leaves college."

"And he'll probably leave college very quickly," I added, for the man whose object in being in college is to get into society, very soon lags behind intellectually and either withdraws of his own volition, or is sent away. The man who gets no social training in college is missing one of the most important byproducts of college life, but the man who gets little or nothing else has wasted his undergraduate years.

The college that does not concern itself with the social life of its students, that does not in some way control or direct that life so that no one will be shut

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out from opportunities for social training and social pleasures is making a grave mistake. The college that without making an effort to change matters allows its social life to be restricted and controlled by a small group of social butterflies is committing a crime. I am sure that in the large institutions of which we regularly read in the newspapers, the alleged social dissipations, accounts of which are constantly making the front page, are indulged in by a very small per cent. of the whole body of undergraduates. It is the social aristocrat of whom, thank heaven, there are not many, who dominates and controls the social life of every college with which I am familiar, to the exclusion of the great body of students who most need the training which comes from such an experience. There are in every college scores or hundreds of young men and women who are too shy and too inexperienced to form a social world of their own, whose social instincts are being repressed, who are being shut out from the life which should be freely open to them, and who are starving for a normal social life. College authorities should be wide enough awake to see the situation and to meet it, the social autocracies in college should be overthrown, and every undergraduate should be offered a fair chance for social training and social education./last/

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