Page:Discipline and the Derelict (1921).pdf/103

 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 expensvieexpensive [sic] 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 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