Page:Discipline and the Derelict (1921).pdf/124

 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-