Page:Discipline and the Derelict (1921).pdf/159

 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 relationshpisrelationships [sic], 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-