Page:Discipline and the Derelict (1921).pdf/194

 "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