Page:Discipline and the Derelict (1921).pdf/195

 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