Page:Discipline and the Derelict (1921).pdf/197

 "Have you a regular job?" I asked.

"Yes, in the daytime," said he.

"What do you do at night?" I went on.

"Nothing," he confessed.

"Then you are a bad man to live in a house where students are supposed to study at night, for nobody does nothing alone."

I said at the outset that the loafer very seldom initiates things, and this is true, but he falls easily into disreputable habits. The student who does not spend his time in study, is not at all likely to be spending it in making his own character or that of the world better. Most of the men who have failed or gone to the bad in college have done so because they had learned to loaf. There are few things so good for the developing and strengthening of character as work. If one has duties to occupy the major part of his waking hours, he is pretty safe.

The loafer is a far greater foe to scholarship than is the man of what we ordinarily speak of as distinctly bad habits. Even if he does his work, and very frequently he is lucky or clever enough to pass, he has no desire to do well.

"A pass is as good as one hundred to me," I hear him say repeatedly, and he preaches the foolish doctrine so assiduously that many innocent and inexperienced freshmen believe him. I said foolish doctrine, for not many practices have succeeded in getting more men out of college than this one of calculating how near one can come to failing and yet pass.

"I don't think I should have been dropped," a loafer pleaded with me. "I meant to pass; though I did not care to get a high grade; in point of fact the