Page:Discipline and the Derelict (1921).pdf/29

 Men ultimately see this fact and admit it. "The best thing you ever did for me," one of our graduates said to me not long ago, "was to send me away from college a year. I thought at the time that it was severe, that it would ruin my chances of finishing my course, that it would break off all friendly relations between myself and my parents, but it braced me up; it gave me the determination to make good; it made a man of me."

I remember one Christmas morning, years ago, when a young freshman and his broken, tearful mother sat at my fireside trying to gather up the fragments of what seemed to them a ruined life and trying to gain courage to face the world. The boy had had very meager resources; he had been hard pressed not only for the comfortable, pleasure-giving things which most boys have, but often even for the necessities of life. Opportunity presented itself, and he had yielded to the temptation to steal from the gymnasium lockers of other students. He had been detected, arrested, lodged in jail, and fined. Now he was out of college and was going home. It was a sad hour we spent together trying to look facts in the face and to plan a sane future, and it seemed, somehow, a pretty hopeless hour. I urged him to go somewhere else and start again, and he promised to try. A few years later I received an invitation to the Commencement exercises of a reputable western college, and within it a card bearing his name. Two years ago he came to see me at home-coming time. He had done well in college, he was married, and he was doing what he could to make the world wiser and better as principal of a reputable high school.