Page:Discipline and the Derelict (1921).pdf/52

 Matrimony seems to be thought an adequate excuse for all sorts of financial delinquencies, since fully seventy-five per cent. of those students who have availed themselves of the advantages of our loan funds in the past, find it the only excuse they have to offer for not meeting their obligations on time. So often is the excuse given that I have recently had inserted in the application blank which students fill out when asking for a loan, this question, "Do you contemplate marrying soon?" In all this that I have related something seems to me wrong. Is it our system, or our teaching, or is it that the student who makes the loan has an inadequate conception of his obligation, or does marriage like war constitute an adequate and legitimate excuse for a man's not meeting his financial obligations promptly?

There is another class of borrower, however, in college whom most undergraduates who have soft hearts and easy purse strings, and whom all college officials are acquainted with. These men are those who do not wish to take advantage of the more formal methods of obtaining help through the regular loan funds established by the institution, but who are only temporarily insolvent and who are expecting checks on the next mail or legacies at the convening of the next term of court. I had a man ask me for a loan once who had an aged grandfather upon whose death he was expecting rather generous returns. I had the strength of character to refuse the request, and though that was years ago, at last reports grandfather was as hale and hearty as ever.

These men seldom want a great deal, but they want it at once to meet the pressing obligation or to catch