Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/184

 180 are foreign. The greatest stimulus to effort is success, and the love of conquest in competition will continue indefinitely to incite students to activity in apparent disregard of utilitarian ends; but with all due allowance for this well-known fact in human nature, popular ideals have changed to such an extent that the maintenance of the honor system must be based on a foundation different from that which maintained it during its early development.

A college degree involves an expenditure of much labor, and often of money that the student can ill afford. In preparing for his examinations he is at times compelled to grapple with topics that are unattractive, subjects that would be sedulously disregarded if they were not prescribed as requisites for the degree sought. If credit can be secured for success without full payment in labor, if deception can be practised for the avoidance of irksome tasks, is such procedure different from current practise in the world of business? Can the student be expected to rise in the college class-room above the ordinary standards of honor in society, in the street or on the athletic field? If the most conspicuous leaders in politics, the organizers of great business corporations, the presidents of railroads and insurance companies, grow rich and prosperous by taking advantage of their opportunities to appropriate unearned dividends, to concentrate on the favored few what belongs to the unprotected multitude, is it remarkable that a student under temptation should profit by such lessons and make the best of an opportunity to win an unearned degree, or secure unearned credit for an examination by misrepresentation? The honor system in college is merely an application of the standards of Washington and Jefferson and Lee in political life. If such standards are too antiquated and simple for twentieth-century politics and finance, nothing can maintain them in the twentieth-century college.

But the honor system is not yet extinguished, hopeless as may be the outlook for it in some quarters. Its existence in any institution of learning is possible only where the demand comes from the majority of the students rather than from the faculty. If such a demand is based on local tradition alone it is doomed to inevitable extinction. No tradition can survive in opposition to the consensus of contemporary thought and feeling. But it has its reason for existence, quite aside from tradition, in the sense of justice and fair play. The majority of young men under normal conditions are disposed to uphold what they conceive to be just. In general society penal laws are necessary to restrain criminals, and the criminal is the exception. The college criminal who cheats in the performance of college duties is found in every college, but he too is exceptional. If he and his friends are so active as to necessitate penal laws that imply hardship to the student body as a whole, the majority have a right to demand the expulsion of the offender.