Page:The Fraternity and the College (1915).pdf/116

 that our fraternities have more political and social unity than they formerly had. Political lines are still sharply drawn, and it seldom matters if two rival fraternities each do have members in the same intra-fraternity organizations; that fact does not keep the fraternities from lining up with the special interests which have attracted them for the last decade. A few evenings ago I was taking dinner with a fraternity which has for years been the political enemy of a second one with whom I had dined the previous evening. A junior in each belonged to the same extra-fraternity organization. It was interesting to me to see that although these two juniors were apparently warm friends, the general feeling of antagonism of those two fraternities as groups was as strongly marked as it had been ten years ago and before the intra-fraternity group had been thought of. In truth I am not at all convinced that this fact is to be deplored, and that complete unity would be an unmixed good. I believe that a healthy rivalry is a help, and that it would be a bad thing utterly to eliminate fraternity divisions. If the time should come when, in any institution, all the fraternity men should be on one side of a question, and all the "barbs" on the other, I should fear for the future and the influence of fraternities in that institution. A certain amount of disagreement and a certain difference of action is likely to continue and is