Page:The Fraternity and the College (1915).pdf/138

 lege. It is largely the divided interest which brings about the result. He has two places to study, two sets of social interests, two homes, and he is loyal to neither.

"How are your town boys coming on?" I asked, a few days ago, an officer of one of our fraternities which has made a practice of pledging a rather large number of the local high school boys. "Wretchedly," he answered pessimistically. "We've never had one that was worth the struggle we made to get him." I could pick out a few illustrious exceptions during the last ten years, but as I went over in my mind the men coming from the local high schools who had been connected with his fraternity, I was forced to agree that in his statements he was on the whole pretty safely within the limits of truth. The too frequent result is that the active brothers who live in town either loaf between home and the fraternity, and so develop into lazy indifferent students who soon withdraw on their own initiative or at the suggestion of the college authorities, or they develop into serious students who stay close at home and do their work, neglecting pretty completely their obligations to the chapter. In neither case are they of much real advantage to the growth and development: of the fraternity excepting in so far as the organization is able to shine from the reflected glory of the good student's scholastic