Page:The Fraternity and the College (1915).pdf/172

 should give them, too, a knowledge of the needs of undergraduates, their habits, their weaknesses, and the methods of influencing them. If the fraternity has faults no one is in a better position than the alumni to correct them, and no one is in a better position than are these men to set the fraternity right before outsiders, for having been out in the world a while they know what the world thinks and says of fraternities and ought to be able to meet the varied objections that are made to them.

"I don't like your fraternities," one of our old graduates said to me not long ago. "When I was in college we had only the literary societies, and they taught a man something, and developed a really democratic spirit." Now I know very well, because I had belonged to the same literary society that he had been a member of, at a time when fraternities were not allowed in the University of Illinois, that the literary societies here, as is the case in many other places now, were quite exclusive, were not democratic, and that they controlled college politics with an absolute completeness that would never be attempted by the modern fraternity. My friend did not know the college fraternity, which is in fact very similar in many respects to the literary society as he knew it, and he had forgotten the character of the organization