Page:The Fraternity and the College (1915).pdf/210

 ing him good night, and I could not help but ask myself what he would be doing when he really reached manhood. Besides the extravagance, the struggle to emulate all the social gyrations of adult life which these youngsters engage in, there is often I have no doubt real dissipation, for the step from extravagance to dissipation is only a short one. I have more than enough examples of the high school fraternity man who has brought with him to college all the evil results of drinking, gambling, and disease acquired through his relationship in his high school fraternity. But even if this story of dissipation were not true, beginning so early to run the social gamut robs the child of many of the real social pleasures to which he is later entitled, and for which his taste has been sated by his too easy and too intemperate indulgence. If the fraternity in the high school were an organization for children, I should not so much complain; it is, however, an organization as I have seen it in which children imitate all the social indiscretions of adults.

In college I have had considerable opportunity to observe the young man after he has graduated from the high school fraternity and has begun his college career, and my criticism of the high school fraternity man is based for the most part upon the fact that his life in the high school fraternity seems not to have fitted him to get the most out of