Page:The Fraternity and the College (1915).pdf/60

 This enforced studiousness and regularity of life has two results. Being with their books a considerable number of hours a day and having no strenuous prejudices against carrying their work, it is impossible that they should not learn something; so fraternity freshmen come out at the end of each semester with grades that average somewhat higher than do those of freshmen outside of such organizations. So far the result is excellent.

The second result seems to me not so good. The freshman has not always liked the restrictions which have been placed upon him in the fraternity house. Released from them completely as he usually is at the end of the freshman year he feels often much as a man might who is allowed to break training or who has been let out of prison, and his tendency is frequently to go to the opposite extreme. Two very battered looking freshmen were brought to me a few weeks ago by a city policeman who had found them in a state of intoxication trying to make their way home from one of the disreputable districts down town. They were, on the whole, decent fellows of good reputation. One had in fact earlier in the year broken his pledge to a fraternity because, as he told me, some of the men drank more than he thought right or good for them. Their only reason for being in the condition in which they were found was, as they tried to explain it to me, because they had been kept in