Page:The Fraternity and the College (1915).pdf/85

 When I was a small boy I remember that a merchant of the country town near which I lived offered a prize of twenty-five dollars and the minister's fee to any couple who would be married in his shop window at noon on the Fourth of July. Somebody accepted the offer and got the money, and to this day I never see a fraternity man capering about the campus engaged in some of the "horse play" incident to an initiation but that I think of that couple—crude, illiterate, without sensitiveness—standing in that public place before the laughing, jeering, unsympathetic crowd to have performed the most sacred and holy rite of marriage; and I always hang my head a little in shame.

As to the arguments in favor of "rough house," I do not believe that any man was ever permanently helped by it. Even though a man should prove himself to have a "streak of yellow" in him, that fact, as I have said never bars him. If he be too "fresh," the rough treatment may calm him for the time being, but he bobs up serenely at the next initiation, fresher than ever, and keen to beat up the defenseless brother who has come after him. If there are exceptions to this statement I do not now recall them. If the treatment were carried into the sophomore year, and the fresh or incorrigible sophomore were subject to discipline, the case might be different. The freshman knows,