Page:The Fraternity and the College (1915).pdf/90

 payment may be evaded or deferred. It is ordinarily as unwise to go into a fraternity with the idea that the cost of living will thus be reduced as it is to enter matrimony with the thought that it will cost no more to support a family than an individual. With us at the University of Illinois the fraternity man is likely to be called upon to expend twenty per cent more than if he had remained outside of the organization, and if he develops popularity and contracts the joining habit, it may cost him considerably more than this.

The payment of bills and the meeting of personal financial obligations is quite as often a matter of habit as of monthly income. So far as I have observed, the man who is broke in college, who allows his bills to go unpaid, or who lets his fraternity brothers meet his obligations is not more punctilious about such matters when he leaves college and begins to earn a regular income. I held for five years the notes of a fraternity man given to the chapter for board, and though the man was soon drawing a good enough salary to enable him to marry, he has not up to this time been getting enough to make it possible for him to pay his old board bill.

Every organization has a longer or shorter list of these grafters whose pocket books and whose memories are short, who are careless or generous with their own money and who feel no compunc-