Page:The Fraternity and the Undergraduate (1923).pdf/143

 actress, and I expected to see an excellent play. The setting of both was beautiful and the acting good, but in each play the heroine after a fierce hand-to-hand struggle with the heavy villain barely escaped public rape upon the stage.

The effect of such scenes upon growing boys and young men can not at best be very wholesome. The mother of one of our freshmen said to me only a few days ago that in company with her son she recently attended one of the so-called better class plays of this sort. "If these are the best," she said, "I shudder at the thought of what the worst is, for the whole thing was so vulgarly suggestive and so common that I wondered how boys of any refinement could sit through such a performance." And, sad to relate, the boys do not make an effort to choose the best, but the raciest.

The actual and ultimate effect upon the morals of those who frequent these plays is bad, but, perhaps, is not so great as one might at first think. A few, no doubt, fall under the baneful influences of the vulgar suggestions which are bandied about. We hear more often than we would wish of the irregular relations which are carried on or which are attempted to be carried on between undergraduates and the performers in the vaudeville cast, but these experiences are relatively infrequent, I am sure. The large influence upon