Page:The Fraternity and the Undergraduate (1923).pdf/16

 paratively recent origin. The oldest fraternity cannot look back quite one hundred years, and a good many of these years were pretty dull so far as educational development was concerned. The most of the Greek-letter fraternities are less than sixty years old. The purpose of their founders was usually self-development, the cultivation of ideals, good scholarship, and good-fellowship. Many of these organizations at first were similar in character to our modern literary societies and encouraged and cultivated debating and public speaking and literary composition. The idea of furnishing a home and of developing home life for its members was at first unthought of and unnecessary. The living conditions in the college in which fraternities were first organized were satisfactory. In many instances students lived in dormitories provided by the college, and it was not necessary for the fraternity to furnish the home life for its members. During the last fifty years conditions have been rapidly changing. Colleges everywhere are providing in the regular curriculum the training for which the fraternity originally stood, and the fraternity in a large number of cases must now look after the housing and feeding of its own members, and so provide its own home life—a duty which the college formerly performed.

There is little that is subtle or unusual in the