Page:The Fraternity and the Undergraduate (1923).pdf/20

 are the organizations which are guilty of them. I should be foolish to argue that there are not immoralities in college fraternities, and I am willing to grant that when these exist among the members of such an organization the evil result may be more far reaching than when such irfegularities are seen in an individual, but these things are not inherent in the fraternity any more than they are in our public schools.

It costs more to live in a fraternity house than in the ordinary boarding-house, because men usually live better, live more comfortably, have more privileges. But priviliges bring obligations in this case as in others, so that the undergraduate who joins a fraternity will find himself restricted by this action. When he chooses a certain group of men for his particular friends, for his college family as it were, he shuts himself off naturally from a similar association with other men or at least with many other men. This does not seem to me more deplorable or regrettable than the fact that when my friend, Tom Brown, married Jane Bailey and thereby acquired Jane's mother as a mother-in-law he made it impossible to hold Mrs. Babb in the same relation, though Mrs. Babb was a delightful lady and from my point of view rather more desirable as a parent-in-law than the person Tom acquired. It is a pity, but one cannot under