Page:The Fraternity and the Undergraduate (1923).pdf/207

 to get in themselves, they immediately conceive reasons why no one else should be allowed to do so. Their imaginations conjure up all sorts of evils and irregularities and undemocratic situations within the fraternity; and they are at once and for all time against the system. When I was a boy on the farm I was fortunate in owning a riding horse and saddle. The boy who lived across the road had neither, but he spent a considerable part of his time in showing up to the other boys the evils and dangers of horseback riding. His father would willingly get him a horse, he said, if he wanted one, but he did not want one; he thought it was a very bad thing and a very dangerous thing for a young boy to have a horse of his own. And so he salved his feelings and comforted himself by railing against me. He deceived no one but himself. It is somewhat the same sort of attitude that the man who does not join a fraternity occasionally takes by way of explaining why he never got in. It is a common method in society of explaining things, but it is usually an unfair and ineffective one.

If the men who are waging an active war against fraternities had usually been active members of these organizations and acquainted with the purposes and the real life of fraternity men, they could make a considerably stronger case. As it