Page:The Fraternity and the Undergraduate (1923).pdf/241

 into our brotherhood, they argue, "The uncouth, barbaristic, low-browed denizens of the mountains and manicurists of the corral." I suppose it was once true that we were justified in thinking that those who came from the farm or from the west might be expected to be crude and uncultivated, with little appreciation of the finer things of life. I myself was born in Illinois and I came from the farm. But it is not so today. The farmer travels, he reads, he has all the accessories of civilization, as he once did not have, and he takes advantage of them. The westerner may not go to Europe so often as the man from the Atlantic coast, but he has traveled more, he has been in more states of our union, and he knows more about the people and the customs of his own country than does the New Englander. The crudest, most bucolic hayseed in college today does not come from the farm, but from New York, and Boston, and St. Louis, and Chicago. It is the city and not the country that breeds crudity and bad manners. If you will study your own college community and your own fraternty, you will agree with me.

I have visited within the past three years a considerable number of western colleges and I have seen the agricultural students of Washington and Oregon and Iowa and other state on either side of the Rocky Mountains. The student in the Liberal