Page:The Fraternity and the Undergraduate (1923).pdf/242

 Arts colleges has nothing on these men either in good manners or refinement, or knowledge of the world, and these men have in addition a force and a power of initiative which win our respect. They have learned to work and to respect labor. They know why they have come to college and they make the most of their opportunities. Their clothes are well tailored, an important fact in the mind of the fraternity man, their speech is careful, their ideals are as high as any man's in the oldest chapter in the oldest fraternity in the country. Only yesterday I read to one of our students uncertain as to the wisdom of expansion into such institutions as I have referred to, a letter from one of these supposedly ill-trained and ill-mannered westerners. It was well phrased, well written, refined, in thoroughly good form and good taste and showed a cultivation and a courtesy not ordinarily met with.

"I don't know how many men in my chapter could write each a letter or would do so," the man said when I was through, "but I know one who couldn't." And the man who wrote the letter was born on a ranch in a far western state and is a student in his own state university.

The westerner and the agricultural student, these anti-expansionists say, are crude and uncultivated. Perhaps; but I have always thought the opposite. His life in the open brings the farmer into the