Page:The Fraternity and the Undergraduate (1923).pdf/25

 fellow freed from the tasks incident to keeping up a house often becomes indifferent to these things and almost unconscious that they have to be performed. It is a good thing for a boy to learn early that no house furnace has yet been designed that will long successfully stoke itself, that floors need to be polished occasionally if they are to look respectable, and that dust and dirt and litter of all sorts must have someone's personal attention if they are to be discouraged or materially abated. I have never been strongly an advocate of the system which permits upperclassmen to order freshmen about just for the sake of showing that they can, or of beating them just to keep one's muscles in shape, but I believe the system is a helpful one which requires each underclassman in a fraternity house to take his share of the responsibility in doing the chores about the house and in seeing that the house is kept in order. It is simply another opportunity to impress upon the undergraduate the obligations of good citizenship. A man appreciates better the size of a yard after he has run the lawn mower over it for a few times; he has more civic pride after he has raked the parking into condition and picked up the loose paper about the premises. He has an altogether different idea of life from what the undergraduate has who lives in a mere boarding-house and who