Page:The Fraternity and the Undergraduate (1923).pdf/26

 can be made to assume none of the responsibilities. When our towns have a "clean up" day in the spring, I am never surprised to see what a large percentage of fraternity men get out and help, for these men have had a thorough local home training in such matters and have learned to take an interest in them and to appreciate their importance.

One of the first things that a young learns when he gets into a fraternity is that if he would be happy, he must know how to get on with people. The boy who at home has run the household, and I the only child who has never had to yield his rights or his playthings to anyone, the sensitive or the selfish fellow, will be taught a good many things before he has been in a fraternity long. While I was writing this paragraph the mail brought me a letter from a worried father begging me to ask the officers of the fraternity of which his only son was a member to be kind to the boy, to humor his idiosyncrasies, and to say nothing to him unkind concerning his personal peculiarities which I, before he had been in college a week, had discovered were not few. It was a foolish letter for a father to write, and a useless one. The fraternity officers would have paid no attention to such advice had I been silly enough to give it to them; their purposes are to educate. One of the main functions of a