Page:The Fraternity and the Undergraduate (1923).pdf/27

 fraternity is to mould the undergraduate, to correct his faults, to change his peculiarities, and to help him to become normal and to live comfortably and happily with normal people. It is largely a matter of observation and adjustment, of yielding one's own preferences or prejudices for the comfort or good of others. The fraternity is a helpful agency in the development of this sort of unselfishness. If the young boy whose father wrote me stays in college long enough, he will be pretty sure to learn how to stand in with the various members of his fraternity or how to manage them; he will learn by experience that his sensitiveness and his selfishness and his peculiar manners hinder him and handicap him, and if he has sense he will correct all these personal peculiarities in order that he may acomplishaccomplish [sic] his purposes—in order that he may get on with people.

A little fellow I knew once, an only child, had had no restraint at home. He was ill tempered, bad mannered, profane, and generally disagreeable to every member of his family, all of whom humored him, waited on him, and endured him. It was only when he started to school and saw that these traits of character made him unpopular and disliked, ostracised and isolated him, and so made him unhappy, that he corrected his faults and did for