Page:The Fraternity and the Undergraduate (1923).pdf/43

 took pride in; that when the head of the organization agreed to a line of conduct I was confident that for the good of his organization he would see that it was carried out. The men in the dormitory were not socially or morally inferior, but they were not in any true sense organized; what one man or one group of men would agree to do would seldom affect the rest of the men. There was so little unity, so little concerted action, that I knew it would be quite unsafe to depend upon the fact that they would all abide by any regulation that might be imposed. It was not that the men themselves were different or more entitled to consideration; they lived in a different way, they were controlled by a different organization, and so they must of necessity be managed differently by me. It was not difficult to make my critic see all these things, and to get him to agree that it was quite just that the men in the fraternity should not be treated quite in the same way as the men in the dormitory.

For a good many years we had every fall at the University of Illinois a pretty severe physical contest between the members of the freshman and sophomore classes which involved many hundreds of contestants. Because of their superior experience, even though their numbers were ordinarily inferior, the sophomores usually won. In one