Page:The Fraternity and the Undergraduate (1923).pdf/54

 instrumental in causing differences or disagreements to come between friends, something is wrong with the marriage or with the fraternity. The fact that one takes a new obligation does not in any sense absolve him from an old one. The answer to the question as to how a fraternity man should treat his independent friends is a simple one; he should treat them as he always has done; visit them at their houses and invite them to his own; keep up his friendly associations with them in the classroom and out of it, on the street and on the campus. To do otherwise is to prove oneself a snob, and to emphasize differences which do not exist.

If there is ill feeling and jealousy and misunderstanding on any college campus between fraternity men and those who are independent of such organizations, it is largely because men have exaggerated trifles. When we begin to draw social lines, or political lines, or intellectual lines between these two classes of men we are making a mistake; we are no more justified in doing so than we should be in insisting upon similar distinctions being made between those men who live at home and those who live in a boarding-house; between the philanthropists who belong to church and those who do not. We shall wipe out the differences which are said to exist between Greeks and independents, when we refuse to recognize the fact that there are any.