The Girl and the Game and Other College Stories/Talks with a Kid Brother/On Hazing
ON HAZING
So the Sophomores have been making it interesting for you, have they? I'm glad of it; that's one of the things you came to college for. You will agree with me after you get out, if not sooner. What's that? Well, let me illustrate.
Once upon a time during the old days of free, untrammelled hazing—real hazing, I mean, not mere persiflage and pamphlets containing formal Freshman-year restrictions—there was a certain professor's son. And he thought his father was a greater man than the President—the President of the college, I mean, for the president of the country was a mere Philistine and did not count. The son should not be blamed for this, because the father would have been inclined to agree with him. I should add that not all professors take themselves so hard. There is a system of hazing that goes on with them, too, even to-day. When a young instructor comes back from Germany weighted down with the dignity of his Ph.D. and feeling sorry for the United States and its deplorable lack of real scholarship— But about this boy:
"They'd better not try to haze me," he remarked the day he matriculated. "My father is a professor."
It was hard to secure him because he lived at his father's home, and the Sophomores did not dare go there after him, even in those days.
"They don't dare haze me," he announced to his classmates as he crossed the campus; "I am the son of Professor Blank." (He always pronounced the capital P in Professor.)
Fate finally delivered him into the Sophomores' hands by night. He smiled a kindly warning at them. "Evidently you do not realize who I am," he said, as if to break it gently.
"Um," said his captors gloatingly, "it is indeed hard to realize that we've got you at last." And they hurried him along over the dark road toward the canal.
"You'd better not," he announced; "my father is Professor Blank."
"We know that," was the answer; "that's the reason. Now then," they added, "here's for your father," as they ducked him in a business-like manner under the cool, moon-lit ripples of the canal. "And here," they repeated as he came up spluttering, "is one for you. Now will you be good?"
"You will suffer for this," he roared when he got breath enough; "my father"
"Ah? then here's for our suffering. Now will you be good?" In the course of time he said he would, and he was. He has been a better man for it ever since. They saw to it that he had exercise enough on the way home to keep from dying of pneumonia, and he has lived to return thanks for it—as father used to tell us we should do, you may remember when he led the way into his study and closed the door.
The canal cure reminds me of the celebrated case of young Pollington, and I tell you this to show you that even I acknowledge that too much medicine is worse than none.
You may have heard the public version of this story; the papers were full of it.
I don't know what was the matter with Pollington; perhaps it was because he came to college with a reputation as an expert swimmer and they did not want him to get out of practice. Some say they gave him more encouragement to swim than he deserved—at any rate it was more than he wanted, for one dark night, as they loosed their hold of him while he took off his clothes, he slipped out of their reach and plunged head first into the water and—that was all. He did not reappear above the surface. The Sophomores waited seconds which seemed like hours, looking up and down the stream. They saw nothing. He was gone.
And they were responsible. That was what came upon them now like a thunderbolt as they ran up to the village for help. But even grappling hooks brought nothing to the surface. Only his clothes were on the bank where they had made him take them off, a pathetic little pile of clothes it seemed now. When carried back to his room a letter was found in the coat pocket. It was addressed to his classmates and said, "I cannot stand it longer. Good-by." The authorities were aroused. The college became excited. The newspapers got hold of it. It was telegraphed all over the country—big head-lines, many editorials. Detectives were put on the case. Finally, all but one or two of the Sophomores were rounded up. First they were brought in for a hearing before the President and expelled from college. The culprits were about to be turned over to the civil authorities, waiting outside the faculty-room. Pollington himself walked in.
He had swum under water across the canal and had come up noiselessly—a trick known to many swimmers—in the shadow of some bushes on the opposite bank. Then waiting there with only his nose above water until the Sophomores left in a panic, he quietly 
They were brought in for a hearing before the President.
I know of a different case which did not get into the papers. It has never been told before.
Usually the hazing was deserved, and in almost all cases the hazers were reasonable, decent enough chaps who did their harmless tricks—the canal cure was seldom employed—if not as a duty to their younger brothers, at least as a harmless pleasure for themselves. Occasionally, however, there was a bully, like Bum Batter. He was a big, thick-headed brute, as strong as an ox and quite as slow. His special delight was goading nice, innocent, hard-working Freshmen, nervous, sensitive little fellows, whose superior sense and sensibilities probably riled up all the bully in big, stupid Batter. Little Harrison Sinclair stood it patiently for a while because he wanted to get everything that was coming to him as a college man. But finally this is what happened:
Did you ever hear of Ike Weir, the "Belfast Spider"? There used to be much about him in the sporting columns of the newspapers, in the old days when he was champion featherweight of the world. By this time he had reached the boxing-lessons stage of his career and was called "The Professor" at the Athletic Club of which Sinclair was a Junior member. Sinclair wrote a long letter that brought the Belfast Spider down to visit his former pupil. That night Bum Batter and a noisy little nuisance named Channing came around to have their usual sport with their victims. "Another skinny little poler eh?" drawled Channing, sticking his finger under Ike Weir's face. "You must have been looking for trouble to come into this room." The pugilist had a lean, intelligent face and had borrowed Sinclair's glasses and a cap for the occasion. "Take off your hat, Freshman," bawled Batter.
The Belfast Spider kept staring at a Greek book which he held upside down, though he didn't know that-
"Take it off for him, Channing," growled Batter, implying that this was really too easy for the great Batter to bother with.
"With pleasure," said Channing, and tried to.
Ike in his palmy days had a very pretty way of doing these things. It was so quick that all they saw was the pseudo-Freshman springing up from his chair, the flash of a fist, and then Channing thoughtfully picking himself up on the far side of the room, with a red welt forming on his jaw. The pugilist had sat down again and assumed his role of the studious student.
"Well! this won't do at all. I'll have to take a hand in this myself," said Batter, rather pleased at the excuse. "Now, then. Freshman," in a mighty voice, "let's see you take off that hat and apologize to Mr. Channing." No reply; only a quiet, cat-like glance. "Here, here! Take it off, I tell you!" Batter now shook his fists.
"Aw! g'wan!" said the Spider. He had been coached not to talk, but forgot in the enthusiasm of his art.
Batter thought the "lanky little poler" was guying his own rather uncouth enunciation, and it made him furious. The real Freshmen were chuckling expectantly by this time—which also was contrary to rehearsal—and that made Batter still more furious. "You miserable little pup," he bawled, drawing back his left, "I'll teach you once for all to be impudent to me. Take that!"
The Spider quickly moved his head six inches to one side without changing his expression. "Slower'n I sized you up to be," he grinned. And then the inevitable happened. Down and up. Down and up.
Then down and out, and hazing was all over in North Entry.
Usually when a boy was hazed much his need was great. These last two cases were merely exceptions to prove the rule, and I have yet to hear of a graduate regretting that he was hazed. But I have recalled these bits of history chiefly to show you how much more conscientious Sophomores used to be in the rough-and-ready days of old and to make you feel a little more pleased with the present methods.
Oh, I know you haven't kicked. If you had I shouldn't respect you enough to take the trouble to talk to you. But I can tell from the tenor of your letters, enthusiastic though they be, that you think it rather hard luck, now that you are free from the irksome restraint of school-days, that a big boy like you, in college at last and called a man by courtesy, cannot do exactly as he pleases and stick out his chest like the college men he used to see at football games.
You have sense enough to smile about it, I see, but you can't quite understand why you should be made to feel so insignificant. When you stop to think of it, you are pretty insignificant, to be sure, but you don't see why you shouldn't be allowed on the street after nine o'clock, and you no doubt think you'd feel a lot more like a real college man if they'd let you smoke a pipe. You don't fancy making way, and even stepping off the walk at times, for every one on the campus except other Freshmen. You think it rather absurd that in a college which has grown up into a university and is supposed to have put away childish things you can wear no other style of head covering than a mild form of black cap.
But it only lasts a year, this rather pleasant purgatory; and you'll appreciate your blatant blessedness all the more when you, in turn, are a Sophomore, covered with the college colors, and are yawping terribly at next year's frightened Freshmen. Then I fancy you won't think all this so absurd.
Even the Sophomores, you'll find, have to give way to the Juniors, and the Juniors to the Seniors, and the Seniors, who seem to you to own the campus, if not the earth, touch their hats respectfully to the instructors, and the instructors to the assistant professors, and so on up the scale of academic dignity. It seems rather absurd sometimes to people outside, and so it is, but there is bound to be some kind of ranking here as there is all over the world, even in America where we are supposed to be free and equal, but never were nor shall be, and certainly the best class distinction for a college is the distinction of classes—academic seniority. With human nature as it is there is bound to be some kind, and if not this kind there might be distinctions that harked back to money or social position.
And if such were the case, Dick, you might never learn certain valuable life lessons which every man ought clearly to understand. Think it over. Good night.