Page:The Fraternity and the Undergraduate (1923).pdf/260

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well mannered, well dressed, and excellently prepared for college. They have good minds and are doing excellent work. They have self-possession and reserve, and would not show embarrassment or self-consciousness in any ordinary social situation. They are interested in athletics, and each will make an athletic team before he is in college long. But they come from the common people, too common, the fraternity man might say, for one is the son of a mechanic and the other is the son of a janitor and neither is ashamed of his parentage.

"But you couldn't take a man like that into your home," a man said to me not long ago.

"Why not?" I asked him. "You do introduce into your home regularly men with cruder manners and with far lower intellectual and moral ideals. Why?"

Such men as I have referred to are as susceptible to the influences of a fraternity as is any man. They would make as good friends, they would develop into as good fellows, and they would exercise a stronger influence in building up and strengthening the fraternity than many men who are now eagerly sought for. The fraternity of the future is going to take account of these men; it is going to accept them for what