Page:Discipline and the Derelict (1921).pdf/199

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ambitious, and the old man could well afford the money. I was getting on pretty well when Bill Haws in golf togs ambled down the street leisurely, a cigarette in his mouth and a vicious looking bull dog tugging at the chain which he was holding. Bill had registered at Michigan once and had been fired because he wouldn't work. The old man looked at him a moment and shook his head. "Do you think I want my boy to look like that?" he asked. And yet Bill Haws had not been injured by college. He had been a loafer always; it had been bred in him by his indulgent father and by his foolish mother, but the college got the credit for his unambitious lethargic life, as in such cases it always will.

When President Lincoln was being beset and reviled for retaining General Grant, whom many considered incompetent, at the head of the Northern Army, he replied, "I can not spare this man; he fights." It is this sort that the college needs—men who have a purpose and determination to carry it through if it takes the skin off, men who will fight the hardest intellectual battles stubbornly and persistently. There is no success, there is no ultimate salvation for any excepting through hard, persistent regular work; and for that reason, it seems to me there is no place in college for the loafer. Especially do I feel that this is true in a state university. The young fellow who goes to such an institution pays in tuition scarcely a tenth of what his education is costing the state. Every wash woman and laborer and artisan, every farmer and clerk and merchant in the state is paying a part of the cost of this young man's education, and is doing this with the thought, if he