Page:Discipline and the Derelict (1921).pdf/61

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life; if I tell my friend that I have changed my mind and do not think it right that we should take this money, he will be sure that I am not playing the game fairly with him, that I am joking, and am intending to collect the money and use it all for my own benefit."

I suggested to him a way out of the difficulty which was quite satisfactory, and he went off relieved and resolved for the future to keep in the straight path of honesty. His is only one of the many instances, which come to my attention almost daily in a large educational institution, of the business temptations which beset students, and of the close relationships between the undergraduate and graft.

The unsophisticated is likely to think of the college life as a protected, shielded life, a life which one spends in the study of books and of nature, afar off from the transactions and the temptations of the sordid business world. This may be true under certain conditions and in certain institutions, but not in the large universities of the Middle West.

In the simple life of the small college there is little opportunity, in the undergraduate activities as they are carried on, for profit or for dishonesty. No large amounts of money change hands, and the students who have charge of undergraduate affairs do not often have their characters put to the test of honesty. "In my own undergraduate days there were fewer than four hundred students in the institution in which I was doing my work. There was little money coming in from athletics, there was a deficit in our class annual, and no one was paid for working on the college paper, for the very good reason that it