Page:Discipline and the Derelict (1921).pdf/62

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required labor and finesse for the business manager to meet the bills for its publication, let alone to pay any one for working upon it. We were satisfied to gain experience, though if there had been any loose money we should no doubt have shared it eagerly. Class functions and class invitations and student operas and plays and publications were either not a part of our undergraduate life or else their conduct entailed such a minor expenditure of money and was so simple in its nature that there was no thought or possibility of graft.

In an institution of eight or ten thousand students the case is very different. The student publications alone of the University of Illinois last year involved the letting of contracts and the expenditure of money to the extent of ninety thousand dollars, and practically all of this money was handled by students, and much of the profit divided among them. The expenditure of the senior class for their invitations, and ball, and breakfast, and class hats, and commencement caps and gowns would even at the most conservative estimate reach ten thousand dollars, and the contracts for all of these things were made by students, and the bills paid by students. The amounts may seem large, but when it is remembered that the number receiving degrees exceeded one thousand, the expenditure is very moderate. If one should go into it thoughtfully, he would be quite astonished to realize the thousand and one undergraduate interests which require the making of contracts, the collection of considerable sums of money often running into thousands of dollars, and the payment of bills by inexperienced careless undergraduates upon whom there