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236 me by one moment of illusion. But now it is over…’ and so saying he took her hand in his. She was somewhat taken aback, for he had never attempted to do such a thing before; but she answered quietly: ‘Wretched will be my lot indeed, should the flower’s perfume prove hapless as the flower that was destroyed.’

She felt that things were not going well, and sat staring at the floor, her chin propped on her fist. This was just the attitude in which she most attracted him. He noticed the plumpness of her hand, the softness of her skin, the delicacy of her whole figure. Such beauty could not, at these close quarters, in any case have failed to move him; coupled with the memories which every feature inspired, it proved irresistible, and to-day his discretion broke down as never before. True, he did no more than make a somewhat vague avowal of his feelings towards her. But Tamakatsura was instantly terror-stricken; of this there could be no doubt, for she was trembling from head to foot. ‘Come!’ he said, ‘you need not look so horrified. There is no harm in my having such feelings, so long as only you and I are aware of them. You have known for some time past that I was very fond of you, and now you have learnt that I care for you even more than you supposed. But were I drawn towards you by the blindest passion that has ever darkened the heart of man, this would not damage your chances with Sochi no Miya, Higekuro and the rest. For in their eyes you are my daughter, and it would never occur to them that my affection for you could in any way hinder their courtship. My only fear is that you will never find a husband who cares for you half as much as I do. Such feelings as mine for you are not as common in the world as you perhaps imagine them to be….’

He spoke all the while as though what he had said to

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 he would be satisfied to stay in his own field and trail along in second place when it comes to politics.

The successful athlete as a student in these days has much to commend him. Of course there is the man who is in college primarily for athletics, who is satisfied merely to pass, who has no intellectual ambitions, and who is willing by any unscrupulous methods to get by. He cares very little how his work is done just so he passes. Such a man, however, is not now common, and he seldom lasts through the college course; somebody gets wise to his methods and he passes on. One such man, whose work was in pretty serious condition, wrote me not long ago. He was anxious that by some act of providence or the faculty he might be made eligible, and when I assured him that this was impossible he replied, "Of course there would be no use of my returning to college if I could not take part in athletics." I felt the same way as he did about it, and suggested that he go to work. It is not of this sort but of the normal man in college of whom I am speaking, who is seriously and honestly preparing himself for the business or profession of life, and who considers athletics a secondary matter. The student who would be an athlete learns first of all that if he would keep up his studies and not neglect his athletic training he has little time to waste; if he would succeed he must learn concentra—tion, he must utilize every available minute. He learns to get his lessons during the vacant hours of the day; he knows that when he comes in at night from practice tired and sore, that he can not afford to loaf much after dinner or to let his mind wander when he gets at his books. He will grow sleepy early

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 in the evening from exhaustion, and if he is to be alert and fresh the next day he must get to bed soon. All this, if he is wise, and he often is, teaches him some of the most valuable lessons he can learn in college—the value of concentration and the value of utilizing his spare hours, and these lessons are valuable not only during his undergraduate days but immeasurably more so when he gets out of college into the more trying and strenuous work of life.

More and more the athlete is learning the value of self-control and morality. The young fellow in training learns to control his temper, for he finds often that when he loses control of his temper he loses control of himself. He learns, too, to take adverse criticism without being offended by it, for he soon sees that to take offense gets him nowhere. He learns not to expect praise for work well done, but to be pleased if his efforts do not bring upon him a storm of criticism and reproach. The hard physical exercise which the man in training gets, helps him in the control of his physical passions; if a man wants to live a decent clean moral life, he will find that the strenuous exercise he gets in the development of athletic ability will help him toward this end more than almost anything else. The man, on the other hand, whose moral ideals might not be otherwise high, is not infrequently led to see that he must choose between a self-controlled, temperate, clean life and failure to accomplish his highest possibilities in athletics. In all my experience with undergraduates I have seen few things that would act more vigorously as a discourager of immoral practices than an ambition for success in athletics, I have seen over and over again


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 the loose dissipated habits of a young fellow changed completely because he developed a desire for athletic success and was willing to learn self-repression and self-control in order to attain his desire. The athlete, too, who might have a tendency to break training or to yield to the temptation to immoral practices is frequently held somewhat in restraint by public opinion as expressed by the undergraduate crowd. The athlete who would risk the success of his team by indulging in dissipations of any sort would soon find himself, in most college communities, pretty thoroughly in disfavor. Very few of us realize, I imagine, just what part this fear of public opinion has played in our own individual cases in keeping us in the straight moral path; sometimes when we should be inclined to hold that it was our staunch principles which held us back, it was quite as likely the fear of what the neighbors would say if they should find out our irregularities. We say, often, that we don't care what people think of us, but when we say it we are joking.

The training which the athlete gets is not advantageous merely from a physical standpoint; I have many times been convinced that it is least valuable from such a standpoint, because the college athlete is not infrequently overtrained, and when he gets out of college and relaxes this training he finds himself in a critical if not in a dangerous condition. The chief advantage that accrues from athletic training is its effect upon the man's judgment and upon his character. The man wanting to make an athletic team in a big university can not afford to yield easily to discouragement; if he does he will never make the team.


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 He has a score of men working for the same place, often, many of them more experienced and better trained than himself. Success often means years of persistent practice with one failure after another. Other things being equal, it is the man who sticks who ultimately succeeds.

I recall a slender green country boy who came up to college from southern Illinois. He had the ambition to do the pole vault, but it seemed at first little more than an ambition. He came out for practice every day during his freshman year, but his accomplishments were rather commonplace. "Plucky little sinner," the coach commented, but that seemed about as far as it went. He might keep on the squad; that was about all. He stuck to it through the sophomore year, gaining form and making gradual progress, but he was still far below the best in his attainments. Most fellows would have dropped gut and taken a place among the rooters on the side lines.

"I really believe Gordon is improving," the coach ventured to remark during the boy's junior year when he was still sticking to his regular practice. "We may hear from him yet." And we did; for he took second place in the spring meet in his junior year, and when he waa a senior he won first place in the Western Conference. He had learned what it means to laugh in the face of defeat and to push on ta the accomplishment of an ambition, and he had set an example of persistence and grit to his college mates which is still a campus tradition. The lesson which he had learned of sticking to a difficult job until it is accomplished, no matter how long it takes, has shown


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 itself in the way in which he has fought difficulties since he left college, and in the way in which he has climbed steadily to success. Whenever a boy balks at a difficult task or begins to lose confidence in his ability to make good, I tell him of Gordon.

Dinwiddie had two ambitions when he came to college; one was to become a good engineer and the other was to make the baseball team. He got a good room over-looking the athletic field so that he could get the inspiration from seeing other athletes out practicing, and would need to waste little time in getting into the game when his turn came. He had a good mind, and he was not afraid of work, so that there seemed very little difficulty in the accomplishment of his first ambition, but the second was not so easy to attain. He had been the star player in the little country town from which he came, it is true, but that is a very different matter from playing left field on the varsity. He went out on the first cut from the squad in his freshman year, but he kept on with his practice with his class team and with his fraternity nine. He hung on a little longer in his sophomore year.

"Give it up, kid, and try croquet," some of his pessimistic friends suggested; but he had no intention of giving it up; it was one of the things for which he had come to college, and he was not going to be turned from his purpose. During his junior year he was kept on the squad during the season, but he got no active participation in the game; all his rivals for the position which he wanted to play seemed just a trifle better than he, and he sat silently on the bench all season, waiting eagerly to be called


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 out. All this time he studied the game, he listened to the suggestions of the coach, and he kept up his practice religiously throughout the spring and summer. When the men were called out for practice in his senior year he seemed to have got his batting eye.

"You'll make it, Mark," the coach told him encouragingly, "if you keep up that gait," and Mark did make it.

Would any one hold that this persistence, this refusal to accept defeat, this willingness to work and to accept criticism through one season and another without apparent hope of success did not have its effects upon the characters of these men, and does not have its effect upon all men who submit to it?

In addition to this refusal to accept defeat which becomes a part of the character of a real athlete, is the training in judgment and quick decision which a man gets. The athlete has little time to decide on his play in any game. He must gauge a ball, or determine upon a play instantly and his decision must be right or he will endanger or lose the game. He can not stand round looking for a hole in the line; he must be through it the instant he has discovered the weak spot. He must solve his opponents' play almost before it is made and must learn at the same time to assist his fellow players in the work which they are doing. He is trained in accuracy, in alertness of mind, in quick decisions. He can not give up when he is tired, he can not fall out when he is hurt, he must fight the game through to a finish with spirit and enthusiasm. Four years of this sort of training, I am convinced, leaves an ineffaceable stamp upon a young fellow's character and is seen in his business


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 methods in after life. It was a very significant fact to me that more than ninety-five per cent. of our athletes who were in attendance at the various Reserve Officers' training camps of the country in preparation for the war, reccived commissions at the close of the camps. They had learned to follow directions, to obey, and to fight.

There is of course an element of danger in most strenuous athletic games, and this danger is often the cause of a great deal of parental opposition to a boy's going into such athletic games, but there is danger in almost any activity that is worth while. A friend of mine in 1917, was talking with a young fellow who had just enlisted in the army and was preparing to go to France.

"Doesn't it frighten you terribly?" she asked, "to think of the danger of your being killed?"

"No," he answered thoughtfully, "there are so many things worse than being killed."

Even though there may be danger of physical injury in most of the strenuous athletic games played in college, there are so many things more to be feared than the possibility of getting hurt, that if I had a son I should be quite willing that he should take that risk in order that he might have a chance at the benefits of the training and the exercise. The parent who wants to keep his son out of football or basket ball because of the danger which he will encounter in these games is frequently encouraging him to be a molly-coddle. The ability to face danger and to endure punishment is what helps to make men out of boys, and it is worth risking because of the strength of character which it develops.


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 It is hard for the young fellow who has once got the athletic fever into his blood to get it out. After a hard game or a hard season, especially one followed by defeat, I have often heard an athlete vigorously affirm that he was through with the whole business. There was nothing to it, he avowed, and when he laid aside his athletic togs, he swore he would never put them on again. Perhaps the next season he was tardy in coming out at first, but he could not stay out of the game long. Neither danger, nor pain, nor exhaustion, nor possible defeat daunted him. The game had got into his blood and he had to take it up.

I have a vivid recollection of "Cap" the night after we had been defeated by Chicago. He had played a masterly, though a losing game, and had come away bearing on his body the scars of hattle. I called at his house after dinner to offer him my congratulations on the game he had put up and my eondolences on the unsatisfactory outcome. He was a sad looking figure. His nose had been broken and some one had kicked him in the eye, which was discolored and swollen shut. His whole body was bruised and sore and he was in a furious temper.

"This is my last appearance, pos-i-tív-ly," he growled. "There's nothing in it. A man's a fool to let himself be mangled up the way I am. I'm out of it. Never again for me. If I ever have a son who wants to play football I'll lock him up or strangle him. It's me in the future for the peaceful life."

I said nothing, for I knew the outcome. He was in the next game as chipper as ever, and the next fall he was the first man out on the field, when it came time for practice. He could not keep away from it


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 any more than the average man can who has got the spirit of it into his system. When the call to arms came "Cap" was one of the first men to leave the peaceful life that he had so vigorously espoused, to face the hardships and the dangers of war.

In spite of my respect for the athlete and for athletic training, I have always felt that as far as an advertising asset is concerned the athlete has been very much overrated. Few students in these days go to college mainly because of their interest in athletics or in going to college choose an institution mainly because of the reputation of its athletic teams. If the boy himself who is entering college had the entire decision in his own hands the matter might be different, but since, even in the United States, father and mother still have a little to say in determining the place where son shall pursue his education, the character of the athletic teams of the institution under consideration usually plays a minor part. It cannot be left wholly out of consideration, but it is seldom the determining factor in the decision.

"A winning team is a fine advertisement for the school," the undergraduate constantly holds, and I am willing for the sake of argument to grant that it does its part, but I am equally sure that if it were the sort of advertisement that could be "keyed," if we could get from our undergraduates a frank, truthful statement as to the influence which, in each individual case, induced them to select the college of their choice, it would be found that successful athletic teams are in reality rather ineffective in adding to the attendance of any institution. That fact, however, does not in any way lessen my interest in the


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 athlete and athletics, nor make me think any the less that the college that puts money generously into the training and development of its athletic teams and that encourages physical exercise generally among its students is acting wisely.

As I have studied the careers of our athletic students after they have graduated and gone out of college I have been convinced that the benefits of athletic training do not end at graduation. It is true that the man who wishes to make a case against the athlete can: present illustrations to show that even though the men engaged in athletics may average well there are still some very notorious dullards who make or try to make our athletic teams. The athlete who flunks is like the Sunday-school superintendent who becomes an embezzler. His intellectual or moral failure, as the case may be, is the more widely advertised and commented upon because of his other relationships. The ordinary student in college may fail and nothing be said of it; when the athlete fails the fact is commented upon at every fraternity and boarding house, is often the subject of serious faculty discussion, and is made the topic for an associated press dispatch in the newspapers. The flunking athlete is like a drunken man in a crowd—he seems far more numerous and attracts far more attention than the quiet sober citizen who goes unobtrusively about his business. For this reason his occasional lack of scholarship is much exaggerated and disproportionately commented upon. It has been my experience in executive affairs in college that it is easier for almost any other man to receive special consideration or special concessions when in scholastic difficulties


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 than for the athlete. Whenever it is announced that the man who is asking for mercy or for reconsideration is an athlete there is very likely to be the stiffening of the jaw and the bending backward of the authorities, in order that there may be no thought on the part of any one that they are not walking and acting in accordance with the rule. Perhaps it is just as well so.

The college athlete who has gone out into the more active duties of life is a fighter; in college he has been trained to fight against difficulties, and he carries with him the results of this training. He is not afraid to tackle a hard proposition, he is not easily discouraged, his judgments are more rapid and more accurate than those of other men, and he is willing even in an apparently losing game to make a try—to stick. His athletic training has taught him endurance and has given him a physique which will stand hardships, and nervous strain, and long hours of work. He has usually learned, also, how to take care of his body, and so how to make the most of the physical and mental resources at his command. For these reasons his chances of success in any work which he takes up are greater than those of the man not so trained, and that success is quite generally somewhat in advance of what might be expected from a study of his scholastic record. The effect which his athletic training has had upon his body, and the effect which athletic practice has had upon his character and his mind, all conduce to his energy, his resourcefulness, and his self-reliance and so make for his success. He is likely to get on faster and to go farther than are men of similar ability who have nat had his training.


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74 Under the former celibacy was not merely discouraged, but visited with the penalty of incapacity to take an inheritance or legacy, if the man was under sixty or the woman under fifty years of age. Constantine appears to have been the first to modify this legislation. No doubt the declension of the Roman population had ceased to have the importance which led to Augustus' stringent enactments, now that the Empire contained a wider field for supplying recruits for the army. And the Christian Church, coming by the fourth century to count the single life nobler than the married, and encouraging anchorite and monastic asceticism, looked on second marriages with increasing dislike and reprobation. The Emperors in the fourth century, though requiring the father's consent to the re-marriage of a woman under twenty-five years of age, and severe in condemnation and punishment of any woman who married again within ten months (in 381 extended to one year) from the death of her husband, in other cases interfered only to secure the interest of the children of the former marriage. Justinian dealt with the subject in 536 and 539. As regards any property derived from the former husband or wife the party marrying again, as already mentioned, retained only the usufruct, the children of the former marriage being entitled to the property in equal shares. As regards property not derived from the former partner, the party re-marrying was disabled from giving by dowry or otherwise or leaving to the second wife or husband more than the smallest share of it which any child of the former marriage would get. Under the law any excess was to be divided equally between the said children if not "ungrateful."

If property was left to a person on condition of his or her not marrying again, it used to be the practice to require an oath for the observance of the condition before the property was transferred. Justinian, in order to prevent frequent perjury and secure the execution of testator's intention, allowed the legatee, after a year for reflexion, to have a transfer of the bequest, or, if it be money, the payment of interest on it. Security had to be given, or at least an oath to be taken, by the recipient that he would, if the condition were broken, restore the property transferred with the profits or interest. His or her own property was tacitly pledged by the statute (536).

By second marriage a mother lost the right, which the law usually gave her, of educating her former children, and the guardianship, if she had it, and lost all dignities and privileges derived from her former husband.

Until the year 542 marriage could be dissolved in the life of the parties by mutual consent without special cause and with only such consequences as were agreed between them. In that year Justinian forbad any such divorce except in order to lead a life of chastity. For breach of this law he enacted in 556 that both parties were to be sent into a monastery for the rest of their lives; of their property one-third


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 The struggles and sacrifices which he made in his undergraduate years are more than compensated for by the returns which come to him in later life.

I have read the most that has been published in recent years concerning the evils of inter-collegiate athletics—the extravagantly large amount of money necessary to support such a system, the confining of athletic training to a very limited number of students, the gambling, drinking, and other moral dissipations incident to big games, but though I have known personally as many undergraduate students, athletes and otherwise, as any college officer in America, I am convinced that these evils have been very much exaggerated. I cannot deny that athletics is expensive, and it would be foolish to maintain for a moment that it is not accompanied by abuses and evils—I can think of no other activity, not even religious activities, that is free from them—but in my experience as a director and supervisor of undergraduate activities it has seemed to me that nothing else has done so much as athletics to develop real college loyalty, to unify a heterogeneous undergraduate body, and by giving an outlet for youthful enthusiasm and youthful spirits, to aid in the maintenance of healthy college discipline. It is true that athletic contests have at times been the opportunity for undergraduate outbreaks and disturbances, but these occasions have on the whole been rare and not infrequently a case of "great cry and little wool," of wide newspaper publicity and relatively little foundation for the facts alleged. I am sure that if it were not for the athletic contests and the


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 athlete I should as a disciplinary officer have a much harder time than I now have.

There is the argument that the athlete supports a sort of physical aristocracy which maintains a monopoly over athletics and physical exercise and makes it possible for the physically elect only to obtain the exercise that all need. We should develop a system, the promulgators of this argument say, which would force every one into athletic sports and secure regular and pleasant exercise daily for every one in college from the freshman to the President. Such a physical millennium sounds alluring, and the theory is beautiful, but the result is about as likely of attainment as those implied in the theories of our socialist friends; they sound attractive on paper, but they are impossible of realization. In every college with which I am familiar there is a predominating percentage of students and faculty who, unless a chain were put about their necks and they were dragged to the fray would take no part in athletic sports at all. There are even more than we might suppose who take no pleasure in exercise themselves and who find no relaxation in watching other people engaged in sports. Whatever can be done to interest students and faculty in sports generally, I believe is a desirable thing, but such interest is not decreased by the development of athletic teams. As I have seen the athlete his training is worth all that it costs—to him, to the college authorities, and to the undergraduate body as a whole, in the development of character, in discipline, in college loyalty, and in the binding together of the students as a whole.


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sight of Jack and Eddie and Mac sitting in the Arcade as I passed this morning on my way down town. They had evidently got up too late for breakfast and were "hitting a coke" before they subjected themselves to the strain of a ten o'clock. The last bell had rung, but they were taking their time and giving Eddie opportunity to finish the risqué tale of his last conquest. Mac had already been out of classes this semester for five weeks because of a slight illness, but that seemed to him an asset rather than a liability, for the instructor knowing he had been ill, could not reasonably expect him to get into the work vigorously all at once or to come to classes regularly or on time. Jack had been out to a dance the night before, and not being prepared had cut his nine o'clock, and Eddie was taking the cuts which as a senior he thought himself entitled to. They were good illustrations, these three happy-golucky souls, of the college loafer—irregular, irresponsible, unambitious—the type of men who are the real menace to-day of undergraduate life in college.

It takes a man of some energy to be a real devil, so that the loafer at first seldom gets into anything that is difficult, or dangerous, or not nice; he doesn't initiate things; some one else makes the plan, though he may trail along behind in an escapade and seem to be a real part of the procession. He is a passive,


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 talkative being; he loves ease, leisure, sleep, coca cola, cigarettes, chocolate bostons, and girls. He is a stroller, a hanger on. If, as I am writing these paragraphs, I should look out of my window upon the broad green expanse of our back campus, I should catch sight of him walking lazily under the shade of the tall elm trees of Burrill Avenue, or sprawled upon the grass, a girl by his side, a smile on his face, his books and his intellectual obligations forgotten. He knows the last dance step, the latest gossip, and he has seen the last bills at the Orpheum. He would be entirely innocuous if he were not allowed to run at large. The trouble is he infects the crowd.

It is not difficult to understand the environment which conduces to the development of this type of student. At home he has neither been given nor has he assumed any responsibility. He has had no duties, no regular set tasks; he has done no work; often he has been mother's darling. It has usually, at home, been a problem as to what should be done with him in the summer vacation when there was no school, so he loafed around lazy and discontented. He has seldom done well in his preparatory school or high school; he has passed, but neither he nor his parents have had any ambitions for him to be a grind or the valedictorian of his class. If his mother were asked she would probably say, "We are very well satisfied with what Clarence has done in high school; he is not a natural student, and has never been very strong, so that we have never pushed him nor wanted him to ." And Clarence has done as his parents desired and has never overstudied.

He comes naturally to speak of himself as "no


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 student" and to take a certain pride in the fact that this characteristic in some way differentiates him from the common herd of undergraduates who do their work because they like it, or who go at things with energy because it is their duty. He takes his commonplace work as a matter of course, just as many people assume without trying that they can not learn to spell.

"You had a shamefully low average last semester," I remarked to Brinkerhoff the other day, "for a man of your training and ability."

"Well, I'm no student," was his self-satisfied reply, which was only another way of saying, "I'm a hopeless loafer, and you ought to be satisfied that I got through as well as I did." There was no shame on his part, no resolve to do better, simply a resignation to the inevitable.

The loafer in college is not always a boy who has been brought up in luxury; he not infrequently comes from very humble surroundings; but wherever he has been brought up he has never developed any love for work. When he enters college it is without ambition, without any definite purpose or object; he has little idea of what he wants to do, no love of books, no interest in study, no vision of the future. He does not know whether he wants to go north or south, whether he would like to study art or ceramic engineering, whether he would prefer to spend his life as a missionary or as a vaudeville star. Some of the other fellows were coming to college, so he threw a few changes of clothing into a suitcase and came along, just as he might have joined a camping party or taken a hike into the country. Some of the most


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Rh her implied nothing more than an unusual access of paternal feeling. It had now quite stopped raining; ‘the wind was rustling in the bamboos,’ and the moon was shining brightly. It was a lovely and solemn night. Tamakatsura’s ladies, seeing that the conversation was beginning to take a somewhat intimate turn, had tactfully withdrawn from her presence.

His visits had for some while been very frequent; but circumstances seldom favoured him as they did to-night. Moreover, now that he had, quite without premeditation, confessed to these feelings, they seemed suddenly to have taken a far stronger hold upon him. Unobtrusively, indeed almost without her being aware of what was happening, he slipped from her shoulders the light cloak which she had been wearing since summer came in, and lay down beside her. She was horrified, but chiefly through the fear that some one might discover them in this posture. Her own father, she ruefully reflected, might refuse to admit his responsibilities towards her and even order her out of his sight, but she could be certain that he would not submit her to such ordeals as she was here undergoing. … She did her best to hide her tears, but before long they burst forth in an uncontrollable flood. Genji was dismayed. ‘If that is what you feel about it,’ he said, ‘you must really dislike me very much indeed. I have not attempted to do anything that the world would consider in the least reprehensible, even were I in no way connected with you. But as it is, we have been friends for almost a year. Surely there is nothing very strange in the way I have behaved? You know quite well that I should never force you to do anything you would be sorry for afterwards. Do not, please, be angry with me. Now that you have grown so like your mother, it is an immense

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 confirmed loafers I have known have been men who had to work for a part of their living. Loafing in college is not, as many people think, a matter of money, but of temperament.

Yesterday a father came into my office to discuss with me the possibility of his son's entering college.

"What course does he want to take?" I asked in order more intelligently to answer his question.

"I don't know," was the reply. "We have not thought much about that. I don't believe George has decided on anything yet."

"What is he interested in? What sort of work or study does he like best?" I continued, trying to get myself square with the intellectual compass.

"He has never shown any special interest in anything yet. We hoped that after he got to college he would develop interest in some line of work."

"Is he in love?" I ventured, determined to get somewhere if possible.

"Well, he certainly does like the girls."

It is this sort, interested in nothing but his senses and his emotions, that develops into the loafer. A boy will seldom show more ambition in college than he has shown at home; if he has had no vision or purpose there, he will be unlikely to find one in college. We do not change our characters by changing our lodging house, and if we have disliked work in Chicago we shall hardly take to it in Champaign.

"You haven't done much for Babb in college," a fellow townsman of his said to me when I was on a visit to the country town from which the freshman referred to came. "He's as lazy and worthless as ever."


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 "If you have had him here for nineteen years and have done nothing for him, how can you expect us to reorganize him in six months?" I inquired.

"I thought you were able to do everything in college," he replied. But we are not.

I have found the greatest interest as an executive officer in college in getting the peculiar viewpoint of the loafer. When I call him for irregularity, and if I am shrewd enough to prove to him that these excuses which he has offered were not thought sufficient on his part to keep him from certain social pleasures in which I have seen him indulging, he leans upon the prop of all loafers and asserts that the rules of the college permit a certain number of cuts to all students, and he has not yet exceeded his limit. "Anyway," he goes on, "a fellow can't go to class all the time." One of the most common excuses of the loafer for not attending class is that of not being wakened in time by the proper person. I have a letter now on my desk from a young fellow dropped from college for poor work who says: "A good deal of my trouble was due to the ineffective waking system in our house," meaning that the freshman whose duty it was to come around and wake him up, sometimes went to sleep at the switch. The next most popular excuse for absence is that he was busy studying for another course than the one he cut. It never seems to occur to him that there are regular hours of study far more than adequate for the purposes of even the good student, and that it is seldom if ever necessary to cut class in order to study. Cutting class with him is a habit as regular and as persistent as smoking, for every loafer smokes.


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 He either smokes because he puts in so much time loafing that he needs some recreation to keep him from getting lonesome, or he loafs because he has smoked so much that it has robbed him of the energy sufficient to do anything else. The odor of the Fatimas which he has burned up floats across the desk to me as he comes in to ask me for an excuse because of illness; before he steps off the campus he has lighted another to stimulate his waning interest in life, and wherever you meet him,—between dances, at his room, on the street,—he is drawing strength and comfort from a pipe or a cigarette. It is the badge of his fraternity.

"Why do you smoke so much?" I asked Rheims, whose restless manner and putty colored complexion and yellow finger nails told the story of his devotion to Nicotine. "You know it hurts you."

"Yes, I suppose it does; but why do you want to rob a man of all pleasure?" That was too much for me.

It is hard for the loafer to study; there are so many easier, subtler, cleverer ways to get by. He means to do it—to-morrow, Sunday, next week, before the end of the semester,—but he is such an awfully popular fellow, he has so many friends to entertain, so many dates to keep, so many extra-curriculum duties to perform, that he has little or no time to give to study. He borrows your notes which he has been too lazy or too busy to take himself, and never returns them until you go to his room and hunt him up; he questions you about your outside reading and tries to get the gist of its content so that he may be spared the labor of doing it for himself, he sits by you dur-


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 ing the quiz hours and stealthily cribs your ideas which he rephrases so that they seem his own. More's the pity, sometimes he does it so well that he gets a better grade than you do who have gone through the assigned reading with puritanic conscientiousness.

The loafer is usually a very charming fellow; he is selfish, but diplomatic and well-mannered. "How does it happen," I asked one of the clan not long ago, "that you do so little work about the fraternity house while Moore is always at it?"

"Moore has no diplomacy," was the reply. "I saw at the start that if I didn't talk back and was always polite and courteous to the fellows, they seldom 'fagged' me; Moore is impudent, and he has to do all the work while the fellows sit around and are amused at my line of talk."

He loves to talk and he generally talks well and knows it. He is usually popular in any crowd, for he has never brought on brain fag through overwork or. He can be found at every fraternity house sitting before the grate fire spinning his yarns to any hour of the night. He dislikes going to bed even more than he dislikes getting up in the morning, and will never think of going so long as he can get some one to keep him company. Not infrequently he has in him some touch of the genius. He has talent without motive power. As I write this sentence my mind drifts back to Jim Watson. "Why don't you stir up Jim?" I asked the president of his fraternity one day, "he might amount to something if he would work."


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 "Oh, Jim," was his reply, "Jim's an awfully good fellow; he's charming; no one could say anything cross to Jim. He's an artist; he's a poet; he's a dreamer; he could do anything if he would."

He was correct in his diagnosis; I simply phrased it a little differently; Jim was the most delightfully artistic loafer in college. He was the sort of fellow of whom people were always saying that he would be a great man if he ever got down to work; but he never did, and he's the most commonplace citizen to-day of the country town in which he lives.

Some people argue that college is a good place for the loafer even if he will not do his college work with credit. He learns to know people, he picks up a smattering of useful information through his daily rubbing up against those who do study, and whether he puts forth much effort of his own or not he comes constantly into contact with people of culture and experience and refinement. He is of no great harm to the college, they say, and the college may be of untold benefit to him. Perhaps so.

I remember a number of years ago we had in the University—I had him in fact in some of my own classes—a big lazy loafer who so far as any of his instructors could discover never "cracked" a book. He had one virtue; he never cut a recitation even though he never recited, and he was also an impenetrable wall in football. One day the president of the institution, who at that time had general charge of all delinquents whether in scholarship or in other things, was looking over Mr. Hicks' scholastic record, which was no credit to any one.


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 "We can never keep this man," he said to the athletic director, "even though he can play football. I shall have to send him home."

"Perhaps you are right," said the director, "but if you do you will shut him off from any further chance of intellectual improvement. He's an exemplary loafer who for the first time in his life is associating with people of cultivation and of ideals. The University is doing him more good than he is doing it harm, it is helping to make him a man, and so far as I can see he ought to be allowed to stay a little longer." Whether the argument was a specious one or not, the president consented, and the man stayed on and played on. He is a respected successful city banker to-day,—he had money—so that perhaps in this case at least the athletic director was right.

I have myself often been the victim of the charms of these fascinating loafers. In their own houses, and in mine, I have been forced often to yield to the magic of their personality. They are good fellows, many of them; they have within them infinite possibilities, unlimited power, if they would only work.

A good deal has been said and written about the dissipations and immoralities of college life, and much that has been written is false. I have been associated with college students more than half of my life, and I have known thousands of them personally. The undergraduate is not free from the temptations and the evils which other men yield to. There are men in college who drink, there are men who gamble, and there are men whose lives are not clean, as there are in every community, but the sum total of these


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 and the evil which they perpetrate is far outweighed by the loafer in college and the vicious influences of which he is the source. It is almost without exception the man who has nothing to do or who having something which he ought to do yet does not do it, who is responsible for the sins and dissipations of college life. It is loafing and lack of a really worthy ambition to give a man balance that leads students into all the other sins and indiscretions of undergraduate life. There is no other evil in college to compare with it, and none so difficult of remedy or of correction.

"I am coming back to college," one of them wrote me this week, "and I know you will be surprised to hear that I do not expect to give you any more trouble."

"If you are intending to go to class regularly, to study faithfully, and to do your work like a man," was my reply, "I shall welcome you with open arms; if you are going to loaf as you have done in the past, I wish to the Lord you would stay where you are."

It is hard for the loafer to reform. Sometimes he can do it in a new environment and under generally new conditions, but the man who has wasted his time in college and who stays out a semester or a year with the hope that he will gain ambition and self-control is often disappointed or disappoints his friends who may have placed faith in him. As soon as he strikes the old crowd and the old campus the spell is on him again; he is like the reformed toper who catches the odor of the highball. Last spring a young fellow who had been out of college a year returned to try


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 to finish his work. He had previously been a confirmed loafer who had by strategy and luck barely escaped dismissal.

"I'm sorry you have come back, Baker," I said to him. "I've expended about as much physical and mental energy on you as I think you are entitled to. I should not care to give you a permit to reënter unless I can have some assurance that you are coming back with a definite purpose to do your work faithfully and well." He gave me the assurance, but there was no real enthusiasm in what he did. He cut class and fooled away his time trying, of course, to keep safely within the limit that would bring him passing grades, but he was the same old loafer as before.

"I am hurting no one but myself," is the favorite excuse of every young fellow who by irregular habits is injuring his mind or his body, but the loafer can truthfully make no such assertion. No young fellow loafs long alone; he spends little of his time reading even trashy or vicious books; he is not given to solitude or meditation. He must gather friends about him and they go out together. There never was a loafer in college who did not ruin some one else in order that he might have a pal to accompany him on his daily orgies of pool and billiards and poker, and soft drinks and fussing and vaudeville and the movies and local gossip, or whatever it is with which he whiles away his hours.

"You don't need to be afraid of my leading any one astray," a young fellow not in college said to me when asking my permission to live in one of the fraternity houses.


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238 comfort to me simply to be with you….’ He spoke then for a long while, tenderly, caressingly. For now that she was lying beside him the resemblance to Yūgao was more than ever complete. But happy though he would have been to remain far longer at her side, he was still able to see that his behaviour had been in the highest degree rash and inconsiderate. It was growing late; at any moment some one might return to the room and discover them. ‘Do not think the worse of me for what has happened this evening,’ he said at last, rising from the couch; ‘it would distress me very much if you did. I know quite well that there are people who never allow their feelings to get the better of them. I can only say that I am differently made. But of this at least I can assure you: whatever you may think of me, such outbursts are not due in my case merely to some frivolous impulse of the moment. Once my affections are aroused they are boundless both in time and extent. You need not fear that I shall ever act in such a way as to harm your good name. All I ask is that I may sometimes be allowed to talk as I have talked to-night; and perhaps I may even hope that you will occasionally answer me in the same spirit.’

He spoke gently, reasonably, but she was now beside herself with agitation, and made no intelligible reply.

‘I see that I have made a great mistake,’ he said at last. ‘I always thought that we got on unusually well together; but it is now clear that the friendship was all on my side. For I cannot think that my showing a little affection would so much perturb you unless you definitely disliked me….’ He broke off, and left the room with a final entreaty that she would speak to no one of what had occurred.

Though Tamakatsura was no longer very young, she was still entirely innocent, and this made her judge Genji’s conduct more harshly than she would otherwise have done.

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 "Have you a regular job?" I asked.

"Yes, in the daytime," said he.

"What do you do at night?" I went on.

"Nothing," he confessed.

"Then you are a bad man to live in a house where students are supposed to study at night, for nobody does nothing alone."

I said at the outset that the loafer very seldom initiates things, and this is true, but he falls easily into disreputable habits. The student who does not spend his time in study, is not at all likely to be spending it in making his own character or that of the world better. Most of the men who have failed or gone to the bad in college have done so because they had learned to loaf. There are few things so good for the developing and strengthening of character as work. If one has duties to occupy the major part of his waking hours, he is pretty safe.

The loafer is a far greater foe to scholarship than is the man of what we ordinarily speak of as distinctly bad habits. Even if he does his work, and very frequently he is lucky or clever enough to pass, he has no desire to do well.

"A pass is as good as one hundred to me," I hear him say repeatedly, and he preaches the foolish doctrine so assiduously that many innocent and inexperienced freshmen believe him. I said foolish doctrine, for not many practices have succeeded in getting more men out of college than this one of calculating how near one can come to failing and yet pass.

"I don't think I should have been dropped," a loafer pleaded with me. "I meant to pass; though I did not care to get a high grade; in point of fact the


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 way I had it figured out I did pass, but the instructor evidently did not figure as I did."

"Evidently not; they don't always," was all I could say.

The loafer is a hindrance to all kinds of progress. If he gets elected to office it is for the honor and not with the idea of doing any work, and the interests in his keeping go to the bow-wows; if he is on a committee he is late when it meets or he never comes at all; if he is a member of an organization, he lies down sluggishly and retards all advancement.

I was at a loss to know last fall why an organization in which I was interested was getting on s0 badly.

"Who is your president?" I asked one of the members.

"Baird," was the reply, "and he's too lazy to do anything himself and too conceited and self-satisfied to let any of us do what ought to be done." Most loafers in office play the part of the dog in the manger admirably. The loafer has done more to undermine the faith of sensible, practical people in the value of a college training than any other class of student. Men can pass over without comment a dozen first rate fellows whose lives have been broadened and whose ideals have been strengthened and whose usefulness to the community has been increased by their college training, but the loafer never gets by them. He is an argument hard to meet.

I was trying to persuade Old Man Elliott who runs the hardware store in the country town where I spent my childhood that he ought to send his son to college. The boy had done well in high school; he was


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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


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 has thought of it at all, that the student should become a better citizen. Such an institution is no place for loafers; it is a place for men with ambitions, with a purpose, with willingness to work and a desire to make the most of themselves and to do what they can for the upbuilding and the betterment of the communities into which they go. The quicker a college gets rid of its loafers the better it will be for the loafers and for the college.


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two sorts of activities in college life which invariably make the front page are the activities of athletics and the activities of social life. Athletics, of course, occupies the center of the stage, but the "fusser" is a close second to the athlete when those engaged in college activities are bidding for first mention in the newspapers. In the case of these two activities, as in many another, prominence brings a flood of adverse criticism, and the two things in the life of the undergraduate student of to-day in the big universities which are most severely railed at and criticized by the newspapers and by the public in general are inter-collegiate athletics and the students' social life.

Everybody, including those who live in college towns and those who are in the state at large, seem to agree that the social life of the undergraduate in college is excessive, that he goes too much; in fact it is quite generally believed by a great many that his life consists of very little else than social pleasure, and that he spends his time not in study, as he should do, but in running from one social orgie to another. The young women, especially at a co-educational institution where there are usually several times as many men as women, are thought to be intemperate in social matters to the extent of breaking down the health of a large percentage of them


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 and of permanently acquiring a sort of social delirium tremens. Local women, at mothers' meetings and at afternoon sewing circles or bridge whist parties, look very serious and shake their heads knowingly when they talk of the awful social goings on over at the college.

"Believe me," some maiden of uncertain years affirms, "I wouldn't let a daughter of mine do as those girls do. It's scandalous, and would ruin any constitution."

Now the real fact is that the average young woman whom I know in college, and my acquaintance is not limited, has very little social life, and the average man, and I know thousands of them, has still less. Rather than there being too much social life, as many allege, I am convinced that there is too little. The trouble lies in the fact that what there is, is too restricted in character and is entered into by too few people. A study of the dances given at the institution with which I am connected will show two things: granted that the number given is large yet it is true that never more than ten per cent. of the whole student body is dancing at any week-end and often not one half this number, and it is true also that twenty-five per cent. of the student body does at least ninety per cent. of the dancing. The social work is unevenly distributed.

I have spoken of dancing as if it were the main social activity in which college students indulge. In an inland college town in the Middle West this is not far from the fact, though there are athletic games which bind more strongly than any other activity the undergraduate body into a more unified group;


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 there are the church sociables which reach a considerable number of students, and there are also vaudeville and moving picture shows which at one time or another lure most of the students within their doors. Where the college is not situated upon a river or a lake there can be no skating, no tobogganing, no boating, and no bathing, excepting of a strictly domestic character. The undergraduate, who at the week-end, when his college work is done, is looking for somewhere to go with a young woman for pleasure or relaxation is practically always limited to dancing or to the local moving picture or vaudeville shows, and of these two opportunities the former presents the more refinement and the less evil and is most frequently taken advantage of.

Both of these forms of social pleasure seem to the unthoughtful onlooker indulged in to excess by the undergraduate body in general because he does not analyze the constituents of the crowd that make up the patrons of these social activities. He hears the music pounded out as he passes a dance-hall in the evening, he sees the crowds pouring out of a vaudeville play-house, and he concludes that students in general put in most of their time either at a vaudeville show or at a dance. He does not stop to caleulate that perhaps not five per cent. of the student body is dancing and not ten per cent. at the theater, nor does he conclude, as he should, as he walks through the student district and sees the student lodging houses lighted from cellar to garret that on almost any Friday or Saturday evening of the week at least seventy-five per cent. of the undergraduates are in their rooms after eight o'clock not engaged in


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 any active social life at all excepting such as one may enjoy through associations with the fellows in his own lodging house.

If the observer who believes that the social life at any college or university is excessive would study for a time the composition of the crowd that frequents the vaudeville theaters and moving picture shows, if he would for a time regularly attend the college dances, as I have done for the past twenty years, he would see that it is largely the same people who support the shows and who are familiar with the regular change of bill from week to week and from day to day. I have talked often with the men who furnish the music for these shows, and they all admit that there is a deadly similarity in the crowds that come daily to these shows. The undergraduate gets the show habit as he may acquire the habit of smoking or drinking, and one habit is as dominating as the others. I imagine that very few college officers have attended more student dances during the last twenty years than I have, and the thing that constantly surprises me when I do attend is the limited number of students which frequents these parties. It is possible before I go to a dance to guess correctly the names of ninety per cent. of the fellows who will be there. Of course, if it is a fraternity dance the problem is easy, for the attendants at such a party will be the active members of the organization, but even when I am invited to the Junior Prom or the Sophomore Cotillion or the Military Ball or a Union Dance I have come to know the dancing crowd, and I can safely predict who will be in the grand march before I get into the reception line.


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Rh He had indeed merely lain down on the same couch; but she, in her inexperience, imagined that in so doing he had taken advantage of her to the utmost possible extent. On returning to the room her gentlewomen at once noticed that she was looking very distraught, and pestered her with tiresome enquiries about her health. No sooner had they withdrawn than Ateki, the daughter of her old nurse, began (irritatingly enough) to congratulate her upon her guardian’s extraordinary kindness: ‘How gratifying it is,’ she said, ‘that his Excellency is so admirably attentive to you! With all respect to your own father, I very much doubt whether he would put himself to half as much trouble on your account…. Prince Genji seems to take a positive pleasure in looking after you.” But Tamakatsura had been too much surprised and shocked by Genji’s conduct to feel, for the moment, any gratitude for the more than parental solicitude by which Ateki was so deeply impressed. She had no desire whatever to see him again, and yet in his absence felt strangely lonely and depressed.

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 Only a few weeks ago I was discussing this same situation with one of our college officers who was deploring the fact that our girls were going out to parties to an extent that was proving ruinous to the health of many of them, and she thought the University should pass some pretty rigid regulations to control this situation.

"How many of our girls," I asked, "do you think make up the list of these social debauchees? How many ought to be locked up or sent home or put into a sanitarium?" She thought for a moment and then replied, "Forty, perhaps," and then thinking again, "twenty would very likely include all of them." And this is less than two per cent. of our girls. I am of the opinion that not more than that proportionate number of our young men are excessively given to dancing and similar forms of social activity. I am sure that seventy-five per cent. of the undergraduates whom I have known have too little social life; instead of the social activities of our college being intemperate, the fact is that they are controlled by a monopoly of a very limited number of people. Five per cent. of our students, to state the case generously, have too much social life, twenty per cent. have about what normal young people require, and the remainder of the undergraduate body have too little, and so get out of college crude and inadequately trained in social matters.

This condition of ill-training is intensified considerably in an institution like the state university, because of the large number of technical students in attendance, many of whom are more interested in acquiring information than in getting a real educa-


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 tion, and who look upon time as wasted unless it is put in in the acquiring of cold facts which may later be put to use in the earning of money. Graduates of city technical high schools and junior colleges who continue their technical training in college too often know and care very little about anything which does not seem to them practical, and social finesse they think is for girls and liberal arts students. They fail to see that as much money even, if that is all they want, is earned through finesse and courtesy and an ingratiating approach as through a knowledge of facts, or if that is putting it a little strongly, at least it may be said that no matter how thoroughly one may be trained in information or facts these are seldom of much use to a man in any business unless he can get the ear of some one and hold it without physical force or intimidation.

I believe that colleges in general give too little attention to the social training of their students. The authorities have the feeling usually that there is too much social life, that young men and women will look after these things themselves, and that the best thing the college authorities can do is to sit on the lid and discourage excess as much as possible. Thea authorities, also, are not unlikely to feel that study and social pleasures are antagonistic, forgetting the adage that all work and no play makes for intellectual slowness, and that every normal human being needs some social exercise. The feeling that every student will see to it himself that he gets all he needs might be correct if social opportunities were open in college to all students alike, and if all students had equal


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56 treatises taken account of the pertinent rescripts, edicts, etc., already issued and it was therefore only from the time when the series of authoritative jurists ended that the imperial constitutions required collecting. The books of Gregorius and Hermogenianus (Codices Greg. et Herm.) contained those issued down to Constantine's time, which was therefore taken as the starting-point for the additional collection. Theodosius in 429 appointed a Commission of eight, and in 485 another larger Commission of which Antiochus the praefect was named first with other officials and ex-officials of the Record and Chancellery departments and Apelles, a law professor, power being given to call other learned men to their aid. He instructed them, following the precedent of Gregory and Hermogenianus' books, to collect all the imperial Constitutions issued by Constantine and his successors which were either in the form of edicts or at least of general application, to arrange them in the order of time under the known heads of law, breaking up for this purpose laws dealing with several subjects, and while preserving the enacting words to omit all unnecessary preambles and declarations. When this is done and approved they are to proceed to review Gregory, Hermogenianus, and this third book, and with the aid of the pertinent parts of the jurists' writings on each head of law to omit what was obsolete, remove all errors and ambiguities, and thus make a book which should "bear the name of the Emperor Theodosius and teach what should be followed and what avoided in life."

The Theodosian code, technically called, as Mommsen thinks, simply Theodosianus, was published in Constantinople 15 February 438 and transmitted to Rome at the end of the year. The consul at Rome holding the authentic copy in his hands, in the presence of the imperial commissioners, read to the Senate the order for its compilation, which was received with acclamation. We have an account of this proceeding with a record of the enthusiastic shouts of the senators and the number of times each was repeated, some 24 or 28 times. Exclusive authority was given to the code in all court-pleadings and court-documents from 1 January 439, the Emperor boasting that the code would banish a cloud of dusty volumes and disperse the legal darkness which drove people to consult lawyers; for the code would make clear the conditions of a valid gift, the way to sue out an inheritance, the frame of a stipulation, and the mode of recovering a debt whether certain or uncertain in amount.

With the knowledge which we possess of the Vatican Fragments and the Digest and Code of Justinian, we might expect from the above description that the Theodosian Code would contain a selection from the juristic writings as well as the constitutions of a general character arranged under the several titles or heads of law. But the Code, which has in a large part (about two-thirds of Books i-v being lost) come down to us, contains no extracts from the jurists and no constitution earlier than Constantine. So that the exclusive authority which the


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 interest in these things and equal cleverness in adapting themselves to new social conditions.

It is the regular fusser, however, well dressed and "high man" with the ladies, who in every college community with which I am familiar, gives more time to society than to his studies, and monopolizes, to the exclusion of his sturdier companions, the social life of the college. Every organization has one or two such men, and they are so adroit in getting rapidly from one place to another that they seem much more numerous than they really are. Sometimes they devote themselves to one young woman exclusively, though this concentrated devotion is seldom for long, and almost never results in anything serious or remotely related to matrimony; sometimes like the busy bee they flit from flower to flower never stopping long enough in any one parlor to form more than a speaking acquaintance with the inmates. Some fussers try hard to get their names into every social pot that is boiling.

I have a young freshman in mind—Harold I think his fond mother named him. He goes tearing down the street while I am at breakfast to meet Ethel and to carry her books to an eight o'clock, at eleven I see him riding with Grace in her dual power car, and at three, as I look out of my window upon the back campus, I catch a glimpse of him strolling languorously with Blanche. I have no doubt that before dinner he has paid court to other susceptible hearts and that by bed-time he has sat in the easy chair at one sorority house at least. He is a hard worker, this callow young freshman, but it is not at


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 his books, and unless he takes the Dean's warning he is not long for this intellectual world.

The fusser who devotes himself to one girl is quite interesting. I do not mean here to include the young man who is mature enough to know his own mind, who is far enough along in college to think seriously of the future, and whose prospects are sufficiently definite to make it possible for him intelligently to contemplate marriage. This class of men is not a very large one but, however many or few there are, I leave them out of the question. The man I have in mind is the one who is playing with emotion, who thinks or imagines that he is in love, and who grows as restless if he must be separated from the object of his melodramatic adoration for a few hours as does an inveterate smoker deprived for a half day of his cigarettes. Such a man can never be a student. If he gets out his books for an hour in a half-hearted effort to absorb a little information he is likely to accomplish nothing. His mind wanders to the last walk he took with her or to the next engagement he has made, and his eyes are fixed dreamily upon her framed picture on his desk. He may stick to the books for a few minutes, but it is not long until he remembers, perhaps, that she is leaving Lincoln Hall at this hour, and he rushes out to meet her and to—walk home with her.

Such a man while in this state of mind has an even chance of flunking, and no chance at all of doing respectable work. He would be more useful running a soda fountain than in college and very little use anywhere. I have occasionally tried to reason with him, but I can recall very few cases where I


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 accomplished much worth while. The social enthusiast who thinks he is in love is not amenable to reason; such a disease as his must usually run its course, must wear itself out; there is very little that either medicine or advice can accomplish, and yet if anything could be done for him it would be by a physician or by a psychologist.

The game in which the fusser is sitting is not a cheap one; if a fellow is to stay with it long he will need to have a good income. There are parties and cabs and flowers to be considered; there are automobile rides and all sorts of excitements to be paid for, and refections and confections innumerable to be provided. He must constantly be on the alert for fear some other more adroit or more generous suitor should get ahead of him. It will not seem surprising, then, that the fusser is an easy borrower, constantly behind in his bills, and regularly overhead in debt. Not even poker played by a man of bad judgment, inept at the game, is more disastrous to an undergraduate's monthly allowance than is the game which the fusser is trying to play. I was talking not long ago to a father who has two sons in college to each of whom he gives the same monthly allowance, and this allowance is not an ungenerous one. His elder son was always in debt, always complaining of the stringency of the money market; the younger boy was satisfied, solvent, and could always show a respectable balance in the bank. The father was disturbed and unable to explain the trouble. I assured him that the explanation was a very simple one; his elder son was playing the social game; he had joined the sentimental army of fussers. When


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 the father showed an inclination to doubt the accuracy of my diagnosis of his son's case I drew out a good sized florist's bill against the boy, long overdue, which had come to me in the morning mail from a local establishment with the polite annotation that any effort which I should be willing to make in bringing about a speedy settlement of the claim would be gratefully received. The father was convinced.

It is the fusser who monopolizes the organized social life of every college. He is seen at every party, glued to a single partner throughout the evening. He may come late, but he never wants to go early, ten o'clock may find him yawning, but midnight sees him freshening up remarkably, and if the party is a formal one and is allowed to run until one or two o'clock, he is just getting his second wind at these hours and is eager to continue his toddling until sun-up. It is he who opposes any attempts to regulate the hour of bringing parties to an end on the ground that such regulations interfere with the personal rights of individuals. The longer the party runs, he thinks, the more fun it is, for he never allows his real college work to interfere with his studies. He would drop dead from fright if he contemplated continuous study for six hours, but eight or nine hours of continuous dancing gives him great exhilaration. The fusser in college reminds me most vividly of the country greenhorns in pioneer days who felt that it was a waste of time to call on a young woman on Sunday evening unless they could sit around yawning until three o'clock in the morning.

It is he, too, who frequently breaks into the man-


text: A Wreath of Cloud/Chapter 6

title: A Wreath of Cloud/Chapter 6


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 agement of social functions, since by being on the managing committee of a party he thereby secures free admission and so cuts down his expenses. If this graft includes free cabs and free candy for the girl, so much the better; he is just that much ahead.

The fusser, stretching his legs before the grate fire in his lodging house, lying in the barber's chair getting a face massage, or sitting on the front porch watching the crowd go by, has but one topic of conversation. He is not interested in the supremacy of a democratic government in Russia, or in athletics, or in food conservation; he is not interested in labor agitations, or in his studies; or in anything that makes for the betterment of the community or the state; his only topic of thought and conversation is girls, singly and in groups, individually and collectively. What he doesn't know about girls has not been written or thought of or talked about. He knows them all absolutely, and he has them all tabulated and cataloged and properly estimated. He usually does not agree with you at all in your own personal estimate of any individual young woman in question and is sure that if you had had his experience you would know a deal sight more than you do. He knows a lemon from a peach in any garden of girls in which he may be wandering, and he is eagerly willing to give you the benefit of his skilled judgment. You may be bored by his talk after you have listened to him for a half hour, but you could not in reason doubt his taste or his conclusions.

I have seen a healthy, enthusiastic freshman come home from a pleasant happy evening with a sensible normal girl have all the joy and enthusiasm taken


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 out of him by the knowing fusser to whom he confided the details of his call. The poor freshman is pitied, laughed at for his taste, and told that he has been wasting his time upon a "dead one." It is the fusser who sets the styles in girls as well as in dancing and in social forms and conventions.

The fusser is a social aristocrat. It annoys him to meet at any social function one whom he does not know or who is not in his own particular social set. If he is a fraternity man, and he very frequently is, it galls him to have to associate with "barbs"; if he is a liberal arts student he feels annoyed at having to come in contact with the cruder "ags." If he goes to a dance, he clings to his partner throughout the evening; he avoids bourgeoisie crowds of common undergraduates, he considers any general college function cheap and vulgar; he likes best to get into a small exclusive organization for social activities where one does not meet so many uninteresting people whom one does not know or care for. Anything that makes for social democracy he discourages or frowns upon, and if by mistake he stumbles into a democratic social gathering, he is unspeakably bored or gets a lot of sport out of the experience by taking his place at a distance, not entering with any heartiness into the pleasures under way, and by making fun of whatever is done or of whoever comes along. He looks upon the whole performance as a crude, vulgar jam which affects him only to give him ennui or pain.

I was talking to the president of one of the most prominent of our undergraduate organizations at a Union dance last spring about these very matters.


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 He had spoken to no one apparently during the whole evening excepting the young woman over whom he had been hovering until he condescended to give me a word and a hand-shake. "These parties are a horrible bore," he ventured, "one never meets any one whom he cares to know or to associate with," and the young woman with him simperingly assented to the doctrine. His object in speaking to me, I found, was to ask my advice and to obtain my consent to his organization of a little group of men, a kind of a social monopoly, which would make it unnecessary for him to come into contact with any excepting the most select—he to make the selection. I tried to show him the advantage of a wide acquaintance, the opportunities for training and improvement in the democratic associations which were open to him in just such social functions as he was then a part of; but he could not see it; it did not appeal to him; he was altogether selfish and narrow in his social activities; he hated the crowd. He was a good illustration of the typical fusser, who desires to restrict and dominate the social life of college for his own advantage and his own narrow, petty, selfish pleasures.

There are a great many young women in our co-educational institutions who encourage this type of man. He keeps the furniture in sorority houses dusted and polished through his various calls; he contributes chocolate bon bons to satisfy the feminine craving for saccharine; he has a fluent flattering tongue, and he is ready to play the gallant at a moment's notice. He so well satisfies the social needs of the moment that it seems useless to many so-


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 cially nervous girls to encourage the friendship of a solider and a less showy man, for fear they will have less social excitement and fewer opportunities to make social engagements. The popular girl and: the fusser in college are both of a piece and together do much to spread a false idea of what the actual social life is of the average young person in college; both should be eliminated wherever it is possible.

The fusser in college is a social menace. His purpose in enrolling as an undergraduate is not to accomplish really good honest college work; the college is for him simply the theater in which he is to have a chance to stage a little social drama in which he will be the star actor. He wants to professionalize and commercialize the social life of college. All he sees in it is an opportunity to make money or to have a regular and continuous good time.

"I don't expect my son to do much work in college," a foolish father said to me a few years ago. "I want him to have a little social life, to enjoy himself, to acquire polish. He'll get plenty of chance to work after he leaves college."

"And he'll probably leave college very quickly," I added, for the man whose object in being in college is to get into society, very soon lags behind intellectually and either withdraws of his own volition, or is sent away. The man who gets no social training in college is missing one of the most important byproducts of college life, but the man who gets little or nothing else has wasted his undergraduate years.

The college that does not concern itself with the social life of its students, that does not in some way control or direct that life so that no one will be shut


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 out from opportunities for social training and social pleasures is making a grave mistake. The college that without making an effort to change matters allows its social life to be restricted and controlled by a small group of social butterflies is committing a crime. I am sure that in the large institutions of which we regularly read in the newspapers, the alleged social dissipations, accounts of which are constantly making the front page, are indulged in by a very small per cent. of the whole body of undergraduates. It is the social aristocrat of whom, thank heaven, there are not many, who dominates and controls the social life of every college with which I am familiar, to the exclusion of the great body of students who most need the training which comes from such an experience. There are in every college scores or hundreds of young men and women who are too shy and too inexperienced to form a social world of their own, whose social instincts are being repressed, who are being shut out from the life which should be freely open to them, and who are starving for a normal social life. College authorities should be wide enough awake to see the situation and to meet it, the social autocracies in college should be overthrown, and every undergraduate should be offered a fair chance for social training and social education.


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text: Discipline and the Derelict (collection)


text: Discipline and the Derelict (collection)/Discipline and the Derelict


text: Discipline and the Derelict (collection)/The Borrower


text: Discipline and the Derelict (collection)/The Undergraduate and Graft


text: Discipline and the Derelict (collection)/Youngest Sons and Only Children


text: Discipline and the Derelict (collection)/"And Some Must Work"


text: Discipline and the Derelict (collection)/The Politician


text: Discipline and the Derelict (collection)/The Cribber


text: Discipline and the Derelict (collection)/The Athlete


text: Discipline and the Derelict (collection)/The Loafer


text: Discipline and the Derelict (collection)/The Fusser


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Rh Constantine in 319 made an important innovation. He enacted that the father's full right over what came to his children should be restricted to what came from himself or his relatives; and that in anything that came from their mother, the head of the family should have only the usufruct and the administration, but with no right of alienation or mortgage. If the children died (it was enacted in 439), their property, apart from the usufruct, passed to their children, or, if there were none, to their father as next heir, not to the grandfather, who if alive would be enjoying the usufruct. When the head of the family emancipated a child, he lost the usufruct, but was authorised to take one-third of the property. Justinian (529) repealed this and gave instead to the father (or other head of the family) the right to retain one-half of the usufruct. Further this arrangement was made to apply not only to what came from the mother but (excepting, as we shall see, camp-peculium) to everything which the children acquired by their own labour or by gift or will from other than their father's relatives. The administration which accompanied the usufruct was not subject to any interference or impeachment by the children, who however were to be supported by their father. The father retained the usufruct, even if he married again.

Soldiers from the time of Augustus were privileged to treat as their own property, disposable as they chose in their life or by their will, all gains made while in the army and in connexion therewith, including gifts from comrades. Such acquisitions were called their castrense-peculium. On this analogy Constantine (326) granted the like privilege to the court officials (palatini), and later Emperors extended it to provincial governors, judicial assessors, advocates, and others in the imperial service (which was often called militia); and eventually (472) to bishops, presbyters, and deacons of the orthodox faith. Wills disposing of such castrense, or quasi-castrense peculium, were specially exempted from challenge by children or parents on the ground of failure in due regard. In case of intestacy, before Justinian altered the law in 543, the intestate's camp-peculium passed to the father as if, like any other peculium, it had been his all along.

As regards the persons of (free) children the father had the power and duty of correction and in early times presumably could sell or kill them, as he could slaves. But this right was rarely exercised, at least in historical times, though not until Constantine (319) was killing a son formally forbidden and ranked as parricide. Sale (with a right however of redemption) was possible only in case of a newly-born child, under pressure of extreme poverty. Exposure of a child, at least after the second century, made the parent liable to punishment. Exposed children of whatever class could not be brought up as slaves or serfs or freed, but were to be deemed freeborn and independent (529). Previously to this law of Justinian it was left to the bringer-up to make them slave or free at his choice.


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50 unpaid army became disorganised and weak. Without money to maintain an effective force and provision the posts, the badly defended frontier gave way under the assault of the barbarians, and, to get rid of them, recourse was had to a ruinous diplomacy, which did not even protect the Empire against invasions. Without money the attempted administrative reform had to be abandoned, and the vices of an openly corrupt administration to be condoned. Without money the government was driven to strange expedients, often most unsuitable to its economic as to its financial policy. To meet expenses the burden of taxation was increased until it became almost intolerable; and as time passed, and the disproportion between the colossal aims of the imperial ambition and the condition of the financial resources of the monarchy became greater, the difficulty of overcoming the deficit led to even harsher measures. "The State," wrote Justinian in 552, "greatly enlarged by the divine mercy and led by this increase to make war on her barbaric neighbours, has never been in greater need of money than to-day." Justinian exercised all his ingenuity to find this money at any sacrifice, but in spite of real economies — amongst others the suppression of the consulship (541) — by which he tried to restore some proportion to the Empire’s budget, the Emperor could never decide to curtail his luxury, or his building operations, while the money which had been collected with such difficulty was too often squandered to please favourites or upon whims. Therefore a terrible financial tyranny was established in the provinces, which effected the ruin of the West already overwhelmed by war, of the Balkan peninsula ravaged by barbarians, and of Asia fleeced by Chosroes. The time came when it was impossible to drag anything from these exhausted countries, and seeing the general misery, the growing discontent and the suspicions which increased every day, contemporaries asked, with a terrified stupor, "whither the wealth of Rome had vanished." Thus the end of the reign was strangely sad.

The death of Theodora (June 548), while it deprived the Emperor of a vigorous and faithful counsellor, dealt Justinian a blow from which he never recovered. Henceforth, as his age increased — he was 65 then — the defects of his character only became more prominent. His irresolution was more noticeable, while his theological mania was inflamed. He disregarded military matters, finding the direction of the wars which he had so dearly loved tiresome and useless; he cared more for the exercise of a diplomacy, often pitifully inadequate, than for the prestige of arms. Above all, he carried on everything with an ever-increasing carelessness. Leaving the trouble of finding money at any cost to his ministers, to Peter Barsymes the successor of John of Cappadocia, and to the quaestor Constantine, the successor of Tribonian, he gave himself up to religious quarrels, passing his nights in disputations with his bishops. As Corippus, a man not noted for severity towards princes, wrote "The old man no longer cared for anything; his spirit was in heaven."


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551-565] Under these circumstances, everything was lost. The effective force of the army, which ought to have numbered 645,000 men, was reduced to 150,000 at the most in 555. No garrisons defended the ramparts of the dilapidated fortresses, "Even the barking of a watch-dog was not to be heard" wrote Agathias, somewhat brutally. Even the capital, inadequately protected by the wall of Anastasius, which was breached in a thousand places, only had a few regiments of the palatine guard — soldiers of no military worth — to defend it, and was at the mercy of a sudden attack. Added to this, successive invasions took place in Illyricum and Thrace; the Huns only just failed to take Constantinople in 558, while in 562 the Avars insolently demanded land and money from the Emperor.

Then there was the misery of earthquakes, in 551 in Palestine, Phoenicia and Mesopotamia, in 554 and 557 at Constantinople. It was in 556 that the scourge of famine came, and in 558 the plague, which desolated the capital during six months. Above all there was the increasing misery caused by the financial tyranny. During the last years of the reign the only supplies came from such expedients as the debasement of the coinage, forced loans and confiscations. The Blues and Greens again filled Byzantium with disturbances: in 553, 556, 559, 560, 561, 562 and 564 there were tumults in the streets, and incendiarism in the town. In the palace the indecision as to a successor led to continual intrigues: already the nephews of the basileus quarrelled over their heritage. There was even a conspiracy against the Emperor's life, and on this occasion Justinian's distrust caused the disgrace of Belisarius once more for a few weeks (562).

Thus when the Emperor died (November 565) at the age of 83 years, relief was felt throughout the Empire. In ending this account of Justinian's reign the grave Evagrius wrote, "Thus died this prince, after having filled the whole world with noise and troubles: and having since the end of his life received the wages of his misdeeds, he has gone to seek the justice which was his due before the judgment-seat of hell." He certainly left a formidable heritage to his successors, perils menacing all the frontiers, an exhausted Empire, in which the public authority was weakened in the provinces by the development of the. great feudal estates, in the capital by the growth of a turbulent proletariat, susceptible to every panic and ready for every sedition. The monarchy had no strength with which to meet all these dangers. In a novel of Justin II promulgated the day after Justinian's death we read the following, word for word — "We found the treasury crushed by debts and reduced to the last degree of poverty, and the army so completely deprived of all necessaries that the State was exposed to the incessant invasions and insults of the barbarians."

It would, however, be unjust to judge the whole of Justinian's reign by the years of his decadence. Indeed, though every part of the work


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Borrower

 * "A Borrower" (1879, "The sculptor's chisel mars"), a poem by W. P. A.
 * "The Borrower" (1921), an essay by Thomas Arkle Clark

title: Borrower


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Rh the husband, which was now a usual incident, was treated as balancing the dowry and gradually subjected to like treatment (468). As the dowry could be increased by the wife or others during the marriage (notwithstanding the rule against gifts between husband and wife), so also could the husband's antenuptial gift, and, if none such had been made, he was allowed to make one not exceeding the value of the dowry, and any agreements which had been made for a marriage settlement could be modified accordingly. The amount of the settlement could be reduced by mutual consent, unless there were children of the marriage, for which the settlement was made (527). Justinian enacted (529)that all agreements for the share to be taken by the wife in her husband's gift after his death were to apply to the share to be taken by the husband in the wife's dowry on her death, the larger share to be reduced to the smaller, and altered the phrase ante nuptias donatio to propter nuptias donatio, that it might fit the extended character (531). In 539 he enacted that the dowry and the marriage gift should be equal, and that in all cases of dissolution of the marriage, whether either party married again or not, the amount coming to him or her from the settlements of the marriage or former marriage should pass as property to the children of the marriage and only the usufruct to the parent; and that was to be subject to the support of the children. In 548 he enacted that either party abstaining from a second marriage should as a reward share with the children in the property of the dowry or nuptial gift, besides enjoying the usufruct of the whole: and further he required that the husband or his friends should (as in other cases of gift) record in court the amount of his marriage gift if over 500 solidi (about equal to £500) under penalty for omission of losing all share in the dowry.

A woman's claim for her dowry had since 529 (and still more since 539) precedence of almost all other claims on her husband's property; and if her husband was insolvent she could maintain her claim on the settled property even during his life against his creditors, and against her father or mother or other donor unless they had expressly stipulated for its return.

Any money or securities or other property which the wife had beside her dowry (parapherna) were not touched by any of these agreements or statutes, but remained entirely the property of the wife and subject to her claim and disposition. The fact was sometimes mentioned in the dowry deed, and the husband and his property were answerable for the parapherna so far as they were under his care. Justinian (530) allowed him to sue for them on his wife's behalf, and to use the interest for their joint purposes, but the capital he was to deal with according to her wish.

were the subject of much change of opinion, in the minds of the Emperors at least, between Augustus and Justinian.