talked or listened and stayed on, and as they stayed, discontented often because they, too, could not go, they loafed. They did not realize that the duty and the heroism they had shown in staying might be quite as great as that shown by those who went, that the college work was quite as important work as that of the training camps or of the trenches. There was an opportunity for patriotism and for self-discipline and sacrifice in doing their college work well which too many of them neglected or ignored. If they could not go to war at once, they were not willing to do anything else."What's the use?" was their solution of the difficulty.

This summer I have had occasion to observe or talk with a young fellow who has had unusual opportunities for education, but has never realized the importance of work. He thinks he would like to go into the army, but he is only eighteen and his parents wish him to have at least another year of education before he enlists. He has an alert mind, but he refuses to use it with any energy. He has gone to college, but his chief ambition is to spend money and to have a good time. He is a fraternity man, but he took no responsibility for the management or for the upbuilding of his organization. He did badly when he might have been the best in his class. Work has been plentiful and working men scarce this summer, but it has never occurred to him to do anything. He could have had $3.50 a day in the harvest field, but it made him tired to think of such an occupation. "I don't like to work," he says, "and I'm not going to do what I don't like to do." He has not yet been made to see that he is the most inexcusable sort of slacker. He will go back to college in the fall with no enthusiasm, no intention of doing well, no conception of his obligation as a citizen to use his energies to the best advantage. Young as he is he should be sent to the army. Such men as he should learn at once to work or they should be sent into the fighting lines.*

Notwithstanding the present war situation, when they open in the fall, the colleges of the country will still draw a large quota of undergraduate men. For many of these the fratern

*Since this article was put in type the War Department has followed this sug gestion.-EDITOR.

ities will make a strong fight. Not a few of these men will accept fraternity membership, but they will be of little service to the organization or receive little benefit themselves by being in college unless they are willing to work and eager to accomplish the best that is in them.

In recognizing the man in college and in special cases giving him special classification that allows him to continue or to finish his college work even when he is beyond the draft age, the government has dignified college training and has made it comparable to regular military service in the army.

The man who goes to college at this time, however, and who does less than his best, who is not willing to make sacrifices and to submit to discipline, even if it be only self-discipline, in order that he may be thoroughly trained, is quite as much of a slacker and a traitor to duty as he would be if he were in a training camp or on the battle front, and loafed and neglected his assigned work and duty. The young fellow whether he be sixteen or twenty-six who is offered educational opportunities at this time and who does not make the most of them should have first mention in the list of non-essential citizens of whom there are too many.

The most irritating and worthless example of the man who can not fight and will not work is the fellow who loafs about the fraternity house trying to decide what branch of the service he will enter and just when he will send in his application. I have seen dozens of men who if they thought they might enlist any time within the next year or two felt entirely justified in giving up all intellectual activities and settling down to a life of ease and pleasure and neglect of the regular duty at hand.

"It will be hard enough when we get into it," they say, "so we might just as well take it easy while we can." So they cut class, and give up study and justify themselves on the ground that they may be in France shortly.

I have just finished talking to a young fellow as I write this paper in early August. He had but little work to do to complete his requirements for a degree, but he gave it up right in the midst of the last few weeks. He was planning to get into the service, he said, so he chose to do nothing but to loaf, and drive

his car about town, and play pool, and booze a little. There was plenty of work to be had and few workers, but farm work blistered his hands, he averred.

This is the time for real men in college-men who have a purpose, men who want an education for what it will do for them and for what it will enable them to do for the government, men who are willing to do their best, who are eager to work.

The college man and especially the man in college who must assume the added obligations of helping to run an organization and keep it alive, will not have as easy a time as he once had. More is expected of men today than was true before we entered into the war; the conditions under which college work is done are more strenuous. Men are unsettled, uncertain, but this is true in every walk of life. No man is excusable for loafing simply because the conditions under which he is working are not ideal. On the contrary he is under the more obligation to work. The man who overcomes difficulties, who goes on with his work and does it in spite of the fact that he is mentally disturbed and upset is the stronger for it.

There are numerous qualities which fraternities look for in the men they are rushing and whom they are considering for prospective brothers. In these days personal charm and social standing, and all around good fellowship, much as they are ordinarily to be desired are not to be compared to stability of character, definiteness of purpose, the willingness to work regularly and with concentration without compulsion.

The fraternities in these days of trial cannot afford to be handicapped by the man who must be whipped into line, who has to be made to work, who has no keen interest in doing well in college. These are the days when every man young or old should have within him the strong determination to work or fight. Coöperation, self-discipline were never before more needed. Educated men were never more necessary than at this moment both to win the war and to take a leading part in the general reorganization and restoration which must come afterward. Everybody may have a part, but the loafer must go, from college and from the fraternity, as from every organization and every walk of life.

THE FRATERNITY OF THE ARMY

Wesley E. King

Captain 145th Field Artillery

In using the word "army" I do not mean the handful of loyal citizens who made soldiery a profession previous to the entry of the United States into the great world conflict: not the little organization which this country so grudgingly supported for the past half century, but the new, big, or big new army of two million men who have set aside their civil pursuits for the time being and are devoting their every ounce of physical energy and brain power in striking, or getting ready to strike, a death blow to kaiserism-the band of patriots gathered together from our four corners to be whisked over seas on a mission of tremendous import to all the world.

Several things these men have done, who have thus begun a new life. One of them is the severing of civil fraternal ties. They do not all realize this, but they have none the less done it. I have only come to realize it thoroughly since being asked to contribute this article. Right over there, just two paces from my bunk, is an Alpha Tau; on the opposite side of this table sits a Masonic brother; on my right is a Sigma Chi; up and down this barrack are two hundred officers, from all parts of the country and many walks of life, many college men and many who know nothing of college or university life but who have been semi-devoted, like myself, to military matters for a quarter of a century, and they all belong to one or more fraternities. And yet you hear not a word of it; not a syllable passes between men here on this subject, unless some special circumstance or event brings it out. I had no idea whatever that Brother X on my left was an A. T. . until I brought the subject up in order to get some thoughts for this attempt at an article. The Sigma Chi served with me for months in California and traveled 1700 miles with me to this place and bunked beside me for weeks without a word on fraternities, and my Masonic brother across table worked away day after day and until midnight night on

night without a display of his fraternal insignia or a sign that I might recognize. No more were his thoughts on the subject than mine. I have questioned fifty men—I mean both officers and enlisted men-and the decision is unanimous. My observations on this subject may properly extend into the ranks as well as among the officers, for my first three months of this service were spent in the ranks. My bunkies were all university men from widely scattered places. I know now that they are fraters in some organization or other, but never a word of it then. One of them is here with me. We have spent nearly a year in the closest kind of contact, and yet no thought or mention of those days so dear to us all and which, in civil life, continued to play so large a part in our lives.

What I have discovered during the past year of army service is that a big new fraternity has sprung up with this big new army. A fraternity of tremendous proportions it is, and one which will not confine itself to men in uniform, but will extend to all those who are permitted to devote their time to finishing the job Kaiser Bill started four years ago this month. In all this million and more of men there is one big, controlling thought, one theme, one clear determination that has established and is cementing to prodigious strength a fraternal bond that has already eclipsed any fraternal bond known among usa bond that will play the big part in the destiny of nations, in the determination of geographical boundaries and the bounds of human liberties-a bond, made sacred by the blood of those who make the supreme sacrifice for it, that will break over and break down any barrier of human or satanical contrivance.

And the basis, the foundation stone, of this new fraternity is found in the impulse which sent hundreds of thousands of the new army strength into the fray of frays. I have not analyzed that impulse as one "to make the world safe for democracy," but as one of pure, unalloyed chivalry; a chivalry of the type made immortal in the mediaeval lays and romances; a chivalry which few have recognized as such themselves, but none the less a spontaneous response of manhood to the defense of womanhood; an electric spark touching the sleeping knight errantry in the