because thou oughtest." Fichte said that Faulheit, Feigheit, and Falschheit
[Laziness, cowardice, falsehood] were the three dishonorable things for students.
If they would study the history and enter into the spirit of their own fraternities,
they would often have keener and broader ideas of honor to which they are
happily so sensitive. If professors made it always a point of honor to confess and
never to conceal the limitation of their knowledge, would scorn all pretense of it,
place credit for originality frankly where it belongs, teach no creeds they do not
profoundly believe, or topics in which they are not interested, and withhold
nothing from those who want the truth, they could from this vantage with more
effect bring students to feel that the laziness that, while outwardly conforming,
does no real inner work; that getting a diploma, as a professor lately said, an
average student could do, on one hour's study a day; living beyond one's means,
and thus imposing a hardship on parents greater than the talent of the son
justifies; accepting stipends not needed, especially to the deprivation of those
more needy; using dishonest ways of securing rank in studies or positions on
teams, or social standing, are, one and all, not only ungentlemanly but cowardly
and mean, and the axe would be laid at the root of the tree. Honor should impel
students to go nowhere where they conceal their college, their fraternity, or even
their name; to keep themselves immaculate from all contact with that class of
women which, Ziegler states, brought twenty-five per cent of the students of the
University of Berlin in a single year to physicians; to remember that other's
sisters are as cherished as their own; to avoid those sins against confiding
innocence which cry for vengeance, as did Valentine against Faust, and which
strengthen the hate of social classes and make mothers and sisters seem tedious
because low ideas of womanhood have been implanted, and which give a taste
for mucky authors that reek with suggestiveness; and to avoid the waste of nerve
substance and nerve weakness in ways which Ibsen and Tolstoi have described.
These things are the darkest blot on the honor of youth.
Associations for youth, devised or guided by adults. Here we enter a very
different realm. Forbush[30] undertakes an analysis of many such clubs which
he divides according to their purpose into nine chief classes: physical training,
handicraft, literary, social, civic and patriotic, science-study, hero-love, ethical,
religious. These he classifies as to age of the boys, his purview generally ending
at seventeen; discusses and tabulates the most favorable number, the instincts
chiefly utilized, the kinds of education gained in each and its percentage of
interest, and the qualities developed. He commends Riis's mode of pulling the
safety-valve of a rather dangerous boy-gang by becoming an adult honorary
member, and interpreting the impulsions of this age in the direction of adventure