A Girls Student Days and After | Page 5

a duty in fulfilling them. The consciousness of this responsibility is the very heart and soul of the student self-government movement, for it recognizes not only the obligation placed upon its members by an institution, but also the wide influence one girl may have on others. Student government knows that upper class girls can determine the spirit of the under classes. Even looking at the matter from the lightest point of view, respectful and law-abiding ways are always well-bred ways.
When a student becomes an alumna she can discharge a large part of her great responsibility by realizing that it is not any longer so much a question of what her school can give her as of what she can give to her school. One thing she can always give it--that is, kindly judgment. And she can acknowledge that her ideas of what her Alma Mater is after her own school-days may not be correct. The school, sad to say, is sometimes placed in the position of the kindly old farmer who, hearing others call a certain man a liar, said: "Waal now, I wouldn't say he wuz a liar. That's a bit harsh. I'd say he handled the truth mighty careless-like." Schools find that some of their alumn? handle the truth mighty careless-like.
While she is still a student a girl's service to her school lies largely in her daily work, the mental muscle she puts into all that she does in the classroom and studies out of it. If because of her and a multiple of many girls like her, the college does not possess that sine qua non of all the higher mental life, an intellectual atmosphere, it is the student's and her multiple's fault. "You may lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink," may be an old adage, but it would be hard to improve upon it. You may set before students a veritable Thanksgiving feast of things intellectual, but if they have no eagerness, no appetite for them, the feast remains untouched. Energy and hunger of the mind, not the anxious hosts, will in the end decide whether that feast is or is not to be eaten.
The school considers not only scholarship but also the sum of all that it is, its culture, its attainment, its moral force, as these elements are expressed in its living members, its students and its teachers--in short, its idealism. Idealism is having one's life governed by ideals, and an ideal is a perfect conception of that which is good, beautiful and true. If the girl's life is not governed by ideals, how, then, can the school hope to have its idealism live or grow? Frequently students think of the ideals of college or school as of something outside themselves, more or less intangible, with which they may or may not be concerned. Students cannot do their institution a greater injury than by harbouring such a thought, for if their sense of responsibility will only make the idea of the school personal, then indeed will the school be like that house upon which the rains descended and the winds blew but it fell not, for it was founded upon a rock.

III
FRIENDSHIPS
Homesickness and friendships, how much and how vivid a part they play in the first year, or years, of school life! An old coloured physician was asked about a certain patient who was very ill. "I'll tell you de truf," was the reply. "Widout any perception, Phoebe Pamela may die and she may get well; dere's considerable danger bofe ways." I will tell you one truth about the first year of school life: friends there will surely be, and homesickness there is likely to be,--there is "considerable danger both ways."
Even if a girl has never been away from home before, it is possible that she will not suffer from homesickness. It is probable, however, that the new surroundings in which the girl finds herself, and the separation from those who are the centre of her personal life, will bring on an attack of this most painful malady. It takes time to fit comfortably into the new surroundings, and meanwhile everything is strange. Homesickness is not to be laughed at, but it must be less deadly, less fatal than some people think it, or there would not be so many recoveries. Girls often weep when they enter school, and then after the long dreary years are really over, lived through, and the poor forlorn freshman is metamorphosed into the senior, they weep again. Is it not strange that these seniors who wept on entering school should weep also when leaving it? It looks in the end as if Phoebe Pamela were sure to get well. Yet the effort to get well requires a fine effort at self-control,--an effort every