The spring season brings with it a great temptation to cut lectures. Just how far each man shall do so is a question which he, with or without the aid of the office, must be left to decide; but cutting leads to one practice which needs to be discouraged. We refer to that of attending lectures by proxy, of being marked present when in reality absent. The point of honor involved in this intentional deception is sufficiently obvious; but in the College today it seems to escape the attention of many who pass in the eyes of themselves and of their fellows for strictly honorable men. More than this, there are men whose characters command respect, who are yet not ready to admit that they do anything dishonorable by occasionally deceiving the office as to their whereabouts. If they did so as a regular thing, their consciences would be troubled, but for just once or twice when a cut would not appear well in their record, - why of course no one could think of a breach of honor.

The question is too often dismissed in this way merely to avoid the personal inconvenience which it is well known would follow upon a really fair decision. The strict application of theory to practice in the college world demands a disregard of one's temporary convenience which to many students would seem little less than brutal. An ideal is such a persistently determined affair that one shrinks from encountering it. When a man knows he is honorable, why expose himself to the unpleasant suggestion that he is not? The hint that his estimate of himself has been too high is of course absurd, but it is extremely disagreeable, and no man in his senses would force himself to listen to it. It would doubtless be unbecoming in us to urge any such lack of self-consideration, but surely it is not going too far to call attention to one of the disguises in which lying is still countenanced among honorable men.