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A SALUTARY INFLUENCE ters of student discipline." It was authorized to try suspected offenders and to impose penalties not subject to review or appeal, except where they were suspensions or expulsions. Student government at Gettysburg got off to a most auspicious start. The faculty included the names of the ten members of the Student Council in the 1911 catalogue, a practice continued through 1942. Presidents and faculty praised the energy and good judgment of the councilors, who began making suggestions for improving all phases of dormitory, campus, and academic life. They urged the faculty to take steps to insure lighter halls and cleaner lavatories in the dormitories, as well as greater fire protection on the campus. They offered to revive the museum and began an annual award to the fraternity with the highest academic average.291 In its issue for July 26, 1915 the Independent, a well-known national magazine, praised the council for having "invented" Take-It-Back-Day, on which all borrowed items were to be returned to their owners. Writing in the 1911 G-Book, the first president of the Student Council stressed the honor and responsibility of each member of the community as major reasons for the existence of student government. Not surprisingly, therefore, the council was the body responsible for administering the honor system introduced in 1916. The faculty's somewhat different priorities at this time are indicated by the paragraph describing student government which they included in the 1911 and subsequent catalogues. According to them, the Student Council was "a trial of self-government" designed to act as "a medium of communication between the students and the Faculty." That it "acts in certain matters of discipline" was the only specific thing said about it. Reporting to the trustees in June 1911, President Granville stated that, during its first year in operation, the Student Council was so successful in handling these matters that "not a single case of order or discipline in the college has been even considered by the faculty." Unfortunately, he could not continue making such glowing reports. During the next few years the Student Council faced the most serious crisis of its existence, one which threatened to destroy the experiment begun so optimistically in the fall of 1910. The causes of this crisis were rooted in the early twentieth-century manifestations of old phenomena: class spirit and rivalry.292 291That many of these suggestions had little or no effect is not here the point. 292See p. 674. 292See p. 674. 61