Right here I broke in again. “Boys,” I said, “let me repeat, don’t try to do it all alone. Get your older friends in. Get your big brothers, your fathers, your teachers, the fathers of the other boys, even if their sons don’t belong. It is a good thing to have a lot of them with you as honorary members. Of course they are busy men. There will not be many of them out any one night, but you ought to have some outsiders and advisers here every night.”
“I don’t know about that,” said “Tubby.” “If we have folks like that here, we won’t feel free and easy. We will be on dress parade all the time.”
“That’s just how we should be,” said Charlie Taylor. “If we don’t take ourselves seriously, no one else will.”
“That’s the way to talk,” chimed in Jimmy Francis. “We don’t want any ‘rough house’ or bear dances or anything like that. We want to do business in this club of ours.”
“Now, look here, fellows,” said “Tubby.” “Who said anything about rough house or anything like it? I don’t want that any more than you do.”
Jimmy assured him that they all knew that he wasn’t standing for anything like “rough house.”
“But it’s going to be awful hard work to keep braced up all the time,” he sighed to himself. “I won’t dare even to slide down in my chair. O well!”
When it came to considering the conduct of members within the society and methods of discipline, the boys were decidedly at sea. They wanted to maintain the dignity of the club and yet they wanted to be fair to everyone. “But,” as Frank Lawrence put it, “what rule shall we follow in passing upon the guilt of members? What standards shall we follow? What is a crime and what is not a crime?”
That was the question. What should be regarded as conduct unbecoming a member of the club? It was finally decided that no one code of rules could answer such a question, but that each case should stand on its own merits. Consequently the section was worded like this: “Any member who is guilty of conduct unbecoming a member of the club may, at any regular meeting, be suspended or expelled at the discretion of the club. But the charge against such member shall be signed by one of the officers of the club or at least three members, shall definitely state the facts constituting the alleged offense, shall lie on the table one week, and shall require a two-thirds vote of the members present for its adoption.”
In arranging for their programmes the boys felt that they should allow some latitude for joint sessions with other clubs. Consequently they instructed their committee who had the drafting of the rules in charge to give a place for such things on the order of business. While they were organizing a debating club, they said, they didn’t want to shut out anything else they might want to do.