"LOYALTY-THE NOBLE VIRTUE! Noble because it is the easiest thing in the world to swing with the trend, to jump on the nearest bandwagon. Noble because it is hard to stand by a belief, a person, an organization, when personal sacrifice or a threat to popularity is involved.

There are several things to which an individual can devote loyalty-to country, to home, to ideal. Examples abound in the biographies of the great and in literature. Here we will speak of loyalty to a way of life, to Beta Sigma Phi.

Examples of loyalty by members to their sorority are many. There was the member who, many years ago, rode miles and miles by horseback, her formal over her arm, to attend the nearest Founder's Day celebration. It was in the early days of the sorority, and the member was a teacher in a wooded mountain area of Southern Colorado. She had no other way to get to the nearest town to catch the bus to Raton, New Mexico, where her chapter was located.

Loyalty to sorority motivated the member (Rilla Billings - refer to Beta Sigma Phi Goes International) who established the first chapter outside the United States. When she moved from Oakland, California to Vancouver, Canada, she took Beta Sigma Phi with her, making it an international organization. In the same way, every member and chapter establishing a Friendly Venture chapter has shown loyalty to the organization.

Loyalty to chapter is the exemplary motive of members who have established attendance records of ten, twenty, fifty years and more! And loyalty to the officers they elect causes members to abide by a decision they personally dislike, just as loyalty to the members is behind the decisions made by chapter executive boards.

Long to be remembered in Beta Sigma Phi history is the story of the member who was so eager to fulfill her requirements for the Exemplar Degree that she completed four years of program work by correspondence. She had just received the Ritual of Jewels Degree when her husband, a career Army man, was transferred to a remote station. After her requirements were completed, she drove 50 miles to the nearest town to receive the Exemplar Degree.

Loyalty, the noble virtue, walks hand in hand with nobility only when reason rules. There is such a thing as blind loyalty, such as animals give because they are ruled by instinct and know no other way. The loyalty of which the Beta Sigma Phi rituals speak is sighted loyalty, the loyalty we give when we know it is right to give it."