any a girl and many a boy, yielding to
the influences of the abandonment of the crowd, take the first step in
sexual vice. This type of festival is not socially profitable to a
community, where the commercial aim and purpose predominates. The
commercial exploitation of the recreation and social needs of the people
is usually productive of sexual immorality.

A characteristic feature of American life is the club, union, society, or
order spontaneously formed by the people. No matter what the fundamental
purposes of these groups may be, whether for protection against sickness,
accident, and industrial evils, whether for the study of art, music, and
literature, or for the promotion of physical activities, the primary bond
that brings the group together and holds it together is the social
instinct of mankind.

Those which administer to the play and recreation life of their members
most efficiently are strongest. The dances, card parties, lectures,
entertainments, and other social activities conducted by such groups are
usually under the best kind of social control, far better than any type of
commercial amusement and perhaps better than most public-supervised
amusements. The strength is in the comparative smallness of the group, the
personal acquaintance of the members, the presence of older people with
the young, and the existence of individual and group responsibility and
ideals. Far better social control would result if all public dances and
public skating-rinks and excursions were conducted on this group or
society basis.

One field of neglected social activity is the home as a recreation and
social center. The day of the "party" seems to be past. Parents have thus
lost one strong hold on the character development of their children.
Thousands of parents in the modern city have lost the social spirit of the
home because of crowded living conditions, but there are also thousands,
especially in the Western cities, who still have individual homes; every
such home should be the primary social and recreation center for
adolescent boys and girls. The revival of the small group social in the
home for the young people would be a constructive contribution to some of
the moral problems of the young.

In the leisure-time activities of children, the Sunday supplement or
"funny sheet" of the newspaper is of importance. The funny sheet appeals
not so much through humor as through glaring color and grotesque pictures
which violate