etty immoralities which are often the youth's protest against them.

There are many city neighborhoods in which practically every young
person who has attained the age of fourteen years enters a factory.
When the work itself offers nothing of interest, and when no public
provision is made for recreation, the situation becomes almost
insupportable to the youth whose ancestors have been rough-working and
hard-playing peasants.

In such neighborhoods the joy of youth is well nigh extinguished; and
in that long procession of factory workers, each morning and evening,
the young walk almost as wearily and listlessly as the old. Young
people working in modern factories situated in cities still dominated
by the ideals of Puritanism face a combination which tends almost
irresistably to overwhelm the spirit of youth. When the Puritan
repression of pleasure was in the ascendant in America the people it
dealt with lived on farms and villages where, although youthful
pleasures might be frowned upon and crushed out, the young people
still had a chance to find self-expression in their work. Plowing the
field and spinning the flax could be carried on with a certain
joyousness and vigor which the organization of modern industry too
often precludes. Present industry based upon the inventions of the
nineteenth century has little connection with the old patterns in
which men have worked for generations. The modern factory calls for an
expenditure of nervous energy almost more than it demands muscular
effort, or at least machinery so far performs the work of the massive
muscles, that greater stress is laid upon fine and exact movements
necessarily involving nervous strain. But these movements are exactly
of the type to which the muscles of a growing boy least readily
respond, quite as the admonition to be accurate and faithful is that
which appeals the least to his big primitive emotions. The demands
made upon his eyes are complicated and trivial, the use of his muscles
is fussy and monotonous, the relation between cause and effect is
remote and obscure. Apparently no one is concerned as to what may be
done to aid him in this process and to relieve it of its dullness and
difficulty, to mitigate its strain and harshness.

Perhaps never before have young people been expected to work from
motives so detached from direct emotional incentive. Never has the age
of marriage been so long delayed; never has the work of youth been so
separated fro