ved merely to trick and deride them?

Older nations have taken a well defined line of action in regard to
it.

Among the Hull-House neighbors are many of the Latin races who employ
a careful chaperonage over their marriageable daughters and provide
husbands for them at an early age. "My father will get a husband for
me this winter," announces Angelina, whose father has brought her to a
party at Hull-House, and she adds with a toss of her head, "I saw two
already, but my father says they haven't saved enough money to marry
me." She feels quite as content in her father's wisdom and ability to
provide her with a husband as she does in his capacity to escort her
home safely from the party. He does not permit her to cross the
threshold after nightfall unaccompanied by himself, and unless the
dowry and the husband are provided before she is eighteen he will
consider himself derelict in his duty towards her. "Francesca can't
even come to the Sodality meeting this winter. She lives only across
from the church but her mother won't let her come because her father
is out West working on a railroad," is a comment one often hears. The
system works well only when it is carried logically through to the end
of an early marriage with a properly-provided husband.

Even with the Latin races, when the system is tried in America it
often breaks down, and when the Anglo-Saxons anywhere imitate this
regime it is usually utterly futile. They follow the first part of the
program as far as repression is concerned, but they find it impossible
to follow the second because all sorts of inherited notions deter
them. The repressed girl, if she is not one of the languishing type,
takes matters into her own hands, and finds her pleasures in illicit
ways, without her parents' knowledge. "I had no idea my daughter was
going to public dances. She always told me she was spending the night
with her cousin on the South Side. I hadn't a suspicion of the truth,"
many a broken-hearted mother explains. An officer who has had a long
experience in the Juvenile Court of Chicago, and has listened to
hundreds of cases involving wayward girls, gives it as his deliberate
impression that a large majority of cases are from families where the
discipline had been rigid, where they had taken but half of the
convention of the Old World and left the other half.

Unless we mean to go back to these Old World customs which are already
hopelessly broken, there would seem to b