e but one path open to us in
America. That path implies freedom for the young people made safe only
through their own self-control. This, in turn, must be based upon
knowledge and habits of clean companionship. In point of fact no
course between the two is safe in a modern city, and in the most
crowded quarters the young people themselves are working out a
protective code which reminds one of the instinctive protection that
the free-ranging child in the country learns in regard to poisonous
plants and "marshy places," or of the cautions and abilities that the
mountain child develops in regard to ice and precipices. This
statement, of course, does not hold good concerning a large number of
children in every crowded city quarter who may be classed as
degenerates, the children of careless or dissolute mothers who fall
into all sorts of degenerate habits and associations before childhood
is passed, who cannot be said to have "gone wrong" at any one moment
because they have never been in the right path even of innocent
childhood; but the statement is sound concerning thousands of girls
who go to and from work every day with crowds of young men who meet
them again and again in the occasional evening pleasures of the more
decent dance halls or on a Sunday afternoon in the parks.

The mothers who are of most use to these normal city working girls are
the mothers who develop a sense of companionship with the changing
experiences of their daughters, who are willing to modify ill-fitting
social conventions into rules of conduct which are of actual service
to their children in their daily lives of factory work and of city
amusements. Those mothers, through their sympathy and adaptability,
substitute keen present interests and activity for solemn warnings and
restraint, self-expression for repression. Their vigorous family life
allies itself by a dozen bonds to the educational, the industrial and
the recreational organizations of the modern city, and makes for
intelligent understanding, industrial efficiency and sane social
pleasures.

By all means let us preserve the safety of the home, but let us also
make safe the street in which the majority of our young people find
their recreation and form their permanent relationships. Let us not
forget that the great processes of social life develop themselves
through influences of which each participant is unconscious as he
struggles alone and unaided in the strength of a current which se