let to the spirit of play
and adventure, and to train the young for their life work? Would such an
outfit do the work without personal leadership inspired by religion?

Christian evangelism in the past has not had an adequate understanding of
the power of the group. In what connections has the Church shown a true
valuation of the social factor in sin and redemption? At what points has
its strategy been ineffective in dealing with socialized evil? What
contributions can social science make to the efficiency of evangelism?
Would a correct scientific analysis of the constructive and disintegrating
forces in society be enough to do saving work?

III

The bad gangs of the young are usually held together by a misdirected love
of play and adventure. The dangerous combinations of adults are
consolidated by "the cohesive power of plunder." That makes them a far
more difficult proposition.

Any local attack on saloons and vice resorts furnishes a laboratory
demonstration of socialized evil. The object of both kinds of institutions
is to make big profit by catering to desires which induce men to spend
freely. Music and sociability are used as a bait. The people who profit by
this trade are held together by the fear of a common danger. Since the
community uses political means of curbing or suppressing the vice
business, the vice group goes into politics to prevent it. It seeks to
control the police, the courts, the political machines by sharing part of
its profits. Lawyers, officials, newspaper proprietors, and real estate
men are linked up and summoned like a feudal levy in case of danger.
Drugstores, doctors, chauffeurs, messenger boys, and all kinds of people
are used to bring in trade and make it secure. The exploded fictions of
alcoholism are kept circulating. Like a tape-worm in the intestines, these
articulated and many-jointed parasitic organizations of vice make our
communities sick, dirty, and decadent.

We have learned to read the sordid trail of the drink and vice traffic in
American communities. There is another kind of organized evil, even more
ancient, pervasive, and deadly, which few understand, though it has left a
trail sufficiently terrible.

Wherever we look in the history of the older nations, we see an alignment
of two fundamental classes. The one is born to toil, stunted by toil, and
gets its class characteristics by toil. The other is characterized by the
pleasures and arts of leisure, is physicall