well, but if society cannot so
provide he will still exploit his causal relation although it must be in
violation of law and order. The result is delinquency, but even in this
he glories. It often gives a more pungent and romantic testimony than
could otherwise be secured. It is the flaring yellow advertisement of
misdirected effectiveness. Probably there mingles with this impulse the
love of adventure as developed in the chase. "Flipping cars,"
tantalizing policemen, pilfering from fruit stands are frequently the
degenerate, urban forms of the old quest of, and encounter with, the
game of forest and jungle.

Then there is the lure of the water, which explains more than half his
school truancy during the open season. It is a fine spring or summer
day. The _Wanderlust_ of his ancestry is upon the boy. The periodic
migration for game or with the herds, the free range of wood and stream,
or the excitement of the chase pulsates in his blood. Voices of the far
past call to something native in him. The shimmer of the water just as
they of old saw it, the joyous chance of taking game from its unseen
depths, or of getting the full flush of bodily sensation by plunging
into it, the unbridled pursuit of one's own sweet will under the free
air of heaven--these are the attractions over against which we place the
school with its books, its restraint, and its feminine control; and the
church with its hush and its Sunday-school lesson: and, too often, we
offer nothing else. It is like giving a hungry woodchopper a doily, a
Nabisco wafer, and a finger-bowl.

If we could but appreciate the great crude past whose conflicts still
persist in the boy's gruesome and tragic dreams, filling him with a
fear of the dark, which fear in time past was the wholesome and
necessary monitor of self-preservation; if we could only realize how
strenuous must be those experiences which guarantee a strong body, a
firm will, and an appetite for objective facts, we would not make our
education so insipidly nice, so intellectual, so bookish, and so much
under the roof. A school and a school building are not synonymous, a
church and a church building are not synonymous; schooling is not
identical with education, nor church attendance with religion. It is
unfortunate if the boy beholds in these two essential institutions
merely an emasculated police.

If either the church or the school is to reach the boy it will have to
recognize and perform its task very