gue: and this was sufficient for the
crowd, for all are children when beholding the elemental things of life.
At any rate the women who stood at the exits of the theater selling the
Christmas stamps of the anti-tuberculosis society will tell you that the
purse strings as well as the heart strings of the crowd relaxed to the
crude but deep melody of mercy.

The social hunger also, turning its back upon the meager home and
heightened by the monotony and semi-independence of early toil, takes to
the street. The quest is quickly commercialized and debauched by the
public dance halls which are controlled by the liquor interests. A
recent thorough investigation of 328 of these halls in Chicago showed a
nightly attendance of some 86,000 young people, the average age of the
boys being sixteen to eighteen years and of the girls fourteen to
sixteen years. Liquor was sold in 240 halls, 190 had saloons opening
into them, in 178 immoral dancing went on unhindered. The worst halls
had the least dancing and the longest intermissions. Everything was
conducted so as to increase the sale of liquor, and between the hours of
one and three A.M. the toughest element from the saloons, which close
at one o'clock, poured into the halls to complete the debauch and to
make full use of the special liquor license which is good until the
later hour.[5]

The quest of fun and social adventure can be traced also through other
commercialized channels, in public poolrooms where minors waste time and
money--gamble, smoke, tell unclean stories and plan mischief; in great
amusement parks where the boy and girl on pleasure bent meet as
strangers to each other and without social sponsor, where the deluded
girl not only accepts but often invites a generosity which will tend to
compromise if not break down the morality of both; on excursion boats
which, if neglected, tend to become floating palaces of shame; and in
many ways that lead from the inadequate home to sorrow and disaster.

It is to be doubted whether the average pastor or parent has an adequate
conception of the tremendous odds against which the moral forces contend
for the conservation of the city's childhood and youth, and whether we
have as yet begun to solve the problems that arise from the city's
sinister treatment of the home. Public parks, field-houses, libraries,
and social settlements graciously mitigate the evil, but are far from
curing it.

To turn to the public schools with the expect