o keep their eyes wide open,
instead of basing their appeals on illusory constructions about social
conditions which do not exist. And if the boys begin to reason, their
calculations may count on a still greater probability of good outcome,
if they indulge in their pleasures. More than that, the fate of
certain European countries shows that when it comes to this clear
reasoning, the great turn of the selfish man is from the dangerous
prostitute to the clean girl or married woman, to the sisters and
wives of his friends, and that means the true ruin of home life.

What is the consequence of all? That the fight ought to be given up?
Surely not. But that instead of relying on physical conditions, on
fear of diseases, on merely eugenic improvements and on clever
reasoning, the reform must come from within, must be one of education
and morality, must be controlled, not by bacteriology, but by ethics,
must find its strength not from horror of skin diseases, but in the
reverence for the ideal values of humanity.

VIII

We must not deceive ourselves as to the gravity of the problem. It is
not one of the passing questions which are replaced next season by new
ones. State laws and interstate laws may and ought to continue to
round off some of the sharp edges, institutions and associations may
and ought to succeed in diminishing some of the misery, but the
central problem of national policy in the treatment of the youth will
stay with us until it has been solved rightly; illustrative
instruction cannot be such a solution. We must see with open eyes
where we are standing. The American nation of to-day is no longer the
America of yesterday. The puritanism which certainly was a spirit of
restraint has gone and cannot be brought back. The new wealth and
power, the influx of sensuous South European and East European
elements, the general trend of our age all over the civilized world,
with its technical comfort and its inexpensive luxuries, the receding
of religion and many more factors, have given a new face to America in
the last fifteen years. A desire for the satisfaction of the senses, a
longing for amusements, has become predominant in thousandfold shades
from the refined to the vulgar. In such self-seeking periods the
sexual desire in its masked and its unmasked forms gains steadily in
importance and fascination.

America, moreover, is in a particularly difficult situation. This new
longing