but chilly sentiments. He contends that young
people are therefore prone to receive moralizing and admonitions with
polite attention, but when it comes to action, they carefully observe
the life about them in order to conduct themselves in such wise as to be
part of the really desirable world inhabited by men of affairs. Owing to
this attitude, many young people living in our cities at the present
moment have failed to apprehend the admonitions of religion and have
never responded to its inner control. It is as if the impact of the
world had stunned their spiritual natures, and as if this had occurred
at the very time that a most dangerous experiment is being tried. The
public gaieties formerly allowed in Catholic countries where young
people were restrained by the confessional, are now permitted in cities
where this restraint is altogether unknown to thousands of young people,
and only faintly and traditionally operative upon thousands of others.
The puritanical history of American cities assumes that these gaieties
are forbidden, and that the streets are sober and decorous for
conscientious young men and women who need no external protection. This
ungrounded assumption, united to the fact that no adult has the
confidence of these young people, who are constantly subjected to a
multitude of imaginative impressions, is almost certain to result
disastrously.

The social relationships in a modern city are so hastily made and often
so superficial, that the old human restraints of public opinion, long
sustained in smaller communities, have also broken down. Thousands of
young men and women in every great city have received none of the
lessons in self-control which even savage tribes imparted to their
children when they taught them to master their appetites as well as
their emotions. These young people are perhaps further from all
community restraint and genuine social control than the youth of the
community have ever been in the long history of civilization. Certainly
only the modern city has offered at one and the same time every possible
stimulation for the lower nature and every opportunity for secret vice.
Educators apparently forget that this unrestrained stimulation of young
people, so characteristic of our cities, although developing very
rapidly, is of recent origin, and that we have not yet seen the outcome.
The present education of the average young man has given him only the
most unreal protection against the tem