esires, with moral equivalents for evil. The task is turned from the
damming and restricting of wants to the creation of fine environments for
them. And the environment of an impulse extends all the way from the
human body, through family life and education out into the streets of the
city.

Had the Commission worked along democratic lines, we should have had
recommendations about the hygiene and early training of children, their
education, the houses they live in and the streets in which they play;
changes would have been suggested in the industrial conditions they face;
plans would have been drawn for recreation; hints would have been
collected for transmuting the sex impulse into art, into social endeavor,
into religion. That is the constructive approach to the problem. I note
that the Commission calls upon the churches for help. Its obvious
intention was to down sex with religion. What was not realized, it seems,
is that this very sex impulse, so largely degraded into vice, is the
dynamic force in religious feeling. One need not call in the testimony of
the psychologists, the students of religion, the aestheticians or even of
Plato, who in the "Symposium" traced out the hierarchy of love from the
body to the "whole sea of beauty." Jane Addams in Chicago has tested the
truth by her own wide experience, and she has written what the Commission
might easily have read,--that "in failing to diffuse and utilize this
fundamental instinct of sex through the imagination, we not only
inadvertently foster vice and enervation, but we throw away one of the
most precious implements for ministering to life's highest needs. There
is no doubt that this ill-adjusted function consumes quite unnecessarily
vast stores of vital energy, even when we contemplate it in its immature
manifestations which are infinitely more wholesome than the dumb swamping
process. All high school boys and girls know the difference between the
concentration and the diffusion of this impulse, although they would be
hopelessly bewildered by the use of terms. They will declare one of their
companions to be 'in love' if his fancy is occupied by the image of a
single person about whom all the new-found values gather, and without
whom his solitude is an eternal melancholy. But if the stimulus does not
appear as a definite image, and the values evoked are dispensed over the
world, the young person suddenly seems to have discovered a beauty and
significance in many thi