much more easily take on all
the new appliances as a part of their daily life and can so swiftly
change from old ways to the unaccustomed. Some of the most selfish and
cruel of the prodigal sons and daughters of our time find it easy to
escape from any parental appeal in the air or by the whirling wheels
of the machine or in any of the various ways by which space and time
are now annihilated. And "out of sight, out of mind" is true of their
psychology. All of which makes it clear that to-day, as in no previous
time, we must all stand or fall together. The old home privacy is for
the most part gone, the old home isolation wholly departed. All
recreation is more and more in the open and appeals at one and the
same time to all youth. The standards have to be raised for all or
they cannot be held firm for the favored few. Democracy, which aims to
make all better, may work to make all cheaper in taste, more vulgar in
language, less capable of fine expression of noble ideals, unless a
social conscience and a social intelligence take command of the common
life.

It is, therefore, to-day, not enough to call upon parents to try and
keep their own sons and daughters from the prodigal life, it is a
necessity, stronger than ever before, to make the influences which all
must share what all careful and wise parents wish for their own
children.

This is a mighty task, one that in the United States of America, with
its cosmopolitan population, and its multitude of people with a
smattering only of education or culture but with economic ability to
gratify their undeveloped tastes, is more vast and more pressing than
any nation has yet tried to accomplish. While we are working at it we
may well comfort ourselves by remembering that each generation has to
meet new problems, and that somehow, even when the young start wrong
or meet with overwhelming temptations or fail to get at the right time
the impulse toward the best which they need, life has them in hand and
teaches by experience much which helps them onward. The tendency of
life is toward strength and health and goodness and idealistic aims
and choice of the best each person knows. It is true, and the best
thing in human experience, that what parents cannot do for those they
love, life itself does for them, perhaps with needless suffering that
the wise and loving parent would have saved them had they but heeded,
but with a thoroughness which experience alone can give.

=Parental