rk toward the rule of the best. It is,
however, profoundly true that we have gone farther in demand for and
effort toward individual freedom than we have in any translation of
the old social pressure upon the individual conscience and life to
assume social obligations and bear them worthily and usefully. There
is a dry rot at the core of any class or any nation which turns its
inmost psychology toward what it can get from life without regard to
what it should give back to life. Too many children and youth in
conditions in which, happily, the old despotism of age is outgrown,
have unhappily missed the old sense of obligation and old call to
service which the earlier forms of family and school discipline
implanted in all responsive natures.

=Do Modern Youth Need New Community Disciplines?=--There is abundant
evidence that William James was profoundly right when he suggested a
need in youth for some required devotion to "the collectivity that
owns us," some "moral equivalent for war" and the military drill of
older forms of civic order. When the Athenian youth took his oath of
devotion to the city of his birth, he signalized his coming of age and
expressed the ideal of service of each to all and all to each. This is
not the place for detailed discussion of what is lacking in modern
training of American Youth analogous in spirit and effect to this
classic custom. It must be insisted, however, as we discuss the
conditions that make for juvenile delinquency, among the children and
youth otherwise normal and capable of useful life, that we have not
done all that democracy demands when we have made children healthy,
sent them to tax-supported schools, prevented them from too early
earning at "gainful occupations," and instituted all manner of
recreative and stimulating provisions for their free use. We must also
give them some sense of what Seneca meant when he said, "We are all
members of one great body; remember that each was born for the good of
all." We must also burn deep into the consciousness of youth in some
fashion that shall be through our modern mechanisms as effective as
were the old "Fraternities" of primitive life, and as are still the
outworn but persistent forms of military discipline, that idea of
subordination of private whim to public well-being which lies at the
base of all true and ordered social advance. The Children's Courts are
a response to the effort of society to give each child a fair chance
in lif