young people who are
living in its tenement houses and working in its factories. The mass
of these young people are possessed of good intentions and they are
equipped with a certain understanding of city life. This itself could
be made a most valuable social instrument toward securing innocent
recreation and better social organization. They are already serving
the city in so far as it is honeycombed with mutual benefit societies,
with "pleasure clubs," with organizations connected with churches and
factories which are filling a genuine social need. And yet the whole
apparatus for supplying pleasure is wretchedly inadequate and full of
danger to whomsoever may approach it. Who is responsible for its
inadequacy and dangers? We certainly cannot expect the fathers and
mothers who have come to the city from farms or who have emigrated
from other lands to appreciate or rectify these dangers. We cannot
expect the young people themselves to cling to conventions which are
totally unsuited to modern city conditions, nor yet to be equal to the
task of forming new conventions through which this more agglomerate
social life may express itself. Above all we cannot hope that they
will understand the emotional force which seizes them and which, when
it does not find the traditional line of domesticity, serves as a
cancer in the very tissues of society and as a disrupter of the
securest social bonds. No attempt is made to treat the manifestations
of this fundamental instinct with dignity or to give it possible
social utility. The spontaneous joy, the clamor for pleasure, the
desire of the young people to appear finer and better and altogether
more lovely than they really are, the idealization not only of each
other but of the whole earth which they regard but as a theater for
their noble exploits, the unworldly ambitions, the romantic hopes, the
make-believe world in which they live, if properly utilized, what
might they not do to make our sordid cities more beautiful, more
companionable? And yet at the present moment every city is full of
young people who are utterly bewildered and uninstructed in regard to
the basic experience which must inevitably come to them, and which has
varied, remote, and indirect expressions.

Even those who may not agree with the authorities who claim that it is
this fundamental sex susceptibility which suffuses the world with its
deepest meaning and beauty, and furnishes the momentum towards all
art, will p