h have failed to perform
this office, and are indicted by the young people themselves.
Thousands of young people in every great city are either frankly
hedonistic, or are vainly attempting to work out for themselves a
satisfactory code of morals. They cast about in all directions for the
clue which shall connect their loftiest hopes with their actual
living.

Several years ago a committee of lads came to see me in order to
complain of a certain high school principal because "He never talks
to us about life." When urged to make a clearer statement, they added,
"He never asks us what we are going to be; we can't get a word out of
him, excepting lessons and keeping quiet in the halls."

Of the dozens of young women who have begged me to make a connection
for them between their dreams of social usefulness and their actual
living, I recall one of the many whom I had sent back to her
clergyman, returning with this remark: "His only suggestion was that I
should be responsible every Sunday for fresh flowers upon the altar. I
did that when I was fifteen and liked it then, but when you have come
back from college and are twenty-two years old, it doesn't quite fit
in with the vigorous efforts you have been told are necessary in order
to make our social relations more Christian."

All of us forget how very early we are in the experiment of founding
self-government in this trying climate of America, and that we are
making the experiment in the most materialistic period of all history,
having as our court of last appeal against that materialism only the
wonderful and inexplicable instinct for justice which resides in the
hearts of men,--which is never so irresistible as when the heart is
young. We may cultivate this most precious possession, or we may
disregard it. We may listen to the young voices rising--clear above
the roar of industrialism and the prudent councils of commerce, or we
may become hypnotized by the sudden new emphasis placed upon wealth
and power, and forget the supremacy of spiritual forces in men's
affairs. It is as if we ignored a wistful, over-confident creature who
walked through our city streets calling out, "I am the spirit of
Youth! With me, all things are possible!" We fail to understand what
he wants or even to see his doings, although his acts are pregnant
with meaning, and we may either translate them into a sordid chronicle
of petty vice or turn them into a solemn school for civic
righteousness.

W