izes
him and bears him along with myriads of others, a current which may so
easily wreck the very foundations of domesticity.

CHAPTER III

THE QUEST FOR ADVENTURE

A certain number of the outrages upon the spirit of youth may be
traced to degenerate or careless parents who totally neglect their
responsibilities; a certain other large number of wrongs are due to
sordid men and women who deliberately use the legitimate
pleasure-seeking of young people as lures into vice. There remains,
however, a third very large class of offenses for which the community
as a whole must be held responsible if it would escape the
condemnation, "Woe unto him by whom offenses come." This class of
offenses is traceable to a dense ignorance on the part of the average
citizen as to the requirements of youth, and to a persistent blindness
on the part of educators as to youth's most obvious needs.

The young people are overborne by their own undirected and misguided
energies. A mere temperamental outbreak in a brief period of
obstreperousness exposes a promising boy to arrest and imprisonment,
an accidental combination of circumstances too complicated and
overwhelming to be coped with by an immature mind, condemns a growing
lad to a criminal career. These impulsive misdeeds may be thought of
as dividing into two great trends somewhat obscurely analogous to the
two historic divisions of man's motive power, for we are told that all
the activities of primitive man and even those of his more civilized
successors may be broadly traced to the impulsion of two elemental
appetites. The first drove him to the search for food, the hunt
developing into war with neighboring tribes and finally broadening
into barter and modern commerce; the second urged him to secure and
protect a mate, developing into domestic life, widening into the
building of homes and cities, into the cultivation of the arts and a
care for beauty.

In the life of each boy there comes a time when these primitive
instincts urge him to action, when he is himself frightened by their
undefined power. He is faced by the necessity of taming them, of
reducing them to manageable impulses just at the moment when "a boy's
will is the wind's will," or, in the words of a veteran educator, at
the time when "it is almost impossible for an adult to realize the
boy's irresponsibility and even moral neurasthenia." That the boy
often fails may be traced in those pitiful figures which show t