The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets - Chapters I-II



CHAPTER I.
YOUTH IN THE CITY.

Nothing is more certain than that each generation longs for a reassurance 
as to the value and charm of life, and is secretly afraid lest it lose its 
sense of the youth of the earth. This is doubtless one reason why it so 
passionately cherishes its poets and artists who have been able to explore 
for themselves and to reveal to others the perpetual springs of life's 
self-renewal.

And yet the average man cannot obtain this desired reassurance through 
literature, nor yet through glimpses of earth and sky. It can come to him 
only through the chance embodiment of joy and youth which life itself may 
throw in his way. It is doubtless true that for the mass of men the 
message is never so unchallenged and so invincible as when embodied in 
youth itself. One generation after another has depended upon its young to 
equip it with gaiety and enthusiasm, to persuade it that living is a 
pleasure, until men everywhere have anxiously provided channels through 
which this wine of life might flow, and be preserved for their delight. 
The classical city promoted play with careful solicitude, building the 
theater and stadium as it built the market place and the temple. The 
Greeks held their games so integral a part of religion and patriotism that 
they came to expect from their poets the highest utterances at the very 
moments when the sense of pleasure released the national life. In the 
medieval city the knights held their tourneys, the guilds their pageants, 
the people their dances, and the church made festival for its most 
cherished saints with gay street processions, and presented a drama in 
which no less a theme than the history of creation became a matter of 
thrilling interest. Only in the modern city have men concluded that it is 
no longer necessary for the municipality to provide for the insatiable 
desire for play. In so far as they have acted upon this conclusion, they 
have entered upon a most difficult and dangerous experiment; and this at 
the very moment when the city has become distinctly industrial, and daily 
labor is continually more monotonous and subdivided. We forget how new the 
modern city is, and how short the span of time in which we have assumed 
that we can eliminate public provision for recreation.

A further difficulty lies in the fact that this industrialism has gathered 
together multitudes of eager young creatures from all quarters of the 
earth as a labor supply for the countless factories and workshops, upon 
which the present industrial city is based. Never before in civilization 
have such numbers of young girls been suddenly released from the 
protection of the home and permitted to walk unattended upon city streets 
and to work under alien roofs; for the first time they are being prized 
more for their labor power than for their innocence, their tender beauty, 
their ephemeral gaiety. Society cares more for the products they 
manufacture than for their immemorial ability to reaffirm the charm of 
existence. Never before have such numbers of young boys earned money 
independently of the family life, and felt themselves free to spend it as 
they choose in the midst of vice deliberately disguised as pleasure.

This stupid experiment of organizing work and failing to organize play 
has, of course, brought about a fine revenge. The love of pleasure will 
not be denied, and when it has turned into all sorts of malignant and 
vicious appetites, then we, the middle aged, grow quite distracted and 
resort to all sorts of restrictive measures. We even try to dam up the 
sweet fountain itself because we are affrighted by these neglected 
streams; but almost worse than the restrictive measures is our apparent 
belief that the city itself has no obligation in the matter, an assumption 
upon which the modern city turns over to commercialism practically all the 
provisions for public recreation.

Quite as one set of men has organized the young people into industrial 
enterprises in order to profit from their toil, so another set of men and 
also of women, I am sorry to say, have entered the neglected field of 
recreation and have organized enterprises which make profit out of this 
invincible love of pleasure.

In every city arise so-called "places" -- "gin-palaces," they are called 
in fiction; in Chicago we euphemistically say merely "places," -- in which 
alcohol is dispensed, not to allay thirst, but, ostensibly to stimulate 
gaiety, it is sold really in order to empty pockets. Huge dance halls are 
opened to which hundreds of young people are attracted, many of whom stand 
wistfully outside a roped circle, for it requires five cents to procure 
within it for five minutes the sense of allurement and intoxication which 
is sold in lieu of innocent pleasure. These coarse and illicit 
merrymakings remind one of the unrestrained jollities of Restoration 
London, and they are indeed their direct descendants, properly 
commercialized, still confusing joy with lust, and gaiety with debauchery. 
Since the soldiers of Cromwell shut up the people's playhouses and 
destroyed their pleasure fields, the Anglo-Saxon city has turned over the 
provision for public recreation to the most evil-minded and the most 
unscrupulous members of the community. We see thousands of girls walking 
up and down the streets on a pleasant evening with no chance to catch a 
sight of pleasure even through a lighted window, save as these lurid 
places provide it. Apparently the modern city sees in these girls only two 
possibilities, both of them commercial: first, a chance to utilize by day 
their new and tender labor power in its factories and shops, and then 
another chance in the evening to extract from them their petty wages by 
pandering to their love of pleasure.

As these overworked girls stream along the street, the rest of us see only 
the self-conscious walk, the giggling speech, the preposterous clothing. 
And yet through the huge hat, with its wilderness of bedraggled feathers, 
the girl announces to the world that she is here. She demands attention to 
the fact of her existence, she states that she is ready to live, to take 
her place in the world. The most precious moment in human development is 
the young creature's assertion that he is unlike any other human being, 
and has an individual contribution to make to the world. The variation 
from the established type is at the root of all change, the only possible 
basis for progress, all that keeps life from growing unprofitably stale 
and repetitious.

Is it only the artists who really see these young creatures as they are -- 
the artists who are themselves endowed with immortal youth? Is it our 
disregard of the artist's message which makes us so blind and so stupid, 
or are we so under the influence of our Zeitgeist that we can detect only 
commercial values in the young as well as in the old? It is as if our eyes 
were holden to the mystic beauty, the redemptive joy, the civic pride 
which these multitudes of young people might supply to our dingy towns.

The young creatures themselves piteously look all about them in order to 
find an adequate means of expression for their most precious message: One 
day a serious young man came to Hull-House with his pretty young sister 
who, he explained, wanted to go somewhere every single evening, "although 
she could only give the flimsy excuse that the flat was too little and too 
stuffy to stay in." In the difficult role of elder brother, he had done 
his best, stating that he had taken her "to all the missions in the 
neighborhood, that she had had a chance to listen to some awful good 
sermons and to some elegant hymns, but that some way she did not seem to 
care for the society of the best Christian people." The little sister 
reddened painfully under this cruel indictment and could offer no word of 
excuse, but a curious thing happened to me. Perhaps it was the phrase "the 
best Christian people," perhaps it was the delicate color of her flushing 
cheeks and her swimming eyes, but certain it is, that instantly and 
vividly there appeared to my mind the delicately tinted piece of wall in a 
Roman catacomb where the early Christians, through a dozen devices of 
spring flowers, skipping lambs and a shepherd tenderly guiding the young, 
had indelibly written down that the Christian message is one of 
inexpressible joy. Who is responsible for forgetting this message 
delivered by the "best Christian people" two thousand years ago? Who is to 
blame that the lambs, the little ewe lambs, have been so caught upon the 
brambles?

But quite as the modern city wastes this most valuable moment in the life 
of the girl, and drives into all sorts of absurd and obscure expressions 
her love and yearning towards the world in which she forecasts her 
destiny, so it often drives the boy into gambling and drinking in order to 
find his adventure.

Of Lincoln's enlistment of two and a half million soldiers, a very large 
number were under twenty-one, some of them under eighteen, and still 
others were mere children under fifteen. Even in those stirring times when 
patriotism and high resolve were at the flood, no one responded as did 
"the boys," and the great soul who yearned over them, who refused to shoot 
the sentinels who slept the sleep of childhood, knew, as no one else knew, 
the precious glowing stuff of which his army was made. But what of the 
millions of boys who are now searching for adventurous action, longing to 
fulfil the same high purpose?

One of the most pathetic sights in the public dance halls of Chicago is 
the number of young men, obviously honest young fellows from the country, 
who stand about vainly hoping to make the acquaintance of some "nice 
girl." They look eagerly up and down the rows of girls, many of whom are 
drawn to the hall by the same keen desire for pleasure and social 
intercourse which the lonely young men themselves feel.

One Sunday night at twelve o'clock I had occasion to go into a large 
public dance hall. As I was standing by the rail looking for the girl I 
had come to find, a young man approached me and quite simply asked me to 
introduce him to some "nice girl," saying that he did not know any one 
there. On my replying that a public dance hall was not the best place in 
which to look for a nice girl, he said: "But I don't know any other place 
where there is a chance to meet any kind of a girl. I'm awfully lonesome 
since I came to Chicago." And then he added rather defiantly: "Some nice 
girls do come here! It's one of the best halls in town." He was voicing 
the "bitter loneliness" that many city men remember to have experienced 
during the first years after they had "come up to town." Occasionally the 
right sort of man and girl meet each other in these dance halls and the 
romance with such a tawdry beginning ends happily and respectably. But, 
unfortunately, mingled with the respectable young men seeking to form the 
acquaintance of young women through the only channel which is available to 
them, are many young fellows of evil purpose, and among the girls who have 
left their lonely boarding houses or rigid homes for a "little fling" are 
likewise women who openly desire to make money from the young men whom 
they meet, and back of it all is the desire to profit by the sale of 
intoxicating and "doctored" drinks.

Perhaps never before have the pleasures of the young and mature become so 
definitely separated as in the modern city. The public dance halls filled 
with frivolous and irresponsible young people in a feverish search for 
pleasure, are but a sorry substitute for the old dances on the village 
green in which all of the older people of the village participated. 
Chaperonage was not then a social duty but natural and inevitable, and the 
whole courtship period was guarded by the conventions and restraint which 
were taken as a matter of course and had developed through years of 
publicity and simple propriety.

The only marvel is that the stupid attempt to put the fine old wine of 
traditional country life into the new bottles of the modern town does not 
lead to disaster oftener than it does, and that the wine so long remains 
pure and sparkling.

We cannot afford to be ungenerous to the city in which we live without 
suffering the penalty which lack of fair interpretation always entails. 
Let us know the modern city in its weakness and wickedness, and then seek 
to rectify and purify it until it shall be free at least from the grosser 
temptations which now beset the 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 perhaps permit me to quote the classical expression of this view as 
set forth in that ancient and wonderful conversation between Socrates and 
the wise woman Diotima. Socrates asks: "What are they doing who show all 
this eagerness and heat which is called love? And what is the object they 
have in view? Answer me." Diotima replies: "I will teach you. The object 
which they have in view is birth in beauty, whether of body or soul.... 
For love, Socrates, is not as you imagine the love of the beautiful only 
... but the love of birth in beauty, because to the mortal creature 
generation is a sort of eternity and immortality."

To emphasize the eternal aspects of love is not of course an easy 
undertaking, even if we follow the clue afforded by the heart of every 
generous lover. His experience at least in certain moments tends to pull 
him on and out from the passion for one to an enthusiasm for that highest 
beauty and excellence of which the most perfect form is but an inadequate 
expression. Even the most loutish tenement-house youth vaguely feels this, 
and at least at rare intervals reveals it in his talk to his "girl." His 
memory unexpectedly brings hidden treasures to the surface of 
consciousness and he recalls the more delicate and tender experiences of 
his childhood and earlier youth. "I remember the time when my little 
sister died, that I rode out to the cemetery feeling that everybody in 
Chicago had moved away from the town to make room for that kid's funeral, 
everything was so darned lonesome and yet it was kind of peaceful too." 
Or, "I never had a chance to go into the country when I was a kid, but I 
remember one day when I had to deliver a package way out on the West Side, 
that I saw a flock of sheep in Douglas Park. I had never thought that a 
sheep could be anywhere but in a picture, and when I saw those big white 
spots on the green grass beginning to move and to turn into sheep, I felt 
exactly as if Saint Cecilia had come out of her frame over the organ and 
was walking in the park." Such moments come into the life of the most 
prosaic youth living in the most crowded quarters of the cities. What do 
we do to encourage and to solidify those moments, to make them come true 
in our dingy towns, to give them expression in forms of art?

We not only fail in this undertaking but even debase existing forms of 
art. We are informed by high authority that there is nothing in the 
environment to which youth so keenly responds as to music, and yet the 
streets, the vaudeville shows, the five-cent theaters are full of the most 
blatant and vulgar songs. The trivial and obscene words, the meaningless 
and flippant airs run through the heads of hundreds of young people for 
hours at a time while they are engaged in monotonous factory work. We 
totally ignore that ancient connection between music and morals which was 
so long insisted upon by philosophers as well as poets. The street music 
has quite broken away from all control, both of the educator and the 
patriot, and we have grown singularly careless in regard to its influence 
upon young people. Although we legislate against it in saloons because of 
its dangerous influence there, we constantly permit music on the street to 
incite that which should be controlled, to degrade that which should be 
exalted, to make sensuous that which might be lifted into the realm of the 
higher imagination.

Our attitude towards music is typical of our carelessness towards all 
those things which make for common joy and for the restraints of higher 
civilization on the streets. It is as if our cities had not yet developed 
a sense of responsibility in regard to the life of the streets, and 
continually forget that recreation is stronger than vice, and that 
recreation alone can stifle the lust for vice.

Perhaps we need to take a page from the philosophy of the Greeks to whom 
the world of fact was also the world of the ideal, and to whom the 
realization of what ought to be, involved not the destruction of what was, 
but merely its perfecting upon its own lines. To the Greeks virtue was not 
a hard conformity to a law felt as alien to the natural character, but a 
free expression of the inner life. To treat thus the fundamental 
susceptibility of sex which now so bewilders the street life and drives 
young people themselves into all sorts of difficulties, would mean to 
loosen it from the things of sense and to link it to the affairs of the 
imagination. It would mean to fit to this gross and heavy stuff the wings 
of the mind, to scatter from it "the clinging mud of banality and 
vulgarity," and to speed it on through our city streets amid spontaneous 
laughter, snatches of lyric song, the recovered forms of old dances, and 
the traditional rondels of merry games. It would thus bring charm and 
beauty to the prosaic city and connect it subtly with the arts of the past 
as well as with the vigor and renewed life of the future.



CHAPTER II
THE WRECKED FOUNDATIONS OF DOMESTICITY.

"Sense with keenest edge unused
 Yet unsteel'd by scathing fire
 Lovely feet as yet unbruised
 On the ways of dark desire!"  

These words written by a poet to his young son express the longing which 
has at times seized all of us, to guard youth from the mass of 
difficulties which may be traced to the obscure manifestation of that 
fundamental susceptibility of which we are all slow to speak and 
concerning which we evade public responsibility, although it brings its 
scores of victims into the police courts every morning.

At the very outset we must bear in mind that the senses of youth are 
singularly acute, and ready to respond to every vivid appeal. We know that 
nature herself has sharpened the senses for her own purposes, and is 
deliberately establishing a connection between them and the newly awakened 
susceptibility of sex; for it is only through the outward senses that the 
selection of an individual mate is made and the instinct utilized for 
nature's purposes. It would seem, however, that nature was determined that 
the force and constancy of the instinct must make up for its lack of 
precision, and that she was totally unconcerned that this instinct 
ruthlessly seized the youth at the moment when he was least prepared to 
cope with it; not only because his powers of self-control and 
discrimination are unequal to the task, but because his senses are 
helplessly wide open to the world. These early manifestations of the sex 
susceptibility are for the most part vague and formless, and are 
absolutely without definition to the youth himself. Sometimes months and 
years elapse before the individual mate is selected and determined upon, 
and during the time when the differentiation is not complete -- and it 
often is not -- there is of necessity a great deal of groping and waste.

This period of groping is complicated by the fact that the youth's power 
for appreciating is far ahead of his ability for expression. "The inner 
traffic fairly obstructs the outer current," and it is nothing short of 
cruelty to over-stimulate his senses as does the modern city. This period 
is difficult everywhere, but it seems at times as if a great city almost 
deliberately increased its perils. The newly awakened senses are appealed 
to by all that is gaudy and sensual, by the flippant street music, the 
highly colored theater posters, the trashy love stories, the feathered 
hats, the cheap heroics of the revolvers displayed in the pawn-shop 
windows. This fundamental susceptibility is thus evoked without a 
corresponding stir of the higher imagination, and the result is as 
dangerous as possible. We are told upon good authority that "If the 
imagination is retarded, while the senses remain awake, we have a state of 
esthetic insensibility," -- in other words, the senses become sodden and 
cannot be lifted from the ground. It is this state of "esthetic 
insensibility" into which we allow the youth to fall which is so 
distressing and so unjustifiable. Sex impulse then becomes merely a dumb 
and powerful instinct without in the least awakening the imagination or 
the heart, nor does it overflow into neighboring fields of consciousness. 
Every city contains hundreds of degenerates who have been over-mastered 
and borne down by it; they fill the casual lodging houses and the 
infirmaries. In many instances it has pushed men of ability and promise to 
the bottom of the social scale. Warner, in his American Charities, 
designates it as one of the steady forces making for failure and poverty, 
and contends that "the inherent uncleanness of their minds prevents many 
men from rising above the rank of day laborers and finally incapacitates 
them even for that position." He also suggests that the modern man has a 
stronger imagination than the man of a few hundred years ago and that 
sensuality destroys him the more rapidly.

It is difficult to state how much evil and distress might be averted if 
the imagination were utilized in its higher capacities through the 
historic paths. An English moralist has lately asserted that "much of the 
evil of the time may be traced to outraged imagination. It is the 
strongest quality of the brain and it is starved. Children, from their 
earliest years, are hedged in with facts; they are not trained to use 
their minds on the unseen."

In failing to diffuse and utilize this fundamental instinct of sex through 
the imagination, we not only inadvertently foster vice and enervation, but 
we throw away one of the most precious implements for ministering to 
life's highest needs. There is no doubt that this ill adjusted function 
consumes quite unnecessarily vast stores of vital energy, even when we 
contemplate it in its immature manifestations which are infinitely more 
wholesome than the dumb swamping process. Every high school boy and girl 
knows the difference between the concentration and the diffusion of this 
impulse, although they would be hopelessly bewildered by the use of the 
terms. They will declare one of their companions to be "in love" if his 
fancy is occupied by the image of a single person about whom all the newly 
found values gather, and without whom his solitude is an eternal 
melancholy. But if the stimulus does not appear as a definite image, and 
the values evoked are dispensed over the world, the young person suddenly 
seems to have discovered a beauty and significance in many things -- he 
responds to poetry, he becomes a lover of nature, he is filled with 
religious devotion or with philanthropic zeal. Experience, with young 
people, easily illustrates the possibility and value of diffusion.

It is neither a short nor an easy undertaking to substitute the love of 
beauty for mere desire, to place the mind above the senses; but is not 
this the sum of the immemorial obligation which rests upon the adults of 
each generation if they would nurture and restrain the youth, and has not 
the whole history of civilization been but one long effort to substitute 
psychic impulsion for the driving force of blind appetite?

Society has recognized the "imitative play" impulse of children and 
provides them with tiny bricks with which to "build a house," and dolls 
upon which they may lavish their tenderness. We exalt the love of the 
mother and the stability of the home, but in regard to those difficult 
years between childhood and maturity we beg the question and unless we 
repress, we do nothing. We are so timid and inconsistent that although we 
declare the home to be the foundation of society, we do nothing to direct 
the force upon which the continuity of the home depends. And yet to one 
who has lived for years in a crowded quarter where men, women and children 
constantly jostle each other and press upon every inch of space in shop, 
tenement and street, nothing is more impressive than the strength, the 
continuity, the varied and powerful manifestations, of family affection. 
It goes without saying that every tenement house contains women who for 
years spend their hurried days in preparing food and clothing and pass 
their sleepless nights in tending and nursing their exigent children, with 
never one thought for their own comfort or pleasure or development save as 
these may be connected with the future of their families. We all know as a 
matter of course that every shop is crowded with workingmen who year after 
year spend all of their wages upon the nurture and education of their 
children, reserving for themselves but the shabbiest clothing and a 
crowded place at the family table.

"Bad weather for you to be out in," you remark on a February evening, as 
you meet rheumatic Mr. S. hobbling home through the freezing sleet without 
an overcoat. "Yes, it is bad," he assents: "but I've walked to work all 
this last year. We've sent the oldest boy back to high school, you know," 
and he moves on with no thought that he is doing other than fulfilling the 
ordinary lot of the ordinary man.

These are the familiar and the constant manifestations of family affection 
which are so intimate a part of life that we scarcely observe them.

In addition to these we find peculiar manifestations of family devotion 
exemplifying that touching affection which rises to unusual sacrifice 
because it is close to pity and feebleness. "My cousin and his family had 
to go back to Italy. He got to Ellis Island with his wife and five 
children, but they wouldn't let in the feeble-minded boy, so of course 
they all went back with him. My cousin was fearful disappointed."

Or, "These are the five children of my brother. He and his wife, my father 
and mother, were all done for in the bad time at Kishinef. It's up to me 
all right to take care of the kids, and I'd no more go back on them than I 
would on my own." Or, again: "Yes, I have seven children of my own. My 
husband died when Tim was born. The other three children belong to my 
sister, who died the year after my husband. I get on pretty well. I scrub 
in a factory every night from six to twelve, and I go out washing four 
days a week. So far the children have all gone through the eighth grade 
before they quit school," she concludes, beaming with pride and joy.

That wonderful devotion to the child seems at times, in the midst of our 
stupid social and industrial arrangements, all that keeps society human, 
the touch of nature which unites it, as it was that same devotion which 
first lifted it out of the swamp of bestiality. The devotion to the child 
is "the inevitable conclusion of the two premises of the practical 
syllogism, the devotion of man to woman." It is, of course, this 
tremendous force which makes possible the family, that bond which holds 
society together and blends the experience of generations into a 
continuous story. The family has been called "the fountain of morality," 
"the source of law," "the necessary prelude to the state" itself; but 
while it is continuous historically, this dual bond must be made anew a 
myriad times in each generation, and the forces upon which its formation 
depend must be powerful and unerring. It would be too great a risk to 
leave it to a force whose manifestations are intermittent and uncertain. 
The desired result is too grave and fundamental.

One Sunday evening an excited young man came to see me, saying that he 
must have advice; some one must tell him at once what to do, as his wife 
was in the state's prison serving a sentence for a crime which he himself 
had committed. He had seen her the day before, and though she had been 
there only a month he was convinced that she was developing consumption. 
She was "only seventeen, and couldn't stand the hard work and the 'low 
down' women" whom she had for companions. My remark that a girl of 
seventeen was too young to be in the state penitentiary brought out the 
whole wretched story.

He had been unsteady for many years and the despair of his thoroughly 
respectable family who had sent him West the year before. In Arkansas he 
had fallen in love with a girl of sixteen and married her. His mother was 
far from pleased, but had finally sent him money to bring his bride to 
Chicago, in the hope that he might settle there. En route they stopped at 
a small town for the naive reason that he wanted to have an aching tooth 
pulled. But the tooth gave him an excellent opportunity to have a drink, 
and before he reached the office of the country practitioner he was 
intoxicated. As they passed through the vestibule he stole an overcoat 
hanging there, although the little wife piteously begged him to let it 
alone. Out of sheer bravado he carried it across his arm as they walked 
down the street, and was, of course, immediately arrested "with the goods 
upon him." In sheer terror of being separated from her husband, the wife 
insisted that she had been an accomplice, and together they were put into 
the county jail awaiting the action of the Grand Jury. At the end of the 
sixth week, on one of the rare occasions when they were permitted to talk 
to each other through the grating which separated the men's visiting 
quarters from the women's, the young wife told her husband that she made 
up her mind to swear that she had stolen the overcoat. What could she do 
if he were sent to prison and she were left free? She was afraid to go to 
his people and could not possibly go back to hers. In spite of his 
protest, that very night she sent for the state's attorney and made a full 
confession, giving her age as eighteen in the hope of making her testimony 
more valuable. From that time on they stuck to the lie through the 
indictment, the trial and her conviction. Apparently it had seemed to him 
only a well-arranged plot until he had visited the penitentiary the day 
before, and had really seen her piteous plight. Remorse had seized him at 
last, and he was ready to make every restitution. She, however, had no 
notion of giving up -- on the contrary, as she realized more clearly what 
prison life meant, she was daily more determined to spare him the 
experience. Her letters, written in the unformed hand of a child -- for 
her husband had himself taught her to read and write -- were filled with a 
riot of self-abnegation, the martyr's joy as he feels the iron enter the 
flesh. Thus had an illiterate, neglected girl through sheer devotion to a 
worthless sort of young fellow inclined to drink, entered into that noble 
company of martyrs.

When girls "go wrong" what happens? How has this tremendous force, 
valuable and necessary for the foundation of the family, become 
misdirected? When its manifestations follow the legitimate channels of 
wedded life we call them praiseworthy; but there are other manifestations 
quite outside the legal and moral channels which yet compel our admiration.

A young woman of my acquaintance was married to a professional criminal 
named Joe. Three months after the wedding he was arrested and "sent up" 
for two years. Molly had always been accustomed to many lovers, but she 
remained faithful to her absent husband for a year. At the end of that 
time she obtained a divorce which the state law makes easy for the wife of 
a convict, and married a man who was "rich and respectable" -- in fact, he 
owned the small manufacturing establishment in which her mother did the 
scrubbing. He moved his bride to another part of town six miles away, 
provided her with a "steam-heated flat," furniture upholstered in "cut 
velvet," and many other luxuries of which Molly heretofore had only 
dreamed. One day as she was wheeling a handsome baby carriage up and down 
the prosperous street, her brother, who was "Joe's pal," came to tell her 
that Joe was "out," had come to the old tenement and was "mighty sore" 
because "she had gone back on him." Without a moment's hesitation Molly 
turned the baby carriage in the direction of her old home and never 
stopped wheeling it until she had compassed the entire six miles. She and 
Joe rented the old room and went to housekeeping. The rich and respectable 
husband made every effort to persuade her to come back, and then another 
series of efforts to recover his child, before he set her free through a 
court proceeding. Joe, however, steadfastly refused to marry her, still 
"sore" because she had not "stood by." As he worked only intermittently, 
and was too closely supervised by the police to do much at his old 
occupation, Molly was obliged to support the humble menage by scrubbing in 
a neighboring lodging house and by washing "the odd shirts" of the 
lodgers. For five years, during which time two children were born, when 
she was constantly subjected to the taunts of her neighbors, and when all 
the charitable agencies refused to give help to such an irregular 
household, Molly happily went on her course with no shade of regret or 
sorrow. "I'm all right as long as Joe keeps out of the jug," was her 
slogan of happiness, low in tone, perhaps, but genuine and "game." Her 
surroundings were as sordid as possible, consisting of a constantly 
changing series of cheap "furnished rooms" in which the battered baby 
carriage was the sole witness of better days. But Molly's heart was full 
of courage and happiness, and she was never desolate until her criminal 
lover was "sent up" again, this time on a really serious charge.

These irregular manifestations form a link between that world in which 
each one struggles to "live respectable," and that nether world in which 
are also found cases of devotion and of enduring affection arising out of 
the midst of the folly and the shame. The girl there who through all 
tribulation supports her recreant "lover," or the girl who overcomes her 
drink and opium habits, who renounces luxuries and goes back to 
uninteresting daily toil for the sake of the good opinion of a man who 
wishes her to "appear decent," although he never means to marry her, these 
are also impressive.

One of our earliest experiences at Hull-House had to do with a lover of 
this type and the charming young girl who had become fatally attached to 
him. I can see her now running for protection up the broad steps of the 
columned piazza then surrounding Hull-House. Her slender figure was 
trembling with fright, her tear-covered face swollen and bloodstained from 
the blows he had dealt her. "He is apt to abuse me when he is drunk," was 
the only explanation, and that given by way of apology, which could be 
extracted from her. When we discovered that there had been no marriage 
ceremony, that there were no living children, that she had twice narrowly 
escaped losing her life, it seemed a simple matter to insist that the 
relation should be broken off. She apathetically remained at Hull-House 
for a few weeks, but when her strength had somewhat returned, when her 
lover began to recover from his prolonged debauch of whiskey and opium, 
she insisted upon going home every day to prepare his meals and to see 
that the little tenement was clean and comfortable because "Pierre is 
always so sick and weak after one of those long ones." This of course 
meant that she was drifting back to him, and when she was at last 
restrained by that moral compulsion, by that overwhelming of another's 
will which is always so ruthlessly exerted by those who are conscious that 
virtue is struggling with vice, her mind gave way and she became utterly 
distraught.

A poor little Ophelia, I met her one night wandering in the hall half 
dressed in the tawdry pink gown "that Pierre liked best of all" and 
groping on the blank wall to find the door which might permit her to 
escape to her lover. In a few days it was obvious that hospital restraint 
was necessary, but when she finally recovered we were obliged to admit 
that there is no civic authority which can control the acts of a girl of 
eighteen. From the hospital she followed her heart directly back to 
Pierre, who had in the meantime moved out of the Hull-House neighborhood. 
We knew later that he had degraded the poor child still further by 
obliging her to earn money for his drugs by that last method resorted to 
by a degenerate man to whom a woman's devotion still clings.

It is inevitable that a force which is enduring enough to withstand the 
discouragements, the suffering and privation of daily living, strenuous 
enough to overcome and rectify the impulses which make for greed and self-
indulgence, should be able, even under untoward conditions, to lift up and 
transfigure those who are really within its grasp and set them in marked 
contrast to those who are merely playing a game with it or using it for 
gain. But what has happened to these wretched girls? Why has this 
beneficent current cast them upon the shores of death and destruction when 
it should have carried them into the safe port of domesticity? Through 
whose fault has this basic emotion served merely to trick and deride them?

Older nations have taken a well defined line of action in regard to it.

Among the Hull-House neighbors are many of the Latin races who employ a 
careful chaperonage over their marriageable daughters and provide husbands 
for them at an early age. "My father will get a husband for me this
winter," announces Angelina, whose father has brought her to a party at 
Hull-House, and she adds with a toss of her head, "I saw two already, but 
my father says they haven't saved enough money to marry me." She feels 
quite as content in her father's wisdom and ability to provide her with a 
husband as she does in his capacity to escort her home safely from the 
party. He does not permit her to cross the threshold after nightfall 
unaccompanied by himself, and unless the dowry and the husband are 
provided before she is eighteen he will consider himself derelict in his 
duty towards her. "Francesca can't even come to the Sodality meeting this 
winter. She lives only across from the church but her mother won't let her 
come because her father is out West working on a railroad," is a comment 
one often hears. The system works well only when it is carried logically 
through to the end of an early marriage with a properly-provided husband.

Even with the Latin races, when the system is tried in America it often 
breaks down, and when the Anglo-Saxons anywhere imitate this regime it is 
usually utterly futile. They follow the first part of the program as far 
as repression is concerned, but they find it impossible to follow the 
second because all sorts of inherited notions deter them. The repressed 
girl, if she is not one of the languishing type, takes matters into her 
own hands, and finds her pleasures in illicit ways, without her parents' 
knowledge. "I had no idea my daughter was going to public dances. She 
always told me she was spending the night with her cousin on the South 
Side. I hadn't a suspicion of the truth," many a broken-hearted mother 
explains. An officer who has had a long experience in the Juvenile Court 
of Chicago, and has listened to hundreds of cases involving wayward girls, 
gives it as his deliberate impression that a large majority of cases are 
from families where the discipline had been rigid, where they had taken 
but half of the convention of the Old World and left the other half.

Unless we mean to go back to these Old World customs which are already 
hopelessly broken, there would seem to be but one path open to us in 
America. That path implies freedom for the young people made safe only 
through their own self-control. This, in turn, must be based upon 
knowledge and habits of clean companionship. In point of fact no course 
between the two is safe in a modern city, and in the most crowded quarters 
the young people themselves are working out a protective code which 
reminds one of the instinctive protection that the free-ranging child in 
the country learns in regard to poisonous plants and "marshy places," or 
of the cautions and abilities that the mountain child develops in regard 
to ice and precipices. This statement, of course, does not hold good 
concerning a large number of children in every crowded city quarter who 
may be classed as degenerates, the children of careless or dissolute 
mothers who fall into all sorts of degenerate habits and associations 
before childhood is passed, who cannot be said to have "gone wrong" at any 
one moment because they have never been in the right path even of innocent 
childhood; but the statement is sound concerning thousands of girls who go 
to and from work every day with crowds of young men who meet them again 
and again in the occasional evening pleasures of the more decent dance 
halls or on a Sunday afternoon in the parks.

The mothers who are of most use to these normal city working girls are the 
mothers who develop a sense of companionship with the changing experiences 
of their daughters, who are willing to modify ill-fitting social 
conventions into rules of conduct which are of actual service to their 
children in their daily lives of factory work and of city amusements. 
Those mothers, through their sympathy and adaptability, substitute keen 
present interests and activity for solemn warnings and restraint, self-
expression for repression. Their vigorous family life allies itself by a 
dozen bonds to the educational, the industrial and the recreational 
organizations of the modern city, and makes for intelligent understanding, 
industrial efficiency and sane social pleasures.

By all means let us preserve the safety of the home, but let us also make 
safe the street in which the majority of our young people find their 
recreation and form their permanent relationships. Let us not forget that 
the great processes of social life develop themselves through influences 
of which each participant is unconscious as he struggles alone and unaided 
in the strength of a current which seizes him and bears him along with 
myriads of others, a current which may so easily wreck the very 
foundations of domesticity.