The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets - Chapters V-VI



CHAPTER V.
THE SPIRIT OF YOUTH AND INDUSTRY.

As it is possible to establish a connection between the lack of public 
recreation and the vicious excitements and trivial amusements which become 
their substitutes, so it may be illuminating to trace the connection 
between the monotony and dullness of factory work and the petty 
immoralities which are often the youth's protest against them.

There are many city neighborhoods in which practically every young person 
who has attained the age of fourteen years enters a factory. When the work 
itself offers nothing of interest, and when no public provision is made 
for recreation, the situation becomes almost insupportable to the youth 
whose ancestors have been rough-working and hard-playing peasants.

In such neighborhoods the joy of youth is well nigh extinguished; and in 
that long procession of factory workers, each morning and evening, the 
young walk almost as wearily and listlessly as the old. Young people 
working in modern factories situated in cities still dominated by the 
ideals of Puritanism face a combination which tends almost irresistibly to 
overwhelm the spirit of youth. When the Puritan repression of pleasure was 
in the ascendant in America the people it dealt with lived on farms and 
villages where, although youthful pleasures might be frowned upon and 
crushed out, the young people still had a chance to find self-expression 
in their work. Plowing the field and spinning the flax could be carried on 
with a certain joyousness and vigor which the organization of modern 
industry too often precludes. Present industry based upon the inventions 
of the nineteenth century has little connection with the old patterns in 
which men have worked for generations. The modern factory calls for an 
expenditure of nervous energy almost more than it demands muscular effort, 
or at least machinery so far performs the work of the massive muscles, 
that greater stress is laid upon fine and exact movements necessarily 
involving nervous strain. But these movements are exactly of the type to 
which the muscles of a growing boy least readily respond, quite as the 
admonition to be accurate and faithful is that which appeals the least to 
his big primitive emotions. The demands made upon his eyes are complicated 
and trivial, the use of his muscles is fussy and monotonous, the relation 
between cause and effect is remote and obscure. Apparently no one is 
concerned as to what may be done to aid him in this process and to relieve 
it of its dullness and difficulty, to mitigate its strain and harshness.

Perhaps never before have young people been expected to work from motives 
so detached from direct emotional incentive. Never has the age of marriage 
been so long delayed; never has the work of youth been so separated from 
the family life and the public opinion of the community. Education alone 
can repair these losses. It alone has the power of organizing a child's 
activities with some reference to the life he will later lead and of 
giving him a clue as to what to select and what to eliminate when he comes 
into contact with contemporary social and industrial conditions. And until 
educators take hold of the situation, the rest of the community is 
powerless.

In vast regions of the city which are completely dominated by the factory, 
it is as if the development of industry had outrun all the educational and 
social arrangements.

The revolt of youth against uniformity and the necessity of following 
careful directions laid down by some one else, many times results in such 
nervous irritability that the youth, in spite of all sorts of prudential 
reasons, "throws up his job," if only to get outside the factory walls 
into the freer street, just as the narrowness of the school inclosure 
induces many a boy to jump the fence.

When the boy is on the street, however, and is "standing around on the 
corner" with the gang to which he mysteriously attaches himself, he finds 
the difficulties of direct untrammeled action almost as great there as 
they were in the factory, but for an entirely different set of reasons. 
The necessity so strongly felt in the factory for an outlet to his sudden 
and furious bursts of energy, his overmastering desire to prove that he 
could do things "without being bossed all the time," finds little chance 
for expression, for he discovers that in whatever really active pursuit he 
tries to engage, he is promptly suppressed by the police. After several 
futile attempts at self-expression, he returns to his street corner 
subdued and so far discouraged that when he has the next impulse to 
vigorous action he concludes that it is of no use, and sullenly settles 
back into inactivity. He thus learns to persuade himself that it is better 
to do nothing, or, as the psychologist would say, "to inhibit his motor 
impulses."

When the same boy, as an adult workman, finds himself confronted with an 
unusual or an untoward condition in his work, he will fall back into this 
habit of inhibition, of making no effort toward independent action. When 
"slack times" come, he will be the workman of least value, and the first 
to be dismissed, calmly accepting his position in the ranks of the 
unemployed because it will not be so unlike the many hours of idleness and 
vacuity to which he was accustomed as a boy. No help having been extended 
to him in the moment of his first irritable revolt against industry, his 
whole life has been given a twist toward idleness and futility. He has not 
had the chance of recovery which the school system gives a like rebellious 
boy in a truant school.

The unjustifiable lack of educational supervision during the first years 
of factory work makes it quite impossible for the modern educator to offer 
any real assistance to young people during that trying transitional period 
between school and industry. The young people themselves who fail to 
conform can do little but rebel against the entire situation, and the 
expressions of revolt roughly divide themselves into three classes. The 
first, resulting in idleness, may be illustrated from many a sad story of 
a boy or a girl who has spent in the first spurt of premature and 
uninteresting work, all the energy which should have carried them through 
years of steady endeavor.

I recall a boy who had worked steadily for two years as a helper in a 
smelting establishment, and had conscientiously brought home all his 
wages, one night suddenly announcing to his family that he "was too tired 
and too hot to go on." As no amount of persuasion could make him alter his 
decision, the family finally threatened to bring him into the Juvenile 
Court on a charge of incorrigibility, whereupon the boy disappeared and 
such efforts as the family have been able to make in the two years since, 
have failed to find him. They are convinced that "he is trying a spell of 
tramping" and wish that they "had let him have a vacation the first summer 
when he wanted it so bad." The boy may find in the rough outdoor life the 
healing which a wise physician would recommend for nervous exhaustion, 
although the tramp experiment is a perilous one.

This revolt against factory monotony is sometimes closely allied to that 
"moral fatigue" which results from assuming responsibility prematurely. I 
recall the experience of a Scotch girl of eighteen who, with her older 
sister, worked in a candy factory, their combined earnings supporting a 
paralytic father. The older girl met with an accident involving the loss 
of both eyes, and the financial support of the whole family devolved upon 
the younger girl, who worked hard and conscientiously for three years, 
supplementing her insufficient factory wages by evening work at glove 
making. In the midst of this devotion and monotonous existence she made 
the acquaintance of a girl who was a chorus singer in a cheap theater and 
the contrast between her monotonous drudgery and the glitter of the stage 
broke down her allegiance to her helpless family. She left the city, 
absolutely abandoning the kindred to whom she had been so long devoted, 
and announced that if they all starved she would "never go into a factory 
again." Every effort failed to find her after the concert troupe left 
Milwaukee and although the pious Scotch father felt that "she had been 
ensnared by the Devil," and had brought his "gray hairs in sorrow to the 
grave," I could not quite dismiss the case with this simple explanation, 
but was haunted by all sorts of social implications.

The second line of revolt manifests itself in an attempt to make up for 
the monotony of the work by a constant change from one occupation to 
another. This is an almost universal experience among thousands of young 
people in their first impact with the industrial world.

The startling results of the investigation undertaken in Massachusetts by 
the Douglas Commission showed how casual and demoralizing the first few 
years of factory life become to thousands of unprepared boys and girls; in 
their first restlessness and maladjustment they change from one factory to 
another, working only for a few weeks or months in each, and they exhibit 
no interest in any of them save for the amount of wages paid. At the end 
of their second year of employment many of them are less capable than when 
they left school and are actually receiving less wages. The report of the 
commission made clear that while the two years between fourteen and 
sixteen were most valuable for educational purposes, they were almost 
useless for industrial purposes, that no trade would receive as an 
apprentice a boy under sixteen, that no industry requiring skill and 
workmanship could utilize these untrained children and that they not only 
demoralized themselves, but in a sense industry itself.

An investigation of one thousand tenement children in New York who had 
taken out their "working papers" at the age of fourteen, reported that 
during the first working year a third of them had averaged six places 
each. These reports but confirm the experience of those of us who live in 
an industrial neighborhood and who continually see these restless young 
workers, in fact there are moments when this constant changing seems to be 
all that saves them from the fate of those other children who hold on to a 
monotonous task so long that they finally incapacitate themselves for all 
work. It often seems to me an expression of the instinct of self-
preservation, as in the case of a young Swedish boy who during a period of 
two years abandoned one piece of factory work after another, saying "he 
could not stand it," until in the chagrin following the loss of his ninth 
place he announced his intention of leaving the city and allowing his 
mother and little sisters to shift for themselves. At this critical 
juncture a place was found for him as lineman in a telephone company; 
climbing telephone poles and handling wires apparently supplied him with 
the elements of outdoor activity and danger which were necessary to hold 
his interest, and he became the steady support of his family.

But while we know the discouraging effect of idleness upon the boy who has 
thrown up his job and refuses to work again, and we also know the 
restlessness and lack of discipline resulting from the constant change 
from one factory to another, there is still a third manifestation of 
maladjustment of which one's memory and the Juvenile Court records 
unfortunately furnish many examples. The spirit of revolt in these cases 
has led to distinct disaster. Two stories will perhaps be sufficient in 
illustration although they might be multiplied indefinitely from my own 
experience.

A Russian girl who went to work at an early age in a factory, pasting 
labels on mucilage bottles, was obliged to surrender all her wages to her 
father who, in return, gave her only the barest necessities of life. In a 
fit of revolt against the monotony of her work, and "that nasty sticky 
stuff," she stole from her father $300 which he had hidden away under the 
floor of his kitchen, and with this money she ran away to a neighboring 
city for a spree, having first bought herself the most gorgeous clothing a 
local department store could supply. Of course, this preposterous 
beginning could have but one ending and the child was sent to the reform 
school to expiate not only her own sins but the sins of those who had 
failed to rescue her from a life of grinding monotony which her spirit 
could not brook.

"I know the judge thinks I am a bad girl," sobbed a poor little prisoner, 
put under bonds for threatening to kill her lover, "but I have only been 
bad for one week and before that I was good for six years. I worked every 
day in Blank's factory and took home all my wages to keep the kids in 
school. I met this fellow in a dance hall. I just had to go to dances 
sometimes after pushing down the lever of my machine with my right foot 
and using both my arms feeding it for ten hours a day -- nobody knows how 
I felt some nights. I agreed to go away with this man for a week but when 
I was ready to go home he tried to drive me out on the street to earn 
money for him and, of course, I threatened to kill him -- any decent girl 
would," she concluded, as unconscious of the irony of the reflection as 
she was of the connection between her lurid week and her monotonous years.

Knowing as educators do that thousands of the city youth will enter 
factory life at an age as early as the state law will permit; instructed 
as the modern teacher is as to youth's requirements for a normal mental 
and muscular development, it is hard to understand the apathy in regard to 
youth's inevitable experience in modern industry. Are the educators, like 
the rest of us, so caught in admiration of the astonishing achievements of 
modern industry that they forget the children themselves?

A Scotch educator who recently visited America considered it very strange 
that with a remarkable industrial development all about us, affording such 
amazing educational opportunities, our schools should continually cling to 
a past which did not fit the American temperament, was not adapted to our 
needs, and made no vigorous pull upon our faculties. He concluded that our 
educators, overwhelmed by the size and vigor of American industry, were 
too timid to seize upon the industrial situation and to extract its 
enormous educational value. He lamented that this lack of courage and 
initiative failed not only to fit the child for an intelligent and 
conscious participation in industrial life, but that it was reflected in 
the industrial development itself; that industry had fallen back into old 
habits, and repeated traditional mistakes until American cities exhibited 
stupendous extensions of the medievalisms in the traditional Ghetto, and 
of the hideousness in the Black Country of Lancashire.

He contended that this condition is the inevitable result of separating 
education from contemporary life. Education becomes unreal and far 
fetched, while industry becomes ruthless and materialistic. In spite of 
the severity of the indictment, one much more severe and well deserved 
might have been brought against us. He might have accused us not only of 
wasting, but of misusing and of trampling under foot the first tender 
instincts and impulses which are the source of all charm and beauty and 
art, because we fail to realize that by premature factory work, for which 
the youth is unprepared, society perpetually extinguishes that variety and 
promise, that bloom of life, which is the unique possession of the young. 
He might have told us that our cities would continue to be traditionally 
cramped and dreary until we comprehend that youth alone has the power to 
bring to reality the vision of the "Coming City of Mankind, full of life, 
full of the spirit of creation."

A few educational experiments are carried on in Cincinnati, in Boston and 
in Chicago, in which the leaders of education and industry unite in a 
common aim and purpose. A few more are carried on by trade unionists, who 
in at least two of the trades are anxious to give to their apprentices and 
journeymen the wider culture afforded by the "capitalistic trade schools" 
which they suspect of preparing strike-breakers; still a few other schools 
have been founded by public spirited citizens to whom the situation has 
become unendurable, and one or two more such experiments are attached to 
the public school system itself. All of these schools are still blundering 
in method and unsatisfactory in their results, but a certain trade school 
for girls, in New York, which is preparing young girls of fourteen for the 
sewing trade, already so overcrowded and subdivided that there remains 
very little education for the worker, is conquering this difficult 
industrial situation by equipping each apprentice with "the informing 
mind." If a child goes into a sewing factory with a knowledge of the work 
she is doing in relation to the finished product; if she is informed 
concerning the material she is manipulating and the processes to which it 
is subjected; if she understands the design she is elaborating in its 
historic relation to art and decoration, her daily life is lifted from 
drudgery to one of self-conscious activity, and her pleasure and 
intelligence is registered in her product.

I remember a little colored girl in this New York school who was drawing 
for the pattern she was about to embroider, a carefully elaborated 
acanthus leaf. Upon my inquiry as to the design, she replied: "It is what 
the Egyptians used to put on everything, because they saw it so much 
growing in the Nile; and then the Greeks copied it, and sometimes you can 
find it now on the buildings downtown." She added, shyly: "Of course, I 
like it awfully well because it was first used by people living in Africa 
where the colored folks come from." Such a reasonable interest in work not 
only reacts upon the worker, but is, of course, registered in the product 
itself. Such genuine pleasure is in pitiful contrast to the usual 
manifestation of the play spirit as it is found in the factories, where, 
at the best, its expression is illicit and often is attended with great 
danger.

There are many touching stories by which this might be illustrated. One of 
them comes from a large steel mill of a boy of fifteen whose business it 
was to throw a lever when a small tank became filled with molten metal. 
During the few moments when the tank was filling it was his foolish custom 
to catch the reflection of the metal upon a piece of looking-glass, and to 
throw the bit of light into the eyes of his fellow workmen. Although an 
exasperated foreman had twice dispossessed him of his mirror, with a third 
fragment he was one day flicking the gloom of the shop when the neglected 
tank overflowed, almost instantly burning off both his legs. Boys working 
in the stock yards, during their moments of wrestling and rough play, 
often slash each other painfully with the short knives which they use in 
their work, but in spite of this the play impulse is too irrepressible to 
be denied.

If educators could go upon a voyage of discovery into that army of boys 
and girls who enter industry each year, what values might they not 
discover; what treasures might they not conserve and develop if they would 
direct the play instinct into the art impulse and utilize that power of 
variation which industry so sadly needs. No force will be sufficiently 
powerful and widespread to redeem industry from its mechanism and 
materialism save the freed power in every single individual.

In order to do this, however, we must go back a little over the 
educational road to a training of the child's imagination, as well as to 
his careful equipment with a technique. A little child makes a very 
tottering house of cardboard and calls it a castle. The important feature 
there lies in the fact that he has expressed a castle, and it is not for 
his teacher to draw undue attention to the fact that the corners are not 
well put together, but rather to listen to and to direct the story which 
centers about this effort at creative expression. A little later, however, 
it is clearly the business of the teacher to call attention to the quality 
of the dovetailing in which the boy at the manual training bench is 
engaged, for there is no value in dovetailing a box unless it is 
accurately done. At one point the child's imagination is to be emphasized, 
and at another point his technique is important -- and he will need both 
in the industrial life ahead of him.

There is no doubt that there is a third period, when the boy is not 
interested in the making of a castle, or a box, or anything else, unless 
it appears to him to bear a direct relation to the future; unless it has 
something to do with earning a. living. At this later moment he is chiefly 
anxious to play the part of a man and to take his place in the world. The 
fact that a boy at fourteen wants to go out and earn his living makes that 
the moment when he should be educated with reference to that interest, and 
the records of many high schools show that if he is not thus educated, he 
bluntly refuses to be educated at all. The forces pulling him to "work" 
are not only the overmastering desire to earn money and be a man, but, if 
the family purse is small and empty, include also his family loyalty and 
affection, and over against them, we at present place nothing but a vague 
belief on the part of his family and himself that education is a desirable 
thing and may eventually help him "on in the world." It is of course 
difficult to adapt education to this need; it means that education must be 
planned so seriously and definitely for those two years between fourteen 
and sixteen that it will be actual trade training so far as it goes, with 
attention given to the condition under which money will be actually paid 
for industrial skill; but at the same time, that the implications, the 
connections, the relations to the industrial world, will be made clear. A 
man who makes, year after year, but one small wheel in a modern watch 
factory, may, if his education has properly prepared him, have a fuller 
life than did the old watchmaker who made a watch from beginning to end. 
It takes thirty-nine people to make a coat in a modern tailoring 
establishment, yet those same thirty-nine people might produce a coat in a 
spirit of "team work" which would make the entire process as much more 
exhilarating than the work of the old solitary tailor, as playing in a 
baseball nine gives more pleasure to a boy than that afforded by a 
solitary game of hand ball on the side of the barn. But it is quite 
impossible to imagine a successful game of baseball in which each player 
should be drilled, only in his own part, and should know nothing of the 
relation of that part to the whole game. In order to make the watch wheel, 
or the coat collar interesting, they must be connected with the entire 
product -- must include fellowship as well as the pleasures arising from 
skilled workmanship and a cultivated imagination.

When all the young people working in factories shall come to use their 
faculties intelligently, and as a matter of course to be interested in 
what they do, then our manufactured products may at last meet the demands 
of a cultivated nation, because they will be produced by cultivated 
workmen. The machine will not be abandoned by any means, but will be 
subordinated to the intelligence of the man who manipulates it, and will 
be used as a tool. It may come about in time that an educated public will 
become inexpressibly bored by manufactured objects which reflect 
absolutely nothing of the minds of the men who made them, that they may 
come to dislike an object made by twelve unrelated men, even as we do not 
care for a picture which has been painted by a dozen different men, not 
because we have enunciated a theory in regard to it, but because such a 
picture loses all its significance and has no meaning or message. We need 
to apply the same principle but very little further until we shall refuse 
to be surrounded by manufactured objects which do not represent some gleam 
of intelligence on the part of the producer. Hundreds of people have 
already taken that step so far as all decoration and ornament are 
concerned, and it would require but one short step more. In the meantime 
we are surrounded by stupid articles which give us no pleasure, and the 
young people producing them are driven into all sorts of expedients in 
order to escape work which has been made impossible because all human 
interest has been extracted from it. That this is not mere theory may be 
demonstrated by the fact that many times the young people may be spared 
the disastrous effects of this third revolt against the monotony of 
industry if work can be found for them in a place where the daily round is 
less grinding and presents more variety. Fortunately, in every city there 
are places outside of factories where occupation of a more normal type of 
labor may be secured, and often a restless boy can be tided over this 
period if he is put into one of these occupations. The experience in every 
boys' club can furnish illustrations of this.

A factory boy who had been brought into the Juvenile Court many times 
because of his persistent habit of borrowing the vehicles of physicians as 
they stood in front of houses of patients, always meaning to "get back 
before the doctor came out," led a contented and orderly life after a 
place had been found for him as a stable boy in a large livery 
establishment where his love for horses could be legitimately gratified.

Still another boy made the readjustment for himself in spite of the great 
physical suffering involved. He had lost both legs at the age of seven, 
"flipping cars." When he went to work at fourteen with two good cork legs, 
which he vainly imagined disguised his disability, his employer kindly 
placed him where he might sit throughout the entire day, and his task was 
to keep tally on the boxes constantly hoisted from the warehouse into 
cars. The boy found this work so dull that he insisted upon working in the 
yards, where the cars were being loaded and switched. He would come home 
at night utterly exhausted, more from the extreme nervous tension involved 
in avoiding accidents than from the tremendous exertion, and although he 
would weep bitterly from sheer fatigue, nothing could induce him to go 
back to the duller and safer job. Fortunately he belonged to a less 
passionate race than the poor little Italian girl in the Hull-House 
neighborhood who recently battered her head against the wall so long and 
so vigorously that she had to be taken to a hospital because of her 
serious injuries. So nearly as dull "grown-ups" could understand, it had 
been an hysterical revolt against factory work by day and "no fun in the 
evening."

America perhaps more than any other country in the world can demonstrate 
what applied science has accomplished for industry; it has not only made 
possible the utilization of all sorts of unpromising raw material, but it 
has tremendously increased the invention and elaboration of machinery. The 
time must come, however, if indeed the moment has not already arrived, 
when applied science will have done all that it can do for the development 
of machinery. It may be that machines cannot be speeded up any further 
without putting unwarranted strain upon the nervous system of the worker; 
it may be that further elaboration will so sacrifice the workman who feeds 
the machine that industrial advance will lie not in the direction of 
improvement in machinery, but in the recovery and education of the 
workman. This refusal to apply "the art of life" to industry continually 
drives out of it many promising young people. Some of them, impelled by a 
creative impulse which will not be denied, avoid industry altogether and 
demand that their ambitious parents give them lessons in "china painting" 
and "art work," which clutters the overcrowded parlor of the more 
prosperous workingman's home with useless decorated plates, and hand-
painted "drapes," whereas the plates upon the table and the rugs upon the 
floor used daily by thousands of weary housewives are totally untouched by 
the beauty and variety which this ill-directed art instinct might have 
given them had it been incorporated into industry.

I could cite many instances of high-spirited young people who suffer a 
veritable martyrdom in order to satisfy their artistic impulse.

A young girl of fourteen whose family had for years displayed a certain 
artistic aptitude, the mother having been a singer and the grandmother, 
with whom the young girl lived, a clever worker in artificial flowers, had 
her first experience of wage earning in a box factory. She endured it only 
for three months, and then gave up her increasing wage in exchange for 
$1.50 a week which she earns by making sketches of dresses, cloaks and 
hats for the advertisements of a large department store.

A young Russian girl of my acquaintance starves on the irregular pay which 
she receives for her occasional contributions to the Sunday newspapers -- 
meanwhile writing her novel -- rather than return to the comparatively 
prosperous wages of a necktie factory which she regards with horror. 
Another girl washes dishes every evening in a cheap boarding house in 
order to secure the leisure in which to practise her singing lessons, 
rather than to give them up and return to her former twelve-dollar-a-week 
job in an electrical factory.

The artistic expression in all these cases is crude, but the young people 
are still conscious of that old sacrifice of material interest which art 
has ever demanded of those who serve her and which doubtless brings its 
own reward. That the sacrifice is in vain makes it all the more touching 
and is an indictment of the educator who has failed to utilize the art 
instinct in industry.

Something of the same sort takes place among many lads who find little 
opportunity in the ordinary factories to utilize the "instinct for 
workmanship"; or, among those more prosperous young people who establish 
"studios" and "art shops," in which, with a vast expenditure of energy, 
they manufacture luxurious articles.

The educational system in Germany is deliberately planned to sift out and 
to retain in the service of industry, all such promising young people. The 
method is as yet experimental, and open to many objections, but it is so 
far successful that "Made in Germany" means made by a trained artisan and 
in many cases by a man working with the freed impulse of the artist.

The London County Council is constantly urging plans which may secure for 
the gifted children in the Board Schools support in Technological 
institutes. Educators are thus gradually developing the courage and 
initiative to conserve for industry the young worker himself so that his 
mind, his power of variation, his art instinct, his intelligent skill, may 
ultimately be reflected in the industrial product. That would imply that 
industry must be seized upon and conquered by those educators, who now 
either avoid it altogether by taking refuge in the eaves of classic 
learning or beg the question by teaching the tool industry advocated by 
Ruskin and Morris in their first reaction against the present industrial 
system. It would mean that educators must bring industry into "the kingdom 
of the mind"; and pervade it with the human spirit.

The discovery of the labor power of youth was to our age like the 
discovery of a new natural resource, although it was merely incidental to 
the invention of modern machinery and the consequent subdivision of labor. 
In utilizing it thus ruthlessly we are not only in danger of quenching the 
divine fire of youth, but we are imperiling industry itself when we 
venture to ignore these very sources of beauty, of variety and of 
suggestion.



CHAPTER VI.
THE THIRST FOR RIGHTEOUSNESS.

Even as we pass by the joy and beauty of youth on the streets without 
dreaming it is there, so we may hurry past the very presence of august 
things without recognition. We may easily fail to sense those spiritual 
realities, which, in every age, have haunted youth and called to him 
without ceasing. Historians tell us that the extraordinary advances in 
human progress have been made in those times when "the ideals of freedom 
and law, of youth and beauty, of knowledge and virtue, of humanity and 
religion, high things, the conflicts between which have caused most of the 
disruptions and despondences of human society, seem for a generation or 
two to lie in the same direction."

Are we perhaps at least twice in life's journey dimly conscious of the 
needlessness of this disruption and of the futility of the despondency? Do 
we feel it first when young ourselves we long to interrogate the 
"transfigured few" among our elders whom we believe to be carrying forward 
affairs of gravest import? Failing to accomplish this are we, for the 
second time, dogged by a sense of lost opportunity, of needless waste and 
perplexity, when we too, as adults, see again the dreams of youth in 
conflict with the efforts of our own contemporaries? We see idealistic 
endeavor on the one hand lost in ugly friction; the heat and burden of the 
day borne by mature men and women on the other hand, increased by their 
consciousness of youth's misunderstanding and high scorn. It may relieve 
the mind to break forth in moments of irritation against "the folly of the 
coming generation," but whoso pauses on his plodding way to call even his 
youngest and rashest brother a fool, ruins thereby the joy of his 
journey, -- for youth is so vivid an element in life that unless it is 
cherished, all the rest is spoiled. The most praiseworthy journey grows 
dull and leaden unless companioned by youth's iridescent dreams. Not only 
that, but the mature of each generation run a grave risk of putting their 
efforts in a futile direction, in a blind alley as it were, unless they 
can keep in touch with the youth of their own day and know at least the 
trend in which eager dreams are driving them -- those dreams that fairly 
buffet our faces as we walk the city streets.

At times every one possessed with a concern for social progress is 
discouraged by the formless and unsubdued modern city, as he looks upon 
that complicated life which drives men almost without their own volition, 
that life of ingenuous enterprises, great ambitions, political jealousies, 
where men tend to become mere "slaves of possessions." Doubtless these 
striving men are full of weakness and sensitiveness even when they rend 
each other, and are but caught in the coils of circumstance; nevertheless, 
a serious attempt to ennoble and enrich the content of city life that it 
may really fill the ample space their ruthless wills have provided, means 
that we must call upon energies other than theirs. When we count over the 
resources which are at work "to make order out of casualty, beauty out of 
confusion, justice, kindliness and mercy out of cruelty and inconsiderate 
pressure," we find ourselves appealing to the confident spirit of youth. 
We know that it is crude and filled with conflicting hopes, some of them 
unworthy and most of them doomed to disappointment, yet these young people 
have the advantage of "morning in their hearts"; they have such power of 
direct action, such ability to stand free from fear, to break through 
life's trammelings, that in spite of ourselves we become convinced that

"They to the disappointed earth shall give
 The lives we meant to live."  

That this solace comes to us only in fugitive moments, and is easily 
misleading, may be urged as an excuse for our blindness and 
insensitiveness to the august moral resources which the youth of each city 
offers to those who are in the midst of the city's turmoil. A further 
excuse is afforded in the fact that the form of the dreams for beauty and 
righteousness change with each generation and that while it is always 
difficult for the fathers to understand the sons, at those periods when 
the demand of the young is one of social reconstruction, the 
misunderstanding easily grows into bitterness.

The old desire to achieve, to improve the world, seizes the ardent youth 
to-day with a stern command to bring about juster social conditions. 
Youth's divine impatience with the world's inheritance of wrong and 
injustice makes him scornful of "rose water for the plague" prescriptions, 
and he insists upon something strenuous and vital.

One can find innumerable illustrations of this idealistic impatience with 
existing conditions among the many Russian subjects found in the foreign 
quarters of every American city. The idealism of these young people might 
be utilized to a modification of our general culture and point of view, 
somewhat as the influence of the young Germans who came to America in the 
early fifties, bringing with them the hopes and aspirations embodied in 
the revolutions of 1848, made a profound impression upon the social and 
political institutions of America. Long before they emigrated, thousands 
of Russian young people had been caught up into the excitements and hopes 
of the Russian revolution in Finland, in Poland, in the Russian cities, in 
the university towns. Life had become intensified by the consciousness of 
the suffering and starvation of millions of their fellow subjects. They 
had been living with a sense of discipline and of preparation for a coming 
struggle which, although grave in import, was vivid and adventurous. Their 
minds had been seized by the first crude forms of social theory and they 
had cherished a vague belief that they were the direct instruments of a 
final and ideal social reconstruction. When they come to America they 
sadly miss this sense of importance and participation in a great and 
glorious conflict against a recognized enemy. Life suddenly grows stale 
and unprofitable; the very spirit of tolerance which characterizes 
American cities is that which strikes most unbearably upon their ardent 
spirits. They look upon the indifference all about them with an amazement 
which rapidly changes to irritation. Some of them in a short time lose 
their ardor, others with incredible rapidity make the adaptation between 
American conditions and their store of enthusiasm, but hundreds of them 
remain restless and ill at ease. Their only consolation, almost their only 
real companionship, is when they meet in small groups for discussion or in 
larger groups to welcome a well known revolutionist who brings them direct 
news from the conflict, or when they arrange for a demonstration in memory 
of "The Red Sunday" or the death of Gershuni. Such demonstrations, 
however, are held in honor of men whose sense of justice was obliged to 
seek an expression quite outside the regular channels of established 
government. Knowing that Russia has forced thousands of her subjects into 
this position, one would imagine that patriotic teachers in America would 
be most desirous to turn into governmental channels all that insatiable 
desire for juster relations in industrial and political affairs. A 
distinct and well directed campaign is necessary if this gallant 
enthusiasm is ever to be made part of that old and still incomplete effort 
to embody in law -- "the law that abides and falters not, ages long" -- 
the highest aspirations for justice.

Unfortunately, we do little or nothing with this splendid store of 
youthful ardor and creative enthusiasm. Through its very isolation it 
tends to intensify and turn in upon itself, and no direct effort is made 
to moralize it, to discipline it, to make it operative upon the life of 
the city. And yet it is, perhaps, what American cities need above all 
else, for it is but too true that Democracy -- "a people ruling" -- the 
very name of which the Greeks considered so beautiful, no longer stirs the 
blood of the American youth, and that the real enthusiasm for self-
government must be found among the groups of young immigrants who bring 
over with every ship a new cargo of democratic aspirations. That many of 
these young men look for a consummation of these aspirations to a social 
order of the future in which the industrial system as well as government 
shall embody democratic relations, simply shows that the doctrine of 
Democracy like any other of the living faiths of men, is so essentially 
mystical that it continually demands new formulation. To fail to recognize 
it in a new form, to call it hard names, to refuse to receive it, may mean 
to reject that which our fathers cherished and handed on as an inheritance 
not only to be preserved but also to be developed.

We allow a great deal of this precious stuff -- this Welt-Schmerz of which 
each generation has need -- not only to go unutilized, but to work havoc 
among the young people themselves. One of the saddest illustrations of 
this, in my personal knowledge, was that of a young Russian girl who lived 
with a group of her compatriots on the west side of Chicago. She recently 
committed suicide at the same time that several others in the group tried 
it and failed. One of these latter, who afterwards talked freely of the 
motives which led her to this act, said that there were no great issues at 
stake in this country; that America was wholly commercial in its interests 
and absorbed in money making; that Americans were not held together by any 
historic bonds nor great mutual hopes, and were totally ignorant of the 
stirring social and philosophic movements of Europe; that her life here 
had been a long, dreary, economic struggle, unrelieved by any of the 
higher interests; that she was tired of getting seventy-five cents for 
trimming a hat that sold for twelve dollars and was to be put upon the 
empty head of some one who had no concern for the welfare of the woman who 
made it. The statement doubtless reflected something of "The Sorrows of 
Werther," but the entire tone was nobler and more highly socialized.

It is difficult to illustrate what might be accomplished by reducing to 
action the ardor of those youths who so bitterly arraign our present 
industrial order. While no part of the social system can be changed 
rapidly, we would all admit that the present industrial arrangements in 
America might be vastly improved and that we are failing to meet the 
requirements of our industrial life with courage and success simply 
because we do not realize that unless we establish that humane legislation 
which has its roots in a consideration for human life, our industrialism 
itself will suffer from inbreeding, growing ever more unrestrained and 
ruthless. It would seem obvious that in order to secure relief in a 
community dominated by industrial ideals, an appeal must be made to the 
old spiritual sanctions for human conduct, that we must reach motives more 
substantial and enduring than the mere fleeting experiences of one phase 
of modern industry which vainly imagines that its growth would be 
curtailed if the welfare of its employees were guarded by the state. It 
would be an interesting attempt to turn that youthful enthusiasm to the 
aid of one of the most conservative of the present social efforts, the 
almost world-wide movement to secure protective legislation for women and 
children in industry, in which America is so behind the other nations. 
Fourteen of the great European powers protect women from all night work, 
from excessive labor by day, because paternalistic governments prize the 
strength of women for the bearing and rearing of healthy children to the 
state. And yet in a republic it is the citizens themselves who must be 
convinced of the need of this protection unless they would permit industry 
to maim the very mothers of the future.

In one year in the German Empire one hundred thousand children were cared 
for through money paid from the State Insurance fund to their widowed 
mothers or to their invalided fathers. And yet in the American states it 
seems impossible to pass a most rudimentary employers' liability act, 
which would be but the first step towards that code of beneficent 
legislation which protects "the widow and fatherless" in Germany and 
England. Certainly we shall have to bestir ourselves if we would care for 
the victims of the industrial order as well as do other nations. We shall 
be obliged speedily to realize that in order to secure protective 
legislation from a governmental body in which the most powerful interests 
represented are those of the producers and transporters of manufactured 
goods, it will be necessary to exhort to a care for the defenseless from 
the religious point of view. To take even the non-commercial point of view 
would be to assert that evolutionary progress assumes that a sound 
physique is the only secure basis of life, and to guard the mothers of the 
race is simple sanity.

And yet from lack of preaching we do not unite for action because we are 
not stirred to act at all, and protective legislation in America is 
shamefully inadequate. Because it is always difficult to put the 
championship of the oppressed above the counsels of prudence, we say in 
despair sometimes that we are a people who hold such varied creeds that 
there are not enough of one religious faith to secure anything, but the 
truth is that it is easy to unite for action people whose hearts have once 
been filled by the fervor of that willing devotion which may easily be 
generated in the youthful breast. It is comparatively easy to enlarge a 
moral concept, but extremely difficult to give it to an adult for the 
first time. And yet when we attempt to appeal to the old sanctions for 
disinterested conduct, the conclusion is often forced upon us that they 
have not been engrained into character, that they cannot be relied upon 
when they are brought into contact with the arguments of industrialism, 
that the colors of the flag flying over the fort of our spiritual 
resources wash out and disappear when the storm actually breaks.

It is because the ardor of youth has not been attracted to the long effort 
to modify the ruthlessness of industry by humane enactments, that we sadly 
miss their resourceful enthusiasm and that at the same time groups of 
young people who hunger and thirst after social righteousness are breaking 
their hearts because the social reform is so long delayed and an 
unsympathetic and hardhearted society frustrates all their hopes. And yet 
these ardent young people who obscure the issue by their crying and 
striving and looking in the wrong place, might be of inestimable value if 
so-called political leaders were in any sense social philosophers. To 
permit these young people to separate themselves from the contemporaneous 
efforts of ameliorating society and to turn their vague hopes solely 
toward an ideal commonwealth of the future, is to withdraw from an 
experimental self-government founded in enthusiasm, the very stores of 
enthusiasm which are needed to sustain it.

The championship of the oppressed came to be a spiritual passion with the 
Hebrew prophets. They saw the promises of religion, not for individuals 
but in the broad reaches of national affairs and in the establishment of 
social justice. It is quite possible that such a spiritual passion is 
again to be found among the ardent young souls of our cities. They see a 
vision, not of a purified nation but of a regenerated and a reorganized 
society. Shall we throw all this into the future, into the futile prophecy 
of those who talk because they cannot achieve, or shall we commingle their 
ardor, their overmastering desire for social justice, with that more sober 
effort to modify existing conditions? Are we once more forced to appeal to 
the educators? Is it so difficult to utilize this ardor because educators 
have failed to apprehend the spiritual quality of their task?

It would seem a golden opportunity for those to whom is committed the task 
of spiritual instruction, for to preach and seek justice in human affairs 
is one of the oldest obligations of religion and morality. All that would 
be necessary would be to attach this teaching to the contemporary world in 
such wise that the eager youth might feel a tug upon his faculties, and a 
sense of participation in the moral life about him. To leave it unattached 
to actual social movements means that the moralist is speaking in 
incomprehensible terms. Without this connection, the religious teachers 
may have conscientiously carried out their traditional duties and yet have 
failed utterly to stir the fires of spiritual enthusiasm.

Each generation of moralists and educators find themselves facing an 
inevitable dilemma first, to keep the young committed to their charge 
"unspotted from the world," and, second, to connect the young with the 
ruthless and materialistic world all about them in such wise that they may 
make it the arena for their spiritual endeavor. It is fortunate for these 
teachers that sometime during "The Golden Age" the most prosaic youth is 
seized by a new interest in remote and universal ends, and that if but 
given a clue by which he may connect his lofty aims with his daily living, 
he himself will drag the very heavens into the most sordid tenement. The 
perpetual difficulty consists in finding the clue for him and placing it 
in his hands, for, if the teaching is too detached from life, it does not 
result in any psychic impulsion at all. I remember as an illustration of 
the saving power of this definite connection, a tale told me by a 
distinguished labor leader in England. His affections had been starved, 
even as a child, for he knew nothing of his parents, his earliest memories 
being associated with a wretched old woman who took the most casual care 
of him. When he was nine years old he ran away to sea and for the next 
seven years led the rough life of a dock laborer, until he became much 
interested in a little crippled boy, who by the death of his father had 
been left solitary on a freight boat. My English friend promptly adopted 
the child as his own and all the questionings of life centered about his 
young protégé. He was constantly driven to attend evening meetings where 
he heard discussed those social conditions which bear so hard upon the 
weak and sick. The crippled boy lived until he was fifteen and by that 
time the regeneration of his foster father was complete, the young docker 
was committed for life to the bettering of social conditions. It is 
doubtful whether any abstract moral appeal could have reached such a 
roving nature. Certainly no attempt to incite his ambition would have 
succeeded. Only a pull upon his deepest sympathies and affections, his 
desire to protect and cherish a weaker thing, could possibly have 
stimulated him and connected him with the forces making for moral and 
social progress.

This, of course, has ever been the task of religion, to make the sense of 
obligation personal, to touch morality with enthusiasm, to bathe the world 
in affection -- and on all sides we are challenging the teachers of 
religion to perform this task for the youth of the city.

For thousands of years definite religious instruction has been given by 
authorized agents to the youth of all nations, emphasized through tribal 
ceremonials, the assumption of the Roman toga, the Barmitzvah of the Jews, 
the First Communion of thousands of children in Catholic Europe, the 
Sunday Schools of even the least formal of the evangelical sects. It is as 
if men had always felt that this expanding period of human life must be 
seized upon for spiritual ends, that the tender tissue and newly awakened 
emotions must be made the repository for the historic ideals and dogmas 
which are, after all, the most precious possessions of the race. How has 
it come about that so many of the city youth are not given their share in 
our common inheritance of life's best goods? Why are their tender feet so 
often ensnared even when they are going about youth's legitimate business? 
One would suppose that in such an age as ours moral teachers would be put 
upon their mettle, that moral authority would be forced to speak with no 
uncertain sound if only to be heard above the din of machinery and the 
roar of industrialism; that it would have exerted itself as never before 
to convince the youth of the reality of the spiritual life. Affrighted as 
the moralists must be by the sudden new emphasis placed upon wealth, 
despairing of the older men and women who are already caught by its 
rewards, one would say that they would have seized upon the multitude of 
young people whose minds are busied with issues which lie beyond the 
portals of life, as the only resource which might save the city from the 
fate of those who perish through lack of vision.

Yet because this inheritance has not been attached to conduct, the youth 
of Jewish birth may have been taught that prophets and statesmen for three 
thousand years declared Jehovah to be a God of Justice who hated 
oppression and desired righteousness, but there is no real appeal to his 
spirit of moral adventure unless he is told that the most stirring 
attempts to translate justice into the modern social order have been 
inaugurated and carried forward by men of his own race, and that until he 
joins in the contemporary manifestations of that attempt he is recreant to 
his highest traditions and obligations.

The Christian youth may have been taught that man's heartbreaking 
adventure to find justice in the order of the universe moved the God of 
Heaven himself to send a Mediator in order that the justice man craves and 
the mercy by which alone he can endure his weakness might be reconciled, 
but he will not make the doctrine his own until he reduces it to action 
and tries to translate the spirit of his Master into social terms.

The youth who calls himself an "Evolutionist" -- it is rather hard to find 
a name for this youth, but there are thousands of him and a fine fellow he 
often is -- has read of that struggle beginning with the earliest tribal 
effort to establish just relations between man and man, but he still needs 
to be told that after all justice can only be worked out upon this earth 
by those who will not tolerate a wrong to the feeblest member of the 
community, and that it will become a social force only in proportion as 
men steadfastly strive to establish it.

If these young people who are subjected to varied religious instruction 
are also stirred to action, or rather, if the instruction is given 
validity because it is attached to conduct, then it may be comparatively 
easy to bring about certain social reforms so sorely needed in our 
industrial cities. We are at times obliged to admit, however, that both 
the school and the church 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.

We may either smother the divine fire of youth or we may feed it. We may 
either stand stupidly staring as it sinks into a murky fire of crime and 
flares into the intermittent blaze of folly or we may tend it into a 
lambent flame with power to make clean and bright our dingy city streets.