Educators apparently forget that this unrestrained stimulation of young
people, so characteristic of our cities, although developing very
rapidly, is of recent origin, and that we have not yet seen the outcome.
The present education of the average young man has given him only the
most unreal protection against the temptations of the city. Schoolboys
are subjected to many lures from without just at the moment when they
are filled with an inner tumult which utterly bewilders them and
concerning which no one has instructed them save in terms of empty
precept and unintelligible warning.

We are authoritatively told that the physical difficulties are
enormously increased by uncontrolled or perverted imaginations, and all
sound advice to young men in regard to this subject emphasizes a clean
mind, exhorts an imagination kept free from sensuality and insists upon
days filled with wholesome athletic interests. We allow this régime to
be exactly reversed for thousands of young people living in the most
crowded and most unwholesome parts of the city. Not only does the stage
in its advertisements exhibit all the allurements of sex to such an
extent that a play without a "love interest" is considered foredoomed to
failure, but the novels which form the sole reading of thousands of
young men and girls deal only with the course of true or simulated love,
resulting in a rose-colored marriage, or in variegated misfortunes.

Often the only recreation possible for young men and young women
together is dancing, in which it is always easy to transgress the
proprieties. In many public dance halls, however, improprieties are
deliberately fostered. The waltzes and two-steps are purposely slow, the
couples leaning heavily on each other barely move across the floor, all
the jollity and bracing exercise of the peasant dance is eliminated, as
is all the careful decorum of the formal dance. The efforts to obtain