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