CHAPTER III

THE QUEST FOR ADVENTURE


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

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