to consider some of the powerful disintegrating factors operative
among immigrants and their children.

Second to the great fact of labor and its demands in our cities is
the need and demand for recreation. The reaction from the monotony of
factory life, with its exacting, fatiguing tension of machine-tending,
and the crowdedness of the tenement home, sends the laboring multitudes
into the streets at night seeking diversion and amusement. This is
pre-eminently true of the young, who find commercialism waiting at
night to "extract from them their petty wages by pandering to their
love of pleasure" after having utilized their undeveloped labor power
in its factories and shops by day.

Jane Addams says, "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 immigrated from other lands to appreciate
or rectify these dangers of the city.

"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.

"The mass of these young people are possessed of good intentions
and would respond to amusements less demoralizing and dangerous,
if such were available at no greater cost than those now offered.