Golden Age, November 4, 1925

Download: PDF — Golden Age, November 4, 1925

a copy’ —. 100 aYear

Canada and Foreign -Countries $ 150

OLD WORLD DYING

a Journal of fact

Vol VII Bi-Weekly No.

November 4, 1925

THE SURVIVAL

BITS OF

WORLD NEWS ■

A GREAT FEAST

FOR THE PEOPLE

NEV

WORLD BEGINNING

sBflaeraMtai

Contents of the Golden Age

; ...-jawr

Social and Educational

Radio Pbogbams .................... 94

Political—Domestic and Fobetgn

Bits of World News . .... ............. 83

An Aerial Battle Impending .... ...... .

The Air Races at Baltimore

■The Fight of the Riffs for Liberty ............ 89

Tortures in Bulgaria .................

Items on the Shenandoah

Great Peace in Europeand America ■ . . . , , . ... . . ...

Recent Slaughters- in China . . . . , . . . . . . . , , ' 89

Religion and Philosophy

The Suwhval of the Unfit

Why Small Communities Decay ............

Multiplication of Morons

Masses Unfit for Self-Government ...........

Moral Bankruptcy of White Humanity

Weakened Sense of ResiionsiUlity ............ 71

Where Coeducation Is. Leading

Youth Becoming Cynical and Godless ........... 73

'■ Loss of Parental Control

' Teachers as Guilty as Parents ..............

Mental Changes in the Sexes .............

A Vice-Infiltrated World

Growth of Cosmetic Industry

; Ominous Increase of Divorces

Vicious Influence of the “Funnies”

Part Played by the Automobile and the Movies - ..... 80

' Sixty-Three Billion Cigarettes a Year

i Effect of National Prohibition

Armageddon Sure and Impending ............ S3

Driving Headlong into Anarchy ............. 86

God’s Solution of the Problem . g-y

A Gbeat Feast fob the Peofib .............. 90

Studies in “The Hart of Goo” 93

Published every other Wednesday at 18 Concord Street, Brooklyn, N.Y,, U.S.A., by WOODWORTH, IHJDGING3. & MARTIN

Copartners and Proprietors Address: IS Coneord Street, Brooklyn, U.T., U.g.A,

CLAYTON S. WOODWORTH . . . Editor ROBERT 3. MARTIN . Businaas’Kaamiw WAI. F. HUDGINGS . . Sec’y sod Trees.

STVB Cssra A Corr—-$1.00 a Xbab Makb Bsmittancss to TUB GO1.DE3 AGB Fousiaa Offices : British . .... 34 Craven Tsrraes, Laiisaster Gate, London W. 2

Canadian .... .... 88-40 Irwin Avenue, Toronto, Ontario

Australasian ....... 49S Collins Street, Melbourne, Australia Ssiith African ...... 6 Lelie Street, Cape Town, South Africa

Catered as secend-daas sasttw at Brooklyn, N. V., nnder ths Act of Marea 3S 1878

Golden Age

---L^^eJJ5JU2-r~---u—^i.^.—..—:----uaaeasarrrrrrTOr^^ ■rJSS7.:;r.;;,l'^ p Igfl!

Volume VII Brooklyn, N.Y., Wednesday, November 4, 1925 Number 160

The Survival of the Unfit By 0. L. Roscnkrans, Jr.

[An unanswerable demonstration of the hopelessness and impossibility of the dreams of evolutionists.—-Ed.]

THE science of Biology teaches that all existence comprises a competitive straggle wherein the strong survive and the weak succumb and perish. Given the biological viewpoint, this dictum is borne out by the entire experience of organic matter- The record of human experience bears it out, whether individually or in the aggregate; virile, aggressive stocks subjugate those which are effete and unmartial, despoiling and exploiting them.

In current life, the shrewd and resourceful profit by the inertia, docility, and stupidity of their fellows. Always a few reap the rewards of efforij while the majority are gleaners of the harvest. Neither is this all chance that fortune almost uniformly favors the energetic and the persevering; for the science of eugenics has confirmed the instinctive recognition of mankind that leadership is truly in large measure a matter of “divine right”.

The fact is that leadership is not accidental, not merely resultant from a fortuitous conjunction of circumstances. Ability forges to the top, as ice-particles rise in freezing water; it seeks its natural level. Character analysis reveals that men of eminence are such because of well-marked traits indelibly registered in their features. These traits are hereditary,

Eugenists have ascertained through exhaustive tests that intellectual capacity is inherited, that racial progress is dependent upon the perpetuation of specific individual types who furnish leadership to the masses, ins uring the multitude with their own controlling ambitions and ideals, imposing on them their own opinions and standards; in effect, thinking for them, setting the pace. It is true that an old-established caste system tends to sanctify privileged mediocrity, but this abuse is mitigated by hereditary predisposition to superior mentality.

Why Small Communities Decay

WHOEVER is able in his own experience to compare older-settled communities with newer-settled localities must have observed the marked difference in spirit between their average citizenship. The inhabitant of the former is apt to be prosaic, narrow, dull, cynical, a plodder, engrossed in petty neighborhood routine, inclined to be jealous of Iris neighbors and suspicious of strangers, overemphasizing trivial slights and grievances, keenly alive to the competitive struggle- The latter is by contrast broader-minded, more genial, sympathetic, fraternal, responding more readily to cooperation, more buoyant and optimistic. His instinct is rather to combine with his fellows in the contest with nature than to distrust them as potential enemies.

Sociologists account for the decay of com-, munity spirit, and the stagnation of rural neighborhoods, by an exodus from them of members of the innately superior mental types in search of fields of larger opportunity. The openings on “Main Street” are limited; hence restless ambition departs for the metropolis or the West, leaving the infcrior-calibred “home-folk” to lapse into lethargy and to bemoan the decay of public spirit.

The realization that something has taken the life out of the community becomes acute, inasmuch as superiority really rans in families, and the tendency is for whole families of this type to transplant themselves into a new environment. Moreover, there is a tendency in men and women to seek mates of their own intellectual class. It is tragical that intellectuality displays a historic propensity to “race-suicide”, while mediocrity is correspondingly prolific. The consequence is that racial stocks “run out”, become like herds of scrub cattle. Both eugenists and criminologists endorse the assever-

ea golden AGE b,00*h*N-x-

ation that the rising generation of white humanity comprises a preponderating percentage of “inferior complexes", of emotional defectives and morons. »

Multiplication of Morons

rPIIE popular application of the term moron is a misnomer. A moron is an adult whose intellectual capacity has been matured at from eight to twelve years of age. But the “morons” of newspaper parlance, the criminal degenerates and socially unadaptable malcontents, should be more properly designated as emotional defectives, or mentally unbalanced, rather than unintelligent.

Scientifically considered, the rank and file of the population are themselves morons. Notwithstanding the fact that they may be in the aggregate staid, sober, conservative, law-abiding and industrious, the bone and sinew of the nation, they are nevertheless deficient in initiative and originality. Their natural leaders and instructors are the sprinkling of brilliant minds throughout society who constitute an aristocracy of ability and to a certain extent subconsciously leaven the whole with their spirit.

The perpetual depletion of its own numbers through wilful class sterility by the Curiales is the true explanation of Roman decadence under the Empire. The servile substratum of Roman society which responded so eagerly to the teachings of the Nazarene, was recruited largely from barbarian sources—from stocks that were racially less impoverished than the moron rab-tie of parasites and paupers that subsisted on its labors and found amusement in its sufferings.

The antique world prolonged its senescence through infusions of virile northern blood, being surrounded by “noble barbarians”, whose hereditary ruling families were prolific; Eventually these barbarians overran the provinces and replenished the waning vitality of their degenerate Latin populations. No such parallel is afforded by surviving barbarian nations in the modern world; for contemporary savages linger on in our age of progress as examples of retrogressive peoples whose natural leaders became bred-out. .

Masses Unfit for Self-Government

THE average man is a prosaic plodder, intrinsically unfit to govern himself. Ordinarily he submits with exemplary patience to be governed from the top, enduring with equanimity even tyranny and oppression, to which he is none the less exposed from mental superiors, since self-glorification is with the majority the ruling motive, even with intellectuality.

In times of great public stress or commotion, when natural leaders fail, the common man surrenders himself to the guidance of persons who are his moral inferiors—brilliant perhaps, but erratic and emotionally unstable minds. The appeal of such leaders is then to their latent savagery, and how suddenly the veneer of sobriety and respectability is sloughed off!

Civilization has perpetuated in its scrapheaps, its slums and industrial centers, a malcontent barbarism which, according to historical precedents, in a time of furious upheaval xvill take the helm. Society in such contingency.becomes like a shaken jar, with the dregs rising to the top.

Society, in an era of decadence, illustrates the inherent incapacity of its average members to maintain a high standard of culture, by reverting to jungle standards. This is betrayed in its literature, drama, art and fashions. Conventionalism, caricature, and lifeless imitation succeed the creations of genius.

Today we have cubist and impressionist art, jazz music, the shimmy, and other emotional dances. Some cartoons resemble the uncouth pictorial efforts of children. The artists of the later Ramesside epoch depicted the Pharoah and his court as beasts and birds; similarly we have our “Bugvilles”, and the like. Correlative-ly with decadent art, morals are growing looser and still more loose.

Heroic remedies are agitated to stem the flood of degeneracy that is threatening to engulf civilization, owing to the rapid increase of mental and moral defectives. Lawlessness is rife and law enforcement lax. The public, like that of Imperial Rome, is inordinately amusementloving, meanwhile acquiring an appetite for sensuality.

Intersex discordancy is flaming up as the home influence smoulders into extinction. Reason is at a discount, subordinated to the passions of the illogical mind. Childish pastimes intrigue maturity, while adult depravity is copied by juvenility. Religion is becoming a fetishistic propitiation of the incarnate human will.

Moral Bankruptcy of White Humanity

THE tocsin is being sounded by scores of reflective minds to arouse public perception of the gravitation of white humanity toward moral bankruptcy. But the “man in the street”, felicitating himself on our virtually uninterrupted series of astonishing scientific discoveries and on the magic of our inventions, smiles incredulously, quite unperturbed about his own shortcomings, wilfully oblivious of the fact that our incomparably rapid material progress during the past three decades has been accompanied by a corresponding deterioration in ideals, institutions and habits of thought.

An age which transcends all that went before it in creature comforts and conveniences, which has translated into sober reality the fairy tales of our ancestors in its sky-scrapers, elevators, escalators, automatic traffic signals, electric signs, motor vehicles, airships, radio, telepix,etc,. is meanwhile not a race of supermen to enjoy these blessings, but an atavistic jungle-type. What a paradox, suggesting that nature’s con-' servation-of-energy law is indemnifying itself for the neglected cultivation of natural human faculties by atrophying those faculties, thereby nullifying mankind’s endeavors to supplement its physical attributes with a complex mechan-ico-scientific equipment !

Man sedulously cultivates the stall-fed types, exotics, and preaches evolution; but nature’s preference is for runts, cayuses, long-horns, gutter-rats and morons. Its efforts are persever-ingly directed to perfect a creature that can flourish under the extremity of adverse pressure and of alimentary competition. Since modern life is ultra-artificial, nature produces a type that is adapted to the congested, noisy, lucernal, jazzed-up life of today; whose optics can bear with equanimity the glare of the electric globes and the strain of perpetual readjustment to focus rapidly moving objects; whose digestions are inured to slim rations of devital’ sed and adulterated foods; whose respiratory organs can handle with impunity a superabundance of CO2 and dust-cluttered air; and whose general physical economy can tolerate an excess of toxic elements.

The katabolic “flapper”, with her flat chest and attenuated frame, may not be competent to bring forth numerous sturdy offspring, such as a pioneer age demands; but her single neurotic, under-nourished, emotionally unbalanced child perhaps exactly meets the requirements of modern urban conditions. Howbeit, this type is mentally indolent, and physically incompetent to perpetuate the very conditions wherein it has its being. Once the brain-type which formulated these conditions has dwindled-into extinction, the elaborate structure of modern civilization may crumble into ruin, untenanted save by owls and bats and doleful creatures!

Victorian Standards Have Disappeared

T) ROBABLY a majority of thinking people today realize that the world is growing corrupt, that ethical standards are decadent, that some sinister influence is undermining publie morality. Such elderly people as have resisted saturation with modernist cant and propaganda to the confounding of their common sense can hardly escape the conviction that a radical de- . parture has been made from the Victorian. standards of their youth. Nevertheless, so -habituated are they to the soothing palliativea , that human nature is sound at the core and that; our age is immeasurably superior to all that; preceded it, that they concede only with re-luctance its want of flawlessness. *

“Flaming youth,” innocent of any background of experience for comparison, is naturally skeptical of adverse criticism, resenting such as envy of its youth. Untaught deference to its elders, it consents to tolerate them solely conditional to their endorsement of its program of mi trammeled liberty; otherwise they are rated as encumbrances, as brakes on the headlong pace of evolution!

If our defunct ancestors should return to life, unquestionably they would marvel at our mechanical magic, but their admiration would be qualified by disapproval of our loose habits. They might reflect: “Of a truth, we had not all this paraphernalia, yet verily we had robust health and sound minds; our weaklings died in infancy. We had cozy homes, loyal helpmates, obedient children. Our lives were rough and simple, filled with drudgery and sorrows ; but we experienced a zest in the living of them, and . were not afraid to live them out their allotted span. Our laws were harsh and often unjust, but we obeyed them. Above all we possessed a priceless consolation in our religion, amid the snares and dangers of our lives.’4 t

The Mirror of the Day’s News

THE perusal of a daily paper would fill these pious ancestors of ours with forebodings; a visit to the movies would kindle their ire at our moral turpitude; a cabaret or road-house orgy,- a ring-side seat at a New Year’s celebration, where nude women dance on the tables; these would cause their memories to hark back yearningly to the cat’s-tail, the whipping-post, the pillory, stocks and branding-iron. "So this is the sequel to our labors 1 Was it to this consummation that we tamed the wilderness, drove out the loping heathen, faced perils and privations beyond the understanding of this, our effete progeny?” So might they muse, indignant at the unappreciation of the legacy of stark heroism bequeathed by themselves.

Suppose in defense of our contention we glance over the daily papers for a few months past, not dismissing with a shrug of impatience the more salient items of crime, or the jibes at the mercenary exploitation of vileness, but considering these attentively from the philosophical angle, and pondering over their significance. What impressions do we form?

Here is bare-faced swindling in cabinets, legislatures and gubernatorial chairs; there nonchalant gunmen walk out arm in arm from the court room with professional bondsmen; boy bandits and “bandit queens” perpeti’ate their robberies in the heart of the down-town districts; "vamp” autoists take their toll of old-folks’ and infants’ lives; bootleggers brazenly ply their profession in open defiance of law, not hesitating to use armed and armored launches against the “dry navy”; rapists abduct their victims in broad daylight, after unmercifully beating up their escorts; divorce sought on frivolous pretexts; suicide committed on trivial excuses.

We read of flat-bombers, pepper-throwers, juvenile murderers, girl hoboes and boy autothieves. One boy, bored by a picture show, turned in the fire-alarm. Some high-school students, experimenting with bombs, intentionally blew up a new and yet vacant store-building. Thirty years ago criminals were hardened adults. Nowadays a large percentage of them are minors. Thirty years ago statutory offenses against immature girls were unknown, except occasionally where committed by Chinamen or Negroes; now they are of appalling frequency.

Public Attitude Toward Gun Toting

TN PRIMITIVE society men bear arms in de-fense of their families and property; today “gun-toting” is so popular even with women and boys, and fire arms are so easy to. obtain, that Congress had to, by federal enactment,, prohibit mail order shipment of firearms.

The scurrilous retort of yesterday modernism now translates into blood and fire. Instead of reproaches or tearful supplications, the unfaithful spouse of today is more likely to be doused by his wife with burning gasoline.

Recent headlines show that a man killed his wife for nagging him. A woman shot her husband for muddying the carpet. A young man slew his own mother at a celebration. A maiden took her mother’s life for scolding her for late hours and irregular habits. A mother soothes her crying infant by giving it her pearl-handled revolver to play with, and the baby accidentally shoots the mother dead. One boy murders his aged grandmother, and another cuts his stepmother’s throat with a razor while she sleeps. A discharged janitor expresses his resentment by shooting his late employer.

An inmate of a home for the aged kills the sister in charge. A pauper murders a roommate in bed. A laborer strangles a six-year-old boy. Two boys, six and eight, hurl a baby into the whirling rapids below a waterfall to enjoy the excitement of seeing it drown while they throw stones at its helpless little body.

Surprising is the public attitude toward those who take the law into their own hands. A notorious gang-chieftain, slain in a gang feud, is buried with regal pomp. An immigrant woman, failing to obtain work, lolls her twin babies and is acquitted amid the applause of the courtroom spectators. Notoriety in crime nowadays excites emulation. The infamous Loeb-Leopold murder inspired imitators; while the Polish actress who resorted to euthanasia to relieve her sweetheart’s sufferings set a precedent for similar procedures. The leniency of the court in the first instance unquestionably provoked other crimes of recent months.

Symptoms of an Incurable Malady

MORE and more flagitious become the crimes from month to month and year to year, and now the newspapers record the occurrences as entirely commonplace. An enraged woman in-* duced an ex-service man to decoy and tie to a tree her cast-off beau, and she.then beat out his ■ brains with a revolver-butt. An instructor in ? agronomy in a Southern college was found ? slain with a fire-ax, with returned examination ■ papers beside him which evidently he had not ■ marked to suit somebody. A favorite sport of i modern burglars is to tie their victims to the i beds, and then set fire to the house. One householder was found bound and gagged in his own basement, with the letters K. K, K. branded on him—presumably to divert suspicion from the real culprits. 1

A mob, led by a jealous woman, recently tarred and feathered a young lady school-teacher for the imprudence of wearing pretty clothes. A father is accused of poisoning his three-year-old son. A man is tried for deliberately inoculating another with disease-germs to procure his death; and the prosecution disclosed that it was an easy matter to obtain such germ-cultures, and no embarrassing questions asked. A seven-year-old girl confessed to poisoning several people from sheer delight in inflicting suffering. A lawyer chose the unique method of hiding his crime by embalming his victims’ heads in concrete blocks. The half-charred corpse of a minister’s wife was discovered in the basement furnace, and the ridiculous theory hazarded that she committed suicide by crawling into the fire through the small furnace door!

Irritated by his child’s inarticulate babble, a father, assisted by the grandmother, cuts off the end of his baby’s tongue. A rejected suitor tears out handfuls of his inamorata’s hair. A fourteen-year-old boy sets fire to fourteen buildings, A girl of twelve commits suicide to elude school attendance. A doctor is found guilty of an assault on a deranged girl-patient, A sanctimonious profligate entices nurses to his home to attack them. Beside the foregoing, the projected “pink parade” of naked men and women in a London park reads like innocent comedy.

Does the recapitulation of these sordid items nauseate the reader? They are but symptoms of civilization’s malady and must not be disregarded in our diagnosis. They are but a few selected examples from the catalogue of crime as indicated by the daily press, none of them of such notoriety as the Fritz Hartman case in Germany—that archfiend who gnawed the throats and drank the blood of twenty-seven youths; or the cannibal Karl Denke, who for ten years had been luring unsuspecting visitors to his lonely Silesian farm and murdering them.

Contrast the law-abiding reputation sustained by ante-bellum Germany with reports of her city marauders of today going out in bands to ravish the peasants’ potato fields; and of bandit axemen besieging farm houses and burning the occupants in their rooms. The Parisian police have been searching for an alleged woman degenerate, who nevertheless evinced rare surgical skill in dismembering the corpses of her scores of victims, leaving her grisly handiwork wrapped in newspapers in widely separated nooks and corners of the city- Russian news, is unreliable; but reports from there persist of child-spies betraying their own parents for ( candy and movie tickets, likewise the gruesome ■ tales of cemeteries turned into brothels.

■ ' i

Weakened Sense of Responsibility '

T> EVERTING to the domestic situation, we ■*-* note a lively appreciation of its portentous- \ ness among prominent educators, journalists, ! reformers and medical authorities. A solemn warning is uttered by the presidents of three of our foremost universities in their baccalaureate addresses; and a chorus of reproof and admonition reechoes from pulpit, bench, editorial desk and lecture platform, challenging the rising generation to take stock of itself and repent before it is too late. But this outburst is, we surmise, as unregarded by the general public of today as the croaking of frogs in a pond.

The reformers find an analogy between our joy-riding, jazz-mad age and the turgid sensuality of Pagan Rome, the prevailing irreligion being cited in this parallel, together with looseness of the marriage tie, the degradation of the home, the growing appetite for suggestive literature and the lascivious drama, the appalling increase of suicide even among children, the weakened sense of personal responsibility and of faith in human dignity, the insubordination of children, and the ascendancy of feminine ideals, contrary to God’s arrangement.

The ultra-artificial character of modern life is proving debilitating. The progressive acceleration of the pace of living is exhausting racial vitality, wearing out men and women prematurely, and stamping the faces of children with weariness and ennui. The exhilarations of our congested, hurried, lucernal, noisy schema of existence find a physiological reaction in discouragement and morbidity.

The Anteus impulse is latent in everyone; and it is an historical phenomenon that urban populations are not self-perpetuating, but require .continual renovation from the rural districts. If it were not unnatural and irrational to live in human dnt-heaps, this would not be the case. ..... .

Abuses of “The New Freedom” • •

HE popular cant extols “the new freedom” and “the new individualism” resultant on coeducation, sex equality, liberal concessions to childhood, etc., as indubitable evidence of mankind’s evolutionary emancipation from the mediaeval fetters of ignorance, bigotry, and superstition. It is noteworthy, however, that each of these factors in modern enlightenment has introduced a corresponding abuse. The promiscuous intermingling of the sexes in public life has deprived womanhood of its milder, more beneficent aspects, thereby augmenting the asperity of the economic struggle and defrauding the home of its lares and penates. Gaps are opened in those traditional barriers which guarded the intersex relations,- permitting license to creep in. Premature sophistication in childhood is noticeably subverting- primal innocence.

Birth control may be an economic necessity in an overcrowded world, where young men are unable to support large families and at the same time gratify the expensive desires of the modern wife accustomed, prior to marriage, to earn an independent salary. But for all that, the mental reaction to the birth-control movement is levity with respect to the sacred function of reproduction. .

The rapid pace of modern life is directly injurious to. children, in both a physiological and a psychological sense. Parents openly tolerate or acquiesce in youthful excesses, shifting responsibility to the schools; and the schools retaliate by censuring the parents for dereliction in duty.

The repudiation of authority by their offspring is openly lamented by many parents. Frequently it is conspicuously obvious that the young ones of today do the bossing. We chuckle over “kiddy-carts” left on the sidewalk for unwary pedestrians to stumble over; but our grins are rueful when a juvenile product of the 20th century peremptorily interrupts the conversation, bidding his parents “Shut up!” because the topics discussed do not interest him.

Where Coeducation is Leading

"VXTH’ERE parental supervision is looked on . ’ as an imposition and parental remonstrance unheeded, youth will venture into more unrestrained, more flagrant irregularities. A superintendent of schools not long ago circulated an appeal among parents to rescue high-school boys and girls from the disastrous effects of jazz music, shimmy dances, lovers’ lanes, unchaperoned joy rides, cigarettes and immodest dress, describing it as a “serious situation” and an “‘alarming state of affairs”. He opined that boys and girls are being perverted by the popular styles of dance, which are deliberately calculated to inflame the sex-passion.

A matronly Y. W. C. A. lecturer deplores the influence of modern jazz-dancing, suggestive motion . pictures, unseemly apparel, sexificd novels, bootlegging, and an unedifying example of parents at home, which are “making immorality popular”. Her strictures are in accord with others. The almost universal practice of “petting”, which is the new-fangled name for hugging and kissing, excites intermittent wails of protest from elders; but the “sugar mammas” retort that their- “cuddle puppies” will not take them out for a good time unless they submit to it; and the parents frequently acquiesce.

Not so long ago it was not customary for well-bred men to smoke in a lady’s company except with her express permission. A caller with liquor-laden breath was apt to be coolly received. But customs have changed. Girls now burn incense to the nicotian goddess; and “hip liquor” is so common at school dances that the spasmodic exhibitions of reformatory zeal on the part of civil and school authorities fail to bring about any abatement of the evil.

A judge of the superior court inveighs against libertinism in the “Latin quarter” of a college town, where taxis wait outside of male students’ apartments to take home drunken and exhausted girls, wrapped in blankets. A caustic editorial pen exposes almost incredible libertinism in the Boston Back Bay rooming-house district, alleging that co-eds admit nocturnal visitors at all hours of night, disrobe in front of lighted windows, and finish dressing in the presence of interviewing newspaper reporters. 'An Illinois coed was recently suspended for attending classes in her pajamas and bathrobe.

Steeped in Artificial Excitement

r. Philip Yarrow delivers this caustic criticism of present-day “civilization”:

The amusement life of America reveals an age -of general decadence . . . the stage, the moving-picture, the dance, reek with unclean conceptions of sex. Degenerate producers have thrust lustful thoughts into the minds of American youth in a way that never before in the history of our country was there such a wild abandon of uncontrolled impulses as mark the life of this generation. The Japanese declare that the American dance is destroying their country. It is certainly undermining the very foundations of American civilization. .

Luther Burbank, the “plant wizard”, apprehends that the rising generation is steeping itself in artificial excitement until the realities of life have grown flat and insipid to the youthful .palate. It feels too much and thinks too little, placing an utter reliance on the external world for its satisfactions, instead of evolving the same from its inner consciousness. lie gravely doubts if this hedonistic growing generation will prove competent to manage the complicated machinery of modern civilization when its turn comes.

Youth Becoming Cynical and Godless

INDEED, a most significant transformation is apparent in the young, especially in their attitude toward their elders. In bygone days, youth accepted its subordinate status as a species of honorable apprenticeship to maturity. It admired and copied grown people, solicitous to learn from them the secrets of maturity. Now youth is self-sufficient, obsessed with the vainglorious fantasy that itself is the finished product, the perfect flower of growth; that senility encroaches where adolescence fades. Its aim is at crystallization into a perennial state; its ideal is “incarnate youth”; its watchword, “Youth must be served I” Disparaging elderly counsel, the tone of modern youth is cynical, materialistic, anarchistic.

An illustration is supplied in a minatory editorial which appeared in a university paper, where the city police are excoriated for arresting a disorderly student. Commenting on this, a local pastor properly deplores the “superficial cancer of atheism and anarchy” which infests the student body, focussing in a “scornful'denial of God”. He apprehends that this editorial may incite some student with a “grandiose complex of mock heroics” into assassinating a policeman.

A widespread conviction exists that our standardized system of education, is insinuating agnosticism into the plastic mind of youth in the form of materialistic philosophy. The headway made by irreligion moves one writer to inquire whether woman is not “losing God at college”, answering his own query in the affirmative, adverting to the pious woman of yesterday whose sedative influence tempered the asperities of life, counteracting male harshness and intolerance.

But this negative type is being supplanted by the typical “new woman”, whom her less self-assertive sisters admire and pattern after, the champion of the feministic ideal, many of whose erstwhile masculine allies have defected from her of late to openly denounce as a fomenter of social confusion. But more of that anon.

Loss of Parental Control

feminine instinct is to yield a fond -®- compliance to the insistent clamor of her brood, and to deprecate a rigid enforcement of family discipline. In this connection, however, the recollection of maternal kindness renders all criticism perforce apologetic, since the same represents the consummation of tender unselfishness, being itself the eternal confutation of Nietzscheism. Nevertheless, social stability presupposes parental control over juvenile exuberance and a wholesome intimidation of animal impulses. The child must be trained, and the paternal function is to counterbalance maternal indulgence with seasonable severity. But too frequently, nowadays, since feministic ideals are ascendant, the father’s prestige is nullified by the consensus of feminine opinion.

The paterfamiliate, indeed, is in a state of semi-eclipse. Society having relieved him of the office of protector, he retains only the burden of bread-winner and, as such, for the sake of rest and tranquility foregoes his immemorial prerogative of enforcing obedience. So the child is allowed to grow up wilful, headstrong', devoid of deference toward its elders, flattered into insufferable self-esteem by too serious an attention paid to its whims and caprices, unloving.

ungrateful, made morbid and irritable by late hours and a surfeit of sweets, and his inventive faculty blunted by a glut of expensive readymade playthings.

* Families in very moderate circumstances feel . bound to provide their children with high-priced toys beyond their means; and in some families a regular percentage of the weekly paycheck is set aside to provide movie-tickets and other amusements for the children; and the latter are taught to expect this as their inherent right—not as a concession due to parental love and kindness.

Juvenile Conceit Gone to Seed

HILDREN are encouraged to develop an un-t natural precocity at the expense of their \ elders’ rights and peace of mind, wrhereby they ■ gain a distorted perspective. An eminent scientist remarks that children nowadays have emphatically adopted the view that they are the most important things in the universe. They ? disclaim any debt of gratitude to their parents, \ considering that parents exist for the sole pur? pose of affording their offspring the best pos-( sible opportunities in life; and they are right-• eously resentful, therefore, when parents seem remiss, but accept all their favors as a matter of course.

; It is natural for children to have this point < of view in default of proper instructions, but it Vis a perniciously egotistic viewpoint calculated to estrange masculine good-will; for it is in. evitable that children who are systematically ! encouraged to flout their natural protectors and providers will be rated nuisances.

Already there is apparent the beginning of a revulsion of sentiment on the male’s part toward immaturity, whose sanctity, no longer safeguarded by innocence of mind, there is an ominous disposition among profligate men to ignore. This is a latter-day evil; for even debauchery in earlier generations respected immaturity. But children today are too wise, their countenances often registering the hard, selfish calculation of grown people. Morbid children are now common, and child suicides not rare. Immorality among children is no longer restricted to the “rabbit warrens” of packed tenement-houses.

In the indictment, the schools have achieved practical unanimity in “passing the buck” to the parents; but it is noticeable, on the other hand, that previously docile, affectionate children metamorphose into “smart Alecs” after only a few weeks in present-day school.

Teachers as Guilty as Parents

F COURSE, the infectious example of schoolmates is in part responsible for the child’s perversion, but a lurking suspicion remains that some teachers, solicitous to retain their jobs, cultivate popularity by catering both to the pupils’ self-complacency and to parental partiality. Unremittingly the young one is petted, coddled, and cajoled into inflation of the ego. Our modern pedagogic science abjures coercion and the drudgery of lessons learned by rote.

Ignoring the axiom that what is acquired by effort is remembered longest, and that the mental discipline involved is invaluable, the new theory is to impart knowledge through suggestion, using pictorial means whenever possible, so as to inflict as little tedium on the pupil as possible; all of which is contrary to Nature’s method, who inculcates her lessons with a cuff or a kick, to make them abide in the memory I The Indian, training his boy for the hunt, made him bite his own finger-nails hard at the first symptom of “deer fever”.

But a mawkish sentimentality now pronounces the birch to be barbarous anachronism. So the child is spoiled for want of adequate correction, and will have to face, all unprepared, eventually the grim realities of life’s stem battle. Such a pampering of the child bespeaks indolence on the part of its instructors rather than kindness, and is really injustice, since a vitally essential part of juvenile education, discipline, is neglected. The child’s wilfulness receives additional encouragement from a standardized system of material philosophy which assumes scientific hypotheses to be incontrovertible truths, and which insinuates into the unreflective youthful mind the suspicion that religion should be relegated to the plane of archaic superstition.

Mental Changes in the Sexes

HE proponents of coeducation are wont to catalogue as admirable those distinguishing traits of freedom, boldness, self-reliance, absence of coquetry and coyness, wherein the American damsel evinces superiority over her European counterpart. They forget that our traditions of chivalry guaranteed those advantages as remotely as the times of Fenimore Cooper.

They are unobservant that boyish frankness not infrequently euphemizes effrontery; selfconfidence, encroachment on the rights of others; disdain for squeamishness, shocking indecorum. By slow degrees our modern coeducational sytem has propagated flagrant abuses derogatory to social hygiene. The unsuperintended relationships of youths and maidens have instilled a sense of mutual disillusionment prejudicial to sex propinquity.

Historical precedents are not lacking where the acquirement of feminine hardness has reacted in producing male effeminacy; women attaining masculinity at the expense of the weaker members of the opposite sex. Sex characteristics are rapidly becoming transposed; the girls ■ turning into hoydens and boys into “cakeeaters”.

The dean of a famous university evoked a howl of protest and made himself extremely unpopular by berating the college men of today for eschewing study and athletics for the softer interests of the parlor and dancing-floor. The students complained that his published speech forced them to cut short their vacations; for they were literally “razzed out of town” by the homefolks.

Changes in the Feminine Form

THE participation of girls in athletics has not proven an unalloyed advantage, as commonly believed Athletic instructors of many years’ experience testify to the statistical fact that during the past three decades young women have been acquiring male attributes, both in physique and in physiognomy. The figure of the average girl is now more angular; she has gained in average stature and lengthened her stride; her shoulders have broadened; her chest has flattened; her hips have narrowed; while her nose, mouth and chin have become more accentuated to correspond. Only the brows and forehead persist as distinctively feminine.

If this metamorphosis renders womanhood more fit for entrance into the industrial arena, it is nevertheless undeniable that it argues a diminution of those anabolic qualifications in-dispensible to perpetuation of the species,’ But with all her external encroachment on male lines, the katabolic modern “flapper” manifests as tenacious a sex interest as her predecessor and is vastly less diffident in avowing it. ■

Certain Chicago co-eds are said to have found books on sex problems so enthralling that the college librarians have had to resort to police intervention to recover missing volumes on that subject. Moreover, the emancipated flapper is franker in pursuing her predominant interest than her predecessors were, deliberately translating liberty into license.

The modem girl athlete is now the model for all femininedom. Perennial girlishness is the goal, so it is incumbent on all women to artificially “reduce” the natural curves of maturity, with their emphasis on the bust and hips, and to prolong adolescent attenuation into middle life. Embonpoint is a bugbear to be averted at all costs, and emaciation is the criterion of loveliness. Hence naturally plump women make caricatures of themselves and sap their nervous vitality through ordeals of reducing and dieting, while gin and cigarettes are not disdained as welcome coadjutors.

The “half-skeletonized figure of the fashion plate”, as one critic observes, “with only a few ounces of dress goods between her and the outer world,” with her “muscle-bound torso and stultified glands and starved nerves . . . subnormal in vitality, over-febrile in activity”, is inadequately equipped to perform the function of maternity. She has not stored away reserves of vitality against the crucial periods of her life, and in consequence defective offspring enter the world.

But fashion still eclipses duty in woman’s estimation. Perpetual girlishness is the style, even for gray hairs, and not merely in physical appearance but in behavior. Having won male concurrence to sex equality, and now fearfully conscious of her own decreasing sex charm, woman is striving by an affectation of immaturity to rehabilitate herself in his esteem.

The Error of Teaching Sex Hygiene ■ ‘Rd’AN’S devotion for his mate really em-■b*-**- phasizes the cradle more and courtship less than women in general believe. Modern theo-rizers have erroneously taught that man’s attachment for his children is by nature incidental, and that women during long ages have been the means of systematically educating him away from original indifference to his progeny. And now, intrigued by their passion for novelty, many women have enthusiastically embraced sex hygiene as well'as the abstruse “wisdom” of psychoanalysis, as the latest fad in education, and are prompt to endorse such philosophy to school children.

The advocates of sex hygiene have claimed for it a clarification of morals, arguing that it is better for the child to imbibe sex knowledge from legitimate instructors instead of from depraved associates. But the sequel has demonstrated the contrary, that premature awakening of sex curiosity stimulates pruriency. It is probable that modern precocity along this line has contributed much toward impairing those traditional standards of modesty which have long been the blessed heritage of Christian culture, which sanctified home life, guaranteed its purity, inculcated mutual respect between its members and protected childhood’s innocence.

The latter-day virgin cheapens herself by listening without a blush to risque anecdotes related by male companions. Her academic knowledge of sex laws cannot suffice for her defense as aloofness and prudery did for her grandmother in her day. It fails signally to apprise her of the grave risks she incurs in accepting chance escorts or the courtesy of automobile rides from strangers. The closed cars with darkened lights, commonly parked on unfrequented side-streets in any modern city, often conceal young girls in their teens.

A kindly woman, residing in a sparsely settled Suburb contiguous to Chicago, a favorite rendezvous for “petting parties”, repeatedly braved the resentment of profligate men by interposing to rescue young girls whose screams attracted her attention. Finally she was found shot to death on her own front porch.

A Vice-Infiltrated World

SEGREGATED vice can have no apologists.

This ancient evil, this grisly asylum where the weakest victims of social injustice sought refuge to hide the horror of their degradation from public view, has perpetuated racial perils from venereal contamination, threatening at historic intervals to engulf whole nations in a morass of physical and moral ruin. Nevertheless the red-light districts have temporarily served in a measure to shield decent womanhood from male depravity. “On the line” some inveterate “rounders” and young men “sowing wild oats” have learned from the spectacle of debauchery in its most hideous aspects to honor normal womanhood. But this is not always the case.

Feminine agitation was chiefly instrumental in abolishing professional prostitution; yet the intended reform has simply driven the habitues into other fields without changing their propensities, scattering them through society to sow contamination broadcast.

Contact with decency has failed to reclaim the fallen woman. Instead she has set an infectious example to respectability on whom she imposes her own base standards of conduct, which combine brazen impudence with the open flaunting of sex, condoning gambling, drinking, cigarettes, cuddling, and painted faces.

Medical practitioners announce a decided moral slackening on the part of young women, basing their opinion on the fact that there is now a larger number of women patients being treated for social diseases than men patients. They assert that young men are being deterred from marriage by the loose living of many young married women of their acquaintance and the consequent heritage of poisoned blood which must certainly be passed on their offspring.

Growth of Cosmetic Industry

IT IS not a flattering reminder to feminine approbativeness that those artificial adjuncts to beauty, now stamped with propriety by current opinion, were not long since relegated to the theater “green room” and the house of ill fame, or at the most resorted to covertly and with diffidence as a boudoir mystery.

Today, who of Victorian antecedents has not been mildly scandalized by the spectacle of ladies unabashed, on street cars or sometimes street corners, openly “enhancing” their natural charms with lip-stick and powder-puff? The sums spent for cosmetics and toilet accessories in our country during the past year reached the staggering total of $750,000,000—almost rivalling pre-Volsteadian barroom receipts!

We may surmise that the business is profit-, able, when chemists of reputation, undiscomfited by the prevalence of cutaneous diseases, find it worth while to go on record and solemnly absolve cosmetics and cigarettes from blame

for present-day blotches and sallow complexions! Ah, no! these foibles are beneficial (?), or at least innocuous—“if women would only abstain from gin-drinking and irregul ar habits!”

However, the cosmetic industry, interallied as it is with innumerable tonsorial and beauty parlors, and cooperating with manicurists, masseurs, and beauty surgeons, is an established interest to be protected. Surely never since prehistoric belles began piercing their nose cartileges to insert rings of bronze has pulchritude been so systematically made to order as in these times, when the saying is abroad that “Old age is no longer respectable”! .

Why, indeed, should nature’s reminders be suffered to reproach youthful gayety when any faded siren, past her prime, can have crow’s-feet erased, wrinkles ironed out, and a schoolgirl’s complexion coaxed back at the cost of a trifling- discomfort plus sundry dollars? What grotesque paradoxes our age affords, where - tottering infirmity apes the sprightliness and ’' indiscretions of juvenility, and little girls are ' flirtatious and blase ! The peculiar readiness of sober science now to pronounce folly as meritorious would be inexplicable in other than a decadescent, commercialized age such as ours.

Wig-Makers Anticipate Bald Women

THE dress and deportment of latter-day women betrays in its audacity, its accentuation of sex, and its violations of Christian requirements of modesty, a reversion to pagan standards. Scanty, clinging gowns which disclose every line of the figure are more suggestive than unconscious nudity.

Woman’s long hair was her glory, and she has parted with it. The excuse that bobbing and shingling strengthen and thicken a head of hair, besides obviating a tedious labor in washing and combing and elaborate coiffeurs, is pronounced fallacy by tonsorial experts. They point out that the practice exposes to infection a paid of the tender feminine scalp and neck which nature intended should be protected by the hair; and sometimes serious skin-poisoning results from fur dyes. Rashes and other cutaneous troubles, they aver, frequently follow shingling.

It is reported that London wig-makers, eon' fident that the nuisance of frequent hair trimmings and expensive marcel waves will ultimately lead to women’s shaving their heads, are getting ready for an expected boom in their trade. Polyandrous Lhassa in that event may still claim to have followed Paris; for the Lamaite nuns there have shaved their heads and worn red-dyed wigs of wool for ages.

Ominous Increase of Divorces . . ri'

ARBITRARY fashion exacts universal conformity, in greater or less degree, from all femininedom. Nevertheless, its reconstruing of standards of propriety may be emblematic, epicyclical to that wider discontent which centers in the divorce court Communities have always instinctively recognized in hymeneal instability a foe to social cohesiveness. In retrospect, whatever era has manifested apathy toward those disjunctive elements in matrimony which predispose to national sterility, has labeled itself an era of portending national decrepitude. It was so with Judea, with Rome; and all the pomp and glitter of our material prosperity does not gainsay the likelihood of its proving so with us.

Neither is the abrogation of conjugal continuity endemic; for the evil is virulent in other lands. But in America, where feministic ideals obtained an earlier foothold, divorce has spread like a noxious weed during the past twenty years. Since the armistice it has increased thirty-one percent. In Wisconsin the proportion of divorce to marriage during the past year is one in seven, the records of that state showing a steadily increasing ratio between divorce and marriage during thirty years. Wisconsin’s record tallies closely with the divorce situation throughout the country.

A popular conception is that “it is a man every time” that is to blame; and instances are usually cited of men who, tiring of the wife when she is old, seek freedom to marry a younger one. But the fact is that about two-thirds of all suits in the divorce courts today are instituted by women; and of the remainder one-fourth is sought by husbands on the ground of “cruelty” inflicted on them by their spouses. “Treat ’em rough” seems to be the motto of the modern “cave woman”, substantiating the theory of academicians that woman is rapidly abnegating her immemorial role of “the gentler sex”.

The dissolution of life-long partnerships by aged couples excites regret; but the popular drift toward “trial marriages”, evinced in nuptial severance after one year’s experiment, . arouses consternation. Startling disclosures are made by a metropolitan district attorney concerning the abuses in the marriage-license bureau where the brief wedlock of minors is procured by parents falsifying the parties’ ages, bo that subsequently the Supreme Court can be compelled to annul the arrangement if it prove unsatisfactory. Minor daughters are thus virtually sold into matrimonial bondage, to be abandoned with impunity when tired of. This is indeed a reversion to heathen customs, a renouncement of American ideals.

Embers of Hearthstone Expiring

THE divorce court represents a complex of discordancies. The tiny, cheerless flat, with folding-bed set in an alcove, unimpervious to sounds, with meals purchased ready-cooked at the delicatessen, has been blamed. Husbands complain of being treated like trespassers in their own homes. Utter callousness to the proprieties by married women in good circumstances, who romp around with “boy friends” of inferior calibre at “hubby’s” expense, is cited. Some women tickle their own vanity by seeking “mental slaves”. Infidelity of husbands is the commonest ostensible excuse of restless wives, but this is quite often a disguise for fickle fancy or for the maladjustment of conflicting egoes.

A woman physician bluntly assigns “physical incompatibility” as the basic cause for presentday divorces. Out of an extensive experience in divorce cases, Judge Hoffman pronounces ninety percent of them due to sex degeneration. That marriage has come to be regarded more as an episode than a sacrament perhaps explains sufficiently the expiring embers of the hearthstone—one of the saddest symptoms of our social malady!

Yet, with all her expanded opportunities for financial independence, opportunities which have upset masculine dominance, the innate predilection of average femininity is to continue on as a “parasite on the male”, rather than to be self-supporting. Herein fairness and consistency are ignored; for, her vanity assuaged by the concession of equal rights, she clings without compunction to her “meal ticket”, meanwhile shirking her share of connubial obligations.

A deputation of British women not long ago petitioned the House of Clergy to omit the word “obey” from the marriage rite, and more recent

ly the Episcopal Church in America has been seriously considering that step. The disloyal wife may be a tyrant as well, threatening with litigation and alimony any husbandly non-compliance with her extravagances. The deserted bread-winner, with only lonesomeness for inspiration, must still toil on. '

Society is inherently fasciculate, wherein lies its strength. It becomes vulnerable through the so-called “new individualism” which, essentially unreciprocal, incarnates selfhood on the throne of duty. Our divorce courts are sowing a crop of dragon’s teeth!

A Growing Sex Antagonism

rpiIE modern feminist movement also has been held responsible for the changed attitude toward marriage. For over thirty years a steadily insidious propaganda has been directed to foment mutual hostility between men and women. Suffragette agitators have disparaged men, and have labored incessantly to convince woman of her own innate superiority; and this has frequently precipitated a masculine reaction.

Young women were called the “coming mistresses of civilization”, the redeemers of the world from man’s blundering and mismanagement. Conjugal loyalty was scoffed at; and marriage re-defined as a relation of convenience. The feministic point of view has filtered through and dominat^Ohe thought of society, prejudicing the harmWry and inter-dependability of the intersex life.

Referring to the growing sex antagonism, Herbert George Wells, an erstwhile staunch supporter of “emancipated” womanhood, suspects that, thus far, enfranchisement has served only to promote confusion; that woman has failed to “make good” as a renovator of society, disclosing, in fact, a marked incompetency to fill her new role. Instead of superwomen, cooperating with men in a world the complexity of whose modern problems demand extraordinary, serious self-devotion, modern womanhood has generally displayed frivolous unconcern, has shown an inclination to ignore sex and has set up female imitators of the successful male types, metamorphosing themselves into “a new sex of little, aggressive pseudomen”.

Women often enter public life to play a part, to satisfy their vanity, and to arouse envy among other women, rather than from serious interest in its duties. Their participation in public office is reminiscent of their adaptation of soldiers’ uniforms as patterns for coquettish garments. Wells alludes to a “vast movement toward non-cooperation which will involve the profoundest changes in social life”, remarking that “sex antagonism is a fact of very great and increasing importance in the world”.

Relying on man’s susceptibility to the sex appeal, and on man’s reluctance to fight except with other men, the modern woman while still tenaciously insisting on her own privileges, systematically encroaches on those of men. Her intrusions on male privacy bear the character of jealousy, as if the feminine intention is that there should be no place where men might elude feminine observation. A symptom of the smouldering masculine resentment at this nagging spirit is evident in the organization of “misogynist clubs” by college students. .

Vicious Influence of the “Funnies”

A NOT unimportant factor in promoting sex discord and in perverting moral standards is the widely read comic section of the newspapers. We are so inured to the burlesque nonsense of these as to be rendered obtuse to their real defects, quite generally esteeming the perusal innocent pastime. A legion of pleased “followers” of the various cartoon serials in the dailies chuckle vacuously over the mishaps and escapades of Andy, Mutt, etc., insensible of the oblique morality conveyed therein.

Nor where reprehension is evoked is it likely to be directed to the most truly culpable; for the critic would inhibit those cartoons which are so frankly and paganly unmoral and whose slap-stick episodes are so palpably pasteboard as to be comparatively innocuous, while endorsing the shallow platitudinizing of others whose simulated loftiness really confuses moral issues and misdirects sympathy into improper channels.

Ostensibly the “funnies” are for children; so complaisance is recommended toward childhood’s proclivities for mischief and self-indulgence. Deceit, fibbing, petty thefts, playing mean tricks, outwitting parental authority, intolerance of infirmity, disrespect for law, are all condoned as venial peccadillos. That adult is a paragon of excellence who gratifies to the full the childish appetite for sweets, movie-tickets and high-priced toys; but the dissentient from childhood’s conviction of its own inalienable prerogative to do as it pleases is a subject for contumelious treatment.

In comic fashion paternal prestige is studiously impugned; “young hopeful” discomfits his boastful parent by catching the biggest fish, retrieves his blundering by his own superior astuteness and self-possession, and despises his father for committing in aggravated measure the same fault for which he had just lectured his offspring.

The father’s clumsiness and stupidity, his tame subserviency to his more level-headed “better half”, his blustering show of authority •which his own progeny discreetly smiles at— these are comically but perpetually registered on the mind. The man’s pusillanimity and injustice are made a text for unfavorable comparisons. It is the brave little orphan girl who rescues the drowning boy, while the helpless and distracted tutor stands supinely wringing his hands on the bank, but who subsequently appropriates to himself full credit for the rescue.

In short the comic has supplemented its original function of mirth-provoker by pandering to the dblique moral code of modernism, participating in the deliberate debauching of latter-day ethical standards by commercialized amusement vendors.

Grievous Waste of Wood Pulp

CONSERVATIONISTS, in their solicitude to preserve our vanishing forests, deplore the grievous waste of pulp-wood entailed in the excessive use of paper. Some even recommend a drastic curtailment, suggesting as an initial reform a reduction in the bulk of the Sunday editions, so much of whose contents consist of a wilderness of advertising matter which the average reader lacks temerity or patience to explore.

…