What, socially, adulthood consists in, varies a good deal from civilization to civilization and from age to age. But everywhere, and at all times, it is grounded upon sexual maturity and maintained on personal responsibility for winning food, clothing, and shelter, and defending one’s self against enemies and disease. Among primitive people, adulthood is initiated by puberty and established and confirmed by means of certain cruel and terrifying rites through which boys and girls are inducted into the society of men and women. Of these rites there survives among us today only that form of sadism and _schadenfreude_ known as hazing, practiced by upperclassmen on newcomers and by fraternity brothers on neophytes. In the school tradition these cruelties are meaningless, but in the rites of the primitive they compose a part, perhaps a major part, of all the formal direct “education” the young savage ever gets. They impose bitter fear and exquisite pain which the elders require shall be unflinchingly endured. During three weeks, more or less, primitives torture their young. When they have finished, the young are utterly initiate, finally and completely adults, fully responsible members of their communities. Classical antiquity prolonged and rationalized this initiatory period. Pain and endurance were imposed less directly but, in one way or another, they were exacted. The boys of Sparta were segregated from their women folk in their seventh year and made charges of the state. From their twelfth year to their eighteenth, they were in the constant company of their elders, often their elders’ favorite company. They collaborated in purveying food, in hunting and in worship. In what time remained, they prepared to practise war, the primary vocation of the citizen. At eighteen, war became their exclusive concern. In Athens, as in Sparta, formal schooling began at the age of seven and ended with puberty at about sixteen. Then the boy was presented at the Agora. He associated freely with his contemporaries and elders, he trained at the gymnasium, attended the law courts and the theatre. He was an _ephebus_, and after two years he took the oath of the _ephebus_ and his name was written on the list of free citizens. He had thereby left the jurisdiction of his parents for the jurisdiction of the state. In Rome, a boy entered upon the responsibility of manhood when he doffed the _toga praetexta_ and put on manhood’s dress. This was during puberty, at about the age of fifteen. Before then he had learned at home and in the Forum the arts of war and the law of the Twelve Tables. After Roman life became Hellenized, schools acquired a vogue; but unless a boy was destined for public life, schooling ended at puberty. Otherwise, a boy entered the Rhetoric School and trained for his vocation. Among the Jews, a boy assumed adult responsibility (he still does so, though it is now merely religious) upon entering adolescence. He was then _Bar Mitzvah_.