Pioneering, moreover, presupposes unrest, discontent, just as it should. I am not fearful for the youth whose soul is in a state of unrest, the youth who has soaring ideals and knows not whether life is even worth living. If that be his problem it is enough for him to know, paraphrasing the word of the Jewish fathers, that whether or not life is worth living we must live as if it were and we must make life fuller of worth. Are you dissatisfied, are you discontented, so much the better for you. Hearing from the mother of James Russell Lowell of his general discontent with the conditions of society, Emerson wrote to her, “I hope he will never get over it.” Better the nobly discontented than the ignobly content. Did not John Stuart Mill say that pigs are always satisfied and men are always dissatisfied. But let your discontent and dissatisfaction be not with the world but with yourself, knowing that if it be noble it shall lift you up. Grave consequences attend the too definite mapping out of life’s programme. Men’s passion for and faith in the profession of soldiering rest upon youth’s yearning for adventure. And if, perchance, to-day great multitudes of men are yearning to take up arms, it is not because they would destroy an enemy, but because they would obliterate the emptiness of their own lives, because they are in revolt against the absence in normal life to-day of the pioneering opportunity. It is this lack of stimulus or impulse in the direction of pioneering which makes for poor, mean, low substitutes in the realm of adventure. The low gang takes the place of high comradeship, the debasing fling becomes a substitute for ennobling adventure. The passion for glamour and glare, as disclosed in the craze for the motion picture, is only another expression of the thwarted sense of adventure which the soul of youth dare not be denied. Seeing that the gang spirit is nothing more than a crude, imperfect, at worst sinful, expression of youth’s passion for togetherness, what needs to be done is to offer youth an opportunity for the expression of the deep yearning for fraternalism. Do young men imagine that they must have their fling? Is it not because life as lived is often so flat and stale and unprofitable that the fling of the body is substituted for the adventure of the spirit, that, failing to grasp hold of the eternal realities and verities, men set out to magnify the passing and perishable? When everything big is shut out of life it is not to be wondered at that life becomes full of meanness and littleness and unworthiness.