Here in these United States in this post-war period, realizing that all is not right with our world, we have found the scapegoat which permits us to go about our business with a free mind. The name on its collar is “The Younger Generation.” The absurdity of believing that the older generation is not responsible for shaping the conditions which have surrounded the younger, and that a world of mature men and women is being set topsy-turvy by young persons but recently emancipated from the nursery, seems to occur to no one. The hen which hatches a duckling from the egg which[Pg 64] some person has set under her unsuspecting wings may well disclaim responsibility for the thoroughly disreputable habits—from the standpoint of a hen—developed by her hatch, but can the older human generation so easily disclaim its responsibility? They may deny it individually and take refuge in the theory that the individual is powerless to counteract the social forces of his time, but this way of escape is as much open to the berated young as to the berating elders. As a matter of fact, whatever we may say of the individual of either generation, I think the responsibility of the older as a whole to the younger as a whole is—to use a liquid measure—just about in the ratio of dad’s quart bottle to son’s half-pint flask. That youth is questioning the validity of our entire system of ethics to an extent that is perturbing to parents and, in a lesser degree, to grandparents may be admitted. But it cannot be so readily argued that the babies born between 1900 and 1910 all received a hypodermic injection of new original sin. The most distinguishing characteristic of modern thought is its use of the genetic method. We explain the present by the light of the past. We are most of us evolutionists, except when it comes to the supposed iniquity of youth. But in fact is there any break? Is not the present attitude of youth toward ethical questions the direct and inevitable outcome of what has been going on in our mental world for not one but many generations? That it is so seems true to the author, who also feels that the salvation for society lies in at least a questioning attitude on the part of the new generation.