How will a man’s mind work when he is released from the higher incentives of society, from public ambitions, inspiring literature, the oversight of opinion, the expectation of friends and the control of law? Except in so far as he can carry these with him in his imagination he must fall back upon unschooled impulses, such as those of sex, of appetite for food and drink, of a crude sociability and craving for excitement. We see how this works in frontier towns and in the confused populations of our cities; and any one who leaves the restraints of home to live among strangers is likely to feel a kind of irresponsibility and moral decay setting in. Without the support of a moral order the individual degenerates. The great thing, then, if we aim to combat degeneracy in a large way, is to build up an affirmative, constructive, many-sided community life, that can draw the individual into its own current, and evoke his higher possibilities. Any one who will look about him may see unnumbered examples of the waste of human nature in our disorderly civilization, the gross and futile expense of energies out of which a little leadership and discipline might make the best things of life. We find prosperous country towns, with almost no poverty, where the younger people are given over to sexual and other vices, chiefly because no organizing spirit has provided a higher outlet for their energies. The prevalent feeling, as expressed in a student’s account, is, “Good Lord, I wish we could scare up something to do,” and if the Lord does not answer a prayer of this kind we know who does. In another town where factory girls get high wages, they buy twenty-dollar hats and silk hose, and have a reputation for being “tough.” I knew of two boys, aged about seventeen, who started out with the manly purpose of sampling all the kinds of intoxicating drinks that were sold in town. They were good boys, and this seemed to them a high adventure. Many boys enter houses of prostitution for the first time in a similar spirit.