A student who had helped conduct a boys’ club in a neglected part of town made this answer to the question, Why should the boys have grown worse without the club? “We merely reply that our experience with boys of this age in the environment these boys are in, near the railroad and near the shops and factories, and near some hell-hole saloons, tells us that the boys, if they had been allowed to develop unguided, would have followed the course of the boys of the generation next above them in age, and formed into a semi-criminal gang, with no use for school or order, and with a community of interest in the lower forms of amusement.” Another student, who had been a school-teacher in a lethargic and depraved rural community, speaks of the surprising effect upon his pupils of hearing “a talented soprano singer.” “You could see their souls, purged of all their hopeless provincial badness, shine in their faces.” Even in our colleges, notwithstanding the social and athletic activities of which we hear so much, there is a good deal of dissipation ascribable to the fact that the need of companionship and self-expression, among boys and girls cut off from former associations, is after all very imperfectly met, and the freshman hungering for these things is apt to find them most accessible in degenerate groups. Any individual is a place where lower and higher tendencies are in conflict, and how the battle goes depends, other things equal, on the vigor and insistence with which the opposing suggestions are presented. If vice is organized, urgent, skilfully advertised, while virtue is not, it is certain that many balanced choices will swing the wrong way. CHAPTER XVII SOME FACTORS IN DEGENERATE PROCESS DISPLACEMENT—ITS DIVERSE EFFECTS—MIGRATION—CHANGES IN THE ECONOMIC SYSTEM—IN BELIEFS AND STANDARDS—DEMORALIZATION OF SAVAGE PEOPLES BY CONTACT WITH CIVILIZATION—STAGNATION—ORGANIZED VICE Probably the phases of degeneration most distinctive of our time are those connected with social change. We live, as we constantly hear, in an epoch of transition, and of the confusion and mental strain that go with such an epoch. Although change may be progressive on the whole, it is apt to break down established social relations and with them the moral order and discipline upon which the individual depends.