The rude reversal of relationships, when parents depend more upon children as interpreters than children upon parents for guidance; the separation of husband from wife, father from children, for the first time, under the necessity to seek a seasonable job at some lumber-camp, railway section or shipping route; the transplanting of a peasant family from their out-of-door life and work in a southern climate to the indoor life in a crowded city tenement, and work in a sweat-shop or factory; the ignorance of and inability to conform to the difference in laws, customs, climate, clothing, diet, and housing—these and many other experiences combine to make a situation pitifully tragic.[41] The Jews, because of their excellent family life and loyalty to their traditions, probably stand change as well as any people; but they acknowledge a considerable demoralization, and a writer in the Pittsburgh Survey gives, as examples, wife desertion, laxity of religious observance, gambling at the coffee-houses, occasional licentiousness, and contempt for the ideals, customs, and beauties of the traditional family and religious life. One of my Jewish students writes: “I can take at random twenty of my friends, and out of these twenty no more than five, I can say, are really interested in Judaism. Yet all of them are the sons of pious Jewish parents.” The decay of respect and discipline on the part of children is universally complained of, and unites with other demoralizing conditions to explain the prevalence of juvenile crime. The movement from country to town is quite as trying, especially as most of those who go are young men and girls who separate entirely from their family and neighborhood connections, becoming subject to unusual stress and temptation without the usual safeguards of association and public opinion. Lonesomeness drives them into questionable companionship, and organized vice of several kinds exists by exploiting them. It is well known that urban prostitutes are recruited largely from girls who have left country homes to work in the city.[42]