The unemployment due to hard times, a great strike, or to other widely acting causes, seems invariably to lead to an increase of vagrancy, dissipation and crime in the class thus displaced. The panic of 1907 was followed in 1909 by an increase of over thirty-four per cent in the commitments to Elmira Reformatory, most of whose inmates come from New York and other industrial cities.[43] An access of prosperity may be equally demoralizing. Those who have made money rapidly, whether they are actually rich or only relatively so compared with former straits, furnish a large amount of moral degeneracy. Lacking ideals and traditions that would teach them the better uses of their means, they are apt to spend them in display and sensual dissipation, and the most prosperous towns and families are often the least edifying in their behavior. A very thriving city in this neighborhood, one that has grown rich by the sudden growth of a line of manufacture, is credibly described as in a far worse state of morals and culture than before the boom. “Things move so fast that people become confused. There are few standards, each gets what he can.” Our deeper beliefs have for their function a mental adjustment to the ruling conditions of life. Where the conditions are stable we gradually attain modes of thought and action suitable to them, and are enabled to live with some assurance. But if the conditions change rapidly these modes of thought and action are discredited, because they no longer “work,” and, since more suitable modes cannot be achieved in a day, we fall into distraction, infidelity, pessimism, and lax conduct. “Where there is no vision the people perish.” No one doubts that this is a time of discredited beliefs and standards. We have an industrial system which calls for new conceptions of right and wrong and new methods of impressing these upon men. Otherwise we do not see what right and wrong are, and either plunge into dangerous experiments or fall back upon a crude selfishness. A few years ago the officials of one of the great trade-unions, an intelligent body of men, embarked upon a campaign of blowing up with dynamite the buildings of those who opposed their commands. They had, apparently, no clear sense that this was wrong, but had accepted the plausible view that they were engaged in a “war,” and that violent means were justifiable. A thoughtful and dispassionate mind easily sees the fallacy of this, but men in difficult moral situations are seldom thoughtful and dispassionate; they need to have the right defined for them in habits and symbols; and our economic life is filled with men going wrong for lack of such definition. Where there is anarchy in thought there will be anarchy in conduct.