What then is the remedy for the existing condition of the newspapers? There is no remedy. Humanly speaking, the present newspapers are about as good as they can be. If the newspapers are to be improved, it will come through the education of the people and the organization of political information and intelligence. As Mr. Lippmann well says, “the number of social phenomena which are now recorded is small, the instruments of analysis are very crude, and the concepts often vague and uncriticized.” We must improve our records and that is a serious task. But first of all we must learn to look at political and social life objectively and cease to think of it wholly in moral terms! In that case we shall have less news, but better newspapers. The real reason that the ordinary newspaper accounts of the incidents of ordinary life are so sensational is because we know so little of human life that we are not able to interpret the events of life when we read them. It is safe to say that when anything shocks us, we do not understand it. ROBERT E. PARK CHAPTER V COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION AND JUVENILE DELINQUENCY I. THE “NATURAL DEPRAVITY” OF MANKIND In view of the fact that man is so manifestly—as Aristotle described him—a political animal, predestined to live in association with, and dependence upon, his fellows, it is strange and interesting to discover, as we are compelled to do, now and again, how utterly unfitted by nature man is for life in society. It is true, no doubt, that man is the most gregarious of animals, but it is nevertheless true that the thing of which he still knows the least is the business of carrying on an associated existence. Here, as elsewhere, it is those who have given the subject the closest study—the educator, the criminologist, and the social worker—who are most aware of the incalculable elements in every social situation and feel most keenly their inability to control human behavior. In his recent study, _The Unadjusted Girl_, Dr. W. I. Thomas, referring to this matter, calls attention to the fact that “The whole criminal procedure is based on punishment, and yet we do not even know that punishment deters from crime. Or, rather, we know that it sometimes deters, and sometimes stimulates to further crime, but we do not know the conditions under which it acts in one way or another.”[58]