Heedlessness of precedents is not characteristic of youth. Youth is avid for them. If satisfactory ones are not found in the generation that is just ahead, any pleasant thing that happens twice is seized upon and stereotyped. Placed in as free an environment as the modern college campus, young people form rigidly conventional groupings and adopt rigid campus customs. The average college student cannot stand alone; he is a very bond-slave to social precedents; and he is one of the most intolerant critics of those who are more individual than himself. Even at the points where modern youths flout adult conventions, other conventions quickly form. The very follies of youth are conventionalized. Why the hip flask at dancing parties? Why the present wave in the ancient stream of “petting” and “necking”? Why is “jazz” for the time being the only music that is interesting? Why Valentinitis? Doubtless the starting-point of each of them is a particular situation that involves a stimulus or a deficiency, but the rapid spread occurs through imitation and mutual suggestion; and the self-accepted excuse or justification lies, not in the nature and results of the act or the experience, but in the fact that it is the conventional or expected thing. The similarity between the ways of youth and the ways of age is remarkable. Think of the money and the time that adults have spent in the last ten years in order to listen to radio trash. Compare the silly social compulsions of the college campus with the force that compels everybody to stand whenever “The Star-Spangled Banner” is sung or played. Or compare, in point of mental process, young women’s adulation of Valentino with mature men’s adulation of Coolidge. Does any fever of modern youth reach a higher temperature than automobilitis among the parents?