What has been said about our economic life, our courts, and our churches applies also in our home-life, in education, and in literature. The family altar is almost extinct; children are not properly trained in respect for their elders; and all too generally young girls learn the lessons of extravagance and immodesty in dress. Many of our modern methods of training have so simplified and made easy the lessons to be learned that the boy who goes to school is in danger of receiving little stout mental development. Excessive emphasis on illustrations and pictures has resulted in the "moving-picture mind" that has only a modicum of initiative on its own account. In literature we have stodginess in style and decadence in morals, and _vers libre_, that is to say, no verse at all. In hardly anything does it seem that we have any art, any standards, any _taste_. Any passing fad is sufficient to gain followers and to pose as worthy achievement. I quote from a representative review of a representative novel by one of the most popular writers in America: "The reader first meets X when he is still a youth of twenty-four enjoying a trip around the world. In Y he meets an American miss of fifteen who falls wholly and entirely in love with him, and he, being somewhat in love with the idea of love, imagines himself in love with her and they become engaged. Afterward, in Paris, and a year or so later on the way home across the Atlantic, the author makes known the instability of the hero's character in the grosser forms of love. Nevertheless he marries the child, barely past her middle teens, and forthwith sets out upon a career of escapades and license.... With the coming of the war he becomes first an ambulance driver and then an aviator, and his long-suffering and much-forgiving wife enters a military hospital as a nurse. But the author is discreetly silent as to the extent to which she is impressed by his assurance that he is going to be a good husband." This story was published by one of the oldest, most respectable, and supposedly most conservative firms in the United States.