HAVE WE ALREADY FORGOTTEN THE NATURAL LOYALTY OF YOUTH. HOW ARE WE PAYING—OUR DEBT TO THEM?

Honour the dead, care for those who saved the homes: for, as we have here striven to show, never before has youth been in such dire need of sympathy, understanding, and help. Too soon we forget that war blasts humanity, a state of war makes us all brutes, degrades every man, woman, and child, in every part of their nature, for all hours of their lives. Youth, indeed, was rudderless through no fault of its own and, when least prepared, most needing a clear vision, it has been tossed into such a medley of mad notions as never before deluded mankind.

We were, indeed, at the approach of Dawn; new light was breaking over the mists of Victorian morality. To recover the real progress, which has been diverted into a mere riot of attack, we have endeavoured to gather [80]together, examine, and clearly state what the "new" morality really means and leads to, how it has come to be upheld. Without denying in some the honest seeking of truth, we have sought to make clear where the teaching around us to-day is untrue, destructive of reality, and poisonous in its effect.

As now proclaimed, this teaching cannot escape its responsibility for much evil talk, thought, and emotion, for many black deeds. Under its influence, thoughtless humanity is fast coming to believe and say that all love, or even comradeship, between the sexes without immediate physical satisfaction is hypocritical and unreal; that is, cramped by forced self-denial or an evidence of cold blood and incapacity for real love. The young live feverishly by this conviction: they flaunt their passions, their falls and their conquests, before the world. They jest at sin, sneer at restraint, and spare no thought for purity. Kindness, courtesy, thought for others, are cast to the winds. At all costs, they must be themselves, and snatch the hour\'s joy.

Such feverish disorder of emotion—the swooning delirium, sudden fires, and complete abandon of balance—is ............