AMERICA'S "FLAMING" YOUTH.

Northern Advocate, 26 February 1925, Page 2

AMERICA'S "FLAMING" YOUTH.

PRESSING SOCIAL PROBLEM.

The problnn to which a popular novelist has fttaehed the catch phrase of "Our .Tl.iming Youth" is causing widespread consternation among the magistrates and educational autlioiiWhilc the most divergent views prevail as to its causes, there is no difference of opinion regarding its appalling calendars of New York. Chicago, and other big citics. To quote the words used by Judge Alfred J. Talley in welcoming reeriminal tribunal in the country—the cently a new colleague to the busiest Court of General Sessions in New York—"the United States has in recent years become the most lawless nation on earth," and its adolescent children its greatest criminals. "You will be heartbroken," he remarked, "by discovering that the vast majority of the defendants brought before you are under twenty years of age." According to the testimony of Mr Rowland Sheldon, a well-known social worker, the youth of America have been overcome by a wave of "emotional instability" which is causing them to "run counter to the prescribed conventions of society.''

Everywhere, it is reported by t'lie Jewish Board of Guardians, "magistrates are confronted by the necessity of sending hoys still in their teens to prison for acts almost inconceivable in any but hardened adults, while young fellows in their early twenties are found guilty of the most daring, reckless, and revolting of crimes." Desperate parents are besieging the courts for help in enforcing parental authority against weyward boys w'ho are idle and who flaunt all restraint. Scientists associated with the Municipal Clinic for Defective Children are recommending glandular diagnosis and treatment fpr the youthful criminals. But Judge Talley frankly declares that "neither heredity nor environment" is responsible for the flaming youth problem. "N"e attributes it to the secular schools of America. "We have been so much afraid," he declares, " th-tt one religion would gain nn advantage over another that we have adopted the cowardly course of eliminating all religion from our schools." ' "Our young criminals,"'he adds, "without religious instruction have grown up as pagans."

Other authorities ascribe the cause of the problem to the lack of a proper home life in the great cities of the tional one. They argue that just as a motor-car owner is held responsible for defective brakes, poor lights, or excessively smoking exhausts, so parents should be made "criminaTlv liable for the behaviour of their offspring." No one, they contend, has the right to inflict a destructive adult on the community, and their prediction is that "the problem of America's flaming youth would speedily shrink into normal proportions if parents whose offspring run amok and commit murders were to be fined, placed in gaol, or even threatened with t'he gallows." The suggestion embodied in this prediction is a highly interesting one; but though a thousand points of be- , haviour are now the subject of legislative regulation, it is a suggestion which is obi iouslv destined to remain in the domain of academic discussion. —W. F. Bullock, in the "Daily Mail."