The landlord marries and sets out on an ocean voyage with his bride.  On the same ship the father of the tubercular family, working as stoker or deck hand, reaches the last stages of the disease and in his dying hours is mercifully attended by the bride.  She contracts the disease and later appears weak and fading.  The husband, ascertaining the real nature of her malady, brings her home with the purpose of placing her in the private sanitarium.  There is no room in this institution, but good accommodations are found in the public sanitarium to which she goes and where she finds the children from their tenement.

The facts have now been put in such juxtaposition that the husband has a change of heart.  The patients recover and the landlord endows a great sanitarium for the tuberculous.  One may easily criticize the crudeness of the plot and the improbabilities with which it bristles.  But it sets forth love and death and conversion and an appeal to rescue those who suffer from the great white plague:  and this was sufficient for the crowd, for all are children when beholding the elemental things of life.  At any rate the women who stood at the exits of the theater selling the Christmas stamps of the anti-tuberculosis society will tell you that the purse strings as well as the heart strings of the crowd relaxed to the crude but deep melody of mercy.

The social hunger also, turning its back upon the meager home and heightened by the monotony and semi-independence of early toil, takes to the street.  The quest is quickly commercialized and debauched by the public dance halls which are controlled by the liquor interests.  A recent thorough investigation of 328 of these halls in Chicago showed a nightly attendance of some 86,000 young people, the average age of the boys being sixteen to eighteen years and of the girls fourteen to sixteen years.  Liquor was sold in 240 halls, 190 had saloons opening into them, in 178 immoral dancing went on unhindered.  The worst halls had the least dancing and the longest intermissions.  Everything was conducted so as to increase the sale of liquor, and between the hours of one and three A.M. the toughest element from the saloons, which close at one o’clock, poured into the halls to complete the debauch and to make full use of the special liquor license which is good until the later hour.[5]

The quest of fun and social adventure can be traced also through other commercialized channels, in public poolrooms where minors waste time and money—­gamble, smoke, tell unclean stories and plan mischief; in great amusement parks where the boy and girl on pleasure bent meet as strangers to each other and without social sponsor, where the deluded girl not only accepts but often invites a generosity which will tend to compromise if not break down the morality of both; on excursion boats which, if neglected, tend to become floating palaces of shame; and in many ways that lead from the inadequate home to sorrow and disaster.