so there is more than ever need to be quick to detect and foil the new public enemies that present themselves.  The public needs a victim to harrow up its feelings.  The injury that is problematic, or general, or that falls in undefined ways upon unknown persons, is resented feebly, or not at all.  The fiend who should rack his victim with torments such as typhoid inflicts would be torn to pieces.  The villain who should taint his enemy’s cup with fever germs would stretch] [Footnote continued from previous page:  hemp.  But think of it!-the corrupt boss who, in order to extort fat contracts for his firm, holds up for a year the building of a filtration plant designed to deliver his city from the typhoid scourge, and thereby dooms twelve hundred of his townspeople to sink to the tomb through the flaming abyss of fever, comes off scatheless.”]

(2) With the gentler conditions of civilized life there is a general tendency toward the relaxing of social restraints.  The harsh penalties of early days would shock us by their cruelty; and early codes are full of prohibitions and injunctions on matters which are now left to the individual conscience.  Needlessly cramping and cruel as these primitive laws often were, they were powerful deterrents, and their lapse has often been followed by greater moral laxity.  The passionate pursuit of liberty, which has been so prominent in modern times, though on the whole of great advantage to man, has not been without its ill effects.

(3) The monotonously specialized and unnatural work, which confines a large proportion of our men, women, and youths today, promotes restlessness and the craving for excitement.  The normal all-round occupations of primitive men tended to work off their energies and satisfy their natural impulses.  But the dulled and tired worker released from eight or ten hours’ drudgery in a factory is apt to be in a psychological state that demands variety, excitement, pleasure at any cost.  It does not pay to repress human nature too much, or to try to make out of a red-blooded young man or woman a mere machine.  Gambling, drunkenness, prostitution, and all sorts of pathological vices flourish largely as a reaction from the dullness and monotony of the day’s work.  We are paying this heavy penalty for our increase of material efficiency at the expense of normal human living.

(4) With the increased possibilities of undetected sin, above mentioned, and the opportunity which criminals now have of forming within a city a little community of their own which permits them fellowship without rebuke for their sins, there have arisen whole classes of vice-caterers.  These men and women make their living by tempting others to sin; the allurements which they set before the young constitute a great check to moral advance, and even threaten continually a serious moral degeneration.  The keepers of gambling houses, saloons, and houses of prostitution, the venders of vile pictures and exciting reading matter, the