In the past six years juvenile crime has doubled. There seems to be no end of organization whose business it is to reach down into the gutter and pick the delinquent boys and girls from their enmeshments of filth and slime. Childrens’ homes are multiplying, juvenile courts have become a fixed order and institutions are springing up almost every day to remind us of the evil in child-life, the presence of baneful influences to which they are ordinarily subjected and their growing unrestraint.
Students of history tell us that this is no more than we might expect as a part of the backwash of war; that it has always happened that a great war was followed by frequent murders and a veritable cavalcade of every sort of crime and that little children have been caught up in this tidal wave of vitiated morals.
Students of observation tell us an altogether different story. They might simply look around them and tell of a vastly more vital reason for the prevalence of crime and for the delinquency of young boys and girls. If they will observe the number of children who are playing in the streets some Sunday morning when they are going to church, they might find ample reason for the decadent moral state of things in this country. There were half a million less children in Sunday schools last year than the preceding year. Does that indicate anything? Dr. John Roach Stratom told here the other day in the course of one of his addresses at the First Baptist Church that churches are dying in New York at the rate of 10 a year. Does that spell anything? One does not need to be puritanical in view to understand that in such retreatings as these the cause for present-day evil is found. Couple these facts with what common observation tell you that children are being fed on so largely in the moving picture shows and you will have the situation entirely summed up. There is nothing strange or baffling about it. It’s as logical as the full moon.
From the editorial page of The Charlotte News, Sept. 15, 1921
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