Charlotte News
One of the lawyers arguing for the defense in the case of the girl out yonder in San Francisco who killed her mother declared that the chief contributing cause to the girl’s delinquency was that she never had any “moral or religious training.”
There are many Dorthy Ellingtons in America today, many perchance, in North Carolina and not a few in Charlotte, girls who will not likely ever kill their mothers or anybody else, but girls, nevertheless, who are losing their inherent value to society because they have no value to society training, like the girl-murderer of the Pacific Coast.
The attorney, in thus presenting to the jury what he evidently conceived as grounds for its consideration, brings challenge indictment against the modern home and society.
His statement explains much of the crime today. Not only are boys turning criminals in knee pants, but the country is witnessing a sweep of wrong-doing over its girlhood that is appalling and amazing.
We are told that for every boy there is in American college, there is an American boy in prison, and that the delinquency of young girls is approximately as far reaching when we come to study the mere numerics of their stunts.
In the majority of cases, the wrong atmosphere in the days of childhood is not even suggestive of the early domestic environs into which the Puritan fathers pitched their families.
Perhaps, they were too strict and rigid and prudish and all that sort of thing, and it may be well have that we have run out from under some of the weights and impediments with which they chained the feet of their children, but, even so, we are bound to accord them the distinction of having reared their families in the fear of the Lord and the law and to have contributed to American society that slant and bend for the better and for the morality with which our early history is so significantly filled.
In the American home today boys and girls are allowed to do pretty much as they please. Fathers are too busy with their pursuits and mothers with their clubs and leagues and outside engagements to give the children that parental oversight and intense concern that they must have if they are to be reared aright.
The result of this neglect is that the children are growing into manhood and womanhood with their old Adamic tendencies unchecked, with their natural will allowed to run their course and wit their spirits rebellious to any social or moral restraints.
There is not that reverence for sacred and holy things, that fear of doing wrong because of its spiritual consequences of the recognition of the solemn sanctions of the moral law as expressed in the Ten Commandments which send out children from the home to be good, law-abiding citizens.
And fruiting from this sort of a home as it has come to be in America, are the Dorthy Ellingtons among the girls who in their wanton disregard for restraint and moral compulsion, actually run to the grim limit of murdering the mother, and tens of thousands of boys like the two Chicago who, for the sheer joy of the thing, killed a playmate of theirs,--just to get a thrill from the experience of murder.
And here and there and everywhere throughout the land, in the populous centres and in the remote country-side, evidences are multiplying of the increasing madness with which young people are possessed tin their determination to flout the moralities and disregard the virtues and have their own way.
It is “the youth movement” among the sociologists, and it is the some-other-sort-of-a-movement many the psychologists and yet some other among the psychiatrists, but, after all, is only the movement of those who have always been on the broad road that leadeth to destruction, the wild, upheeding, pleasure-loving, lust-following, law-disregarding boys and girls, men and women who are a law unto themselves and are going to express speed toward the gates of hell.
On page 2 of the Concord Daily Tribune, Saturday, April 25, 1925, an editorial from the Charlotte News
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn92073201/1925-04-25/ed-1/seq-2/#words=APRIL+25%2C+1925
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