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Show WHITHER THE DRIFT? When the members of the juvenile court voted, at its annual session, to appeal to our legislature for "more stringent delinquency laws, better juvenile juve-nile court laws, more money with which to enforce the laws," they assumed that laws, the enforcement enforce-ment of laws, and the legislature itself, are leading lead-ing influences in forming the character of our children chil-dren and reforming those of them who are already al-ready perverts. In our city jail there are this morning four boys, under twenty years of age, detained for murder mur-der or burglary. These youths, with three other boys, now in the state industrial school for burglary, bur-glary, were arrested last month. But our citizens do not know the full story of the depravity of our young boy3 and girls. The names of at least thirty wayward and vicious youths have been withheld, because they are the sons and daughters of parents moving in good society. These boys and girls were rebuked re-buked by the magistrate and are now out on suspended sus-pended sentences. In a dive which was raided by the police not long ago, five girls, all under sixteen, were arrested. It is a notorious fact that, among a very large proportion of the children of this city immorality of a vicious kind, profanity shocking in its excess and corruption of a pitiable depth are prevalent. In Provo last week two youths were arrested for criminally assaulting a young girl, and in Ogden last Sunday four boys were arrested for drunkenness. drunken-ness. Add to all this, the hidden crimes of the. young, the shocking irreverence of boys and girla towards the' aged, the contempt for parental authority, author-ity, the disrespect for clergymen, for judges and for officers of the law, and you have a state of affairs which is prophetic of ruin and misery. Bad as are the boys, the girls are worse, if those in a position to know are to be trusted. We have heard of one rooming house for men, in this city, where a mother and her two daughters 16 and 18 years .old are nightly visitors. So awful 13 the corruption of young girls that the county commissioners commis-sioners have been compelled to open a Detention Home for corrupt girls, like the Uintah Home for erring boys, to house and detain these delinquent children. A few days ago an officer of the juvenile court frankly admitted that the number of criminals crim-inals among the boys and girls in Our city "is increasing in-creasing at an alarming rate," When asked who i3 to blame for this deplorable corruption of our youth, his answer was: "The fathers and mothers." The press, the pulpit and the public all say "the parents ought to instruct their children in morals and teach them how to behave themselves." In theory this is all very fine, but in practice it is a dismal failure. Experience proves that parents do not, and will not, teach their children piety, religion re-ligion or morals. They will not instruct their offspring. off-spring. Many of them cannot, for they are themselves them-selves spiritually and morally dead. If they are not themselves corrupt, they are ignorant of the moral law, and, moreover, they do not care. A very large percentage of the fathers are indifferent, they do not believe in religion, morality or clean living. Now what are you going to do about it ? You may solve many social problems by. legislation, but the heart of the boy and the heart of the girl can never be reached by legislation. Legislation cannot deal with thoughts, and all moral iniquity begins with thoughts. We have it on the authority of, humanly speaking, the greatest that our race ever begot, on the authority of Jesus Christ, Lord and Master, that: "Out of the heart proceed-evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false testimonies, blasphemies, and all things that defile a man." Now, since the parents will not and the law cannot form the character of a child, what can we do. There is left for us one hope, and one only. The hope of a betterment of our school system. Long ago the Catholic Church abandoned the experiment exper-iment of trusting the moral training of the child to its parents. She made moral and religious instruction in-struction a part of the child's education. She insisted in-sisted upon every pastor of souls assuming the responsibility, re-sponsibility, before God and his own conscience, of teaching every Catholic boy and girl under his pastorate the doctrines of Jesus Christ, their duties to the state, to society, to their neighbors, to their own souls and bodies. And when'the Church was not free to instruct the child in state schools, she opened, at an enormous expense, schools of her own that she might save the child. When M. Paul Bert, the blatant prophet of the secularization of schools in France, said, thirty-three years ago, that : "Secularized schools would softly detach children from religion," he knew what he was talking about. The public schools are gradually detaching the people from the high standards of morality erected by Christianity. If. M. Paul Bert be now living he has only to study the effects, in France and the United States, of an educational system without morality to be thoroughly satisfied that his statement state-ment was Correct. What can be hoped of a country whose children are neglected by their parents, whose boys and girls are brought up in schools without religion and fed from their earliest years on cheap and nasty reading. |