principally the relief which comes from the contemplation of the female form in various stages of undress. One understands these crowds fairly well, but there is an occasional touch of mystery; there, for example, go a couple of women, middleaged, hard-faced,—just what is their concern in this life, one would like to know? The young one understands-but these!

With the departure of the amusement seekers we are left to loiter and to kill time as we may. Individuals once again become perceptible. Groups that are not going anywhere detach themselves. There is one about that window where the latest thing in hats is displayed. One understands the fascination of the hat in the window, and the difficulty of the process of detaching the individual hat and transferring it to the individual head. The process of selecting a hat must be nerve-racking, and alas! is so rarely successful.

One wanders on, leaving the still interested group about the window, and comes upon an instance of life's failure-the woman who sells chewing gum at the corner. I have known her long. A very honest woman she is, with a thoroughly sane dread of city institutions for the care of the poor. In all weathers she stands there offering her ware and gathering the few cents which suffice for her support. Down at the very bottom she is, far below the line which our friends the sociologists trace as representing the minimum of decent living-and yet not an altogether unhappy or cheerless person. She has a proper pride in taking care of herself, and manages to do it, save in rare times of illness. She finds it possible to be thankful to God and man. A humble, decent, cleanly, contented body! Let us buy some gum, loathsome confection though it be, and pass on.

Pass on to be attracted by a quite different phenomenon of the Square life-three small boys, two of whom interestedly watch the efforts of the third to master the science of pipesmoking. No doubt he is already familiar with whatever pale joys the cigarette may yield and is ambitious to pass on to the higher science. It is a laudable ambition, and marks him as one likely to dominate his environment and rise above his class.

It signalizes in him a fine scorn of convention, for the Square affects the cigarette. Joy be with him in his undertaking; it is an adventure, and even if qualms succeed-what of that? It is much to have nobly dared.

From time to time the Square is invaded and appeals are made to our seriousness. The itinerant speaker sets up his box and cries aloud for the attention of the passer-by. Yesterday it was the war orator who appealed to our patriotism or to our charity; today it is more likely to be the socialist who promises us the economic millenium. Sometimes it is the prophet of no-god who wants to relieve us from the incubus of superstition which we are somewhat surprised to learn clings tightly to us and impedes our progress. Inasmuch as it is a warm night and we not occupied, we drift idly from one box to another and listen to a few words of promise from each. But, I confess with shame, that we are not much interested in any of the schemes proposed for our improvement. The fervor of the orators fails to stir us. The faces we turn up are of the most indifferent caste: we wonder why "the guy" should be so excited about what appeals to us so little, and slowly wander on to hear what the next "guy" has to say. I fancy we set small store by our manhood's privilege and wonder why the orators are so anxious to have us use the vote. Those of us who are young have interests which are more important, and those of us who are older are quite cynical of "reform" of all sorts. We have gathered here too often on election nights and cheered the "avalanche" which brought a "reform" party into power, and then found that nothing happened in consequence but a change of officials; so we refuse to be stirred to enthusiasm by soap-box orators. Thus the life of the Square flows on without worrying about the future, lulled by the placidity of the night.

A placid life, not, on the surface, expressive of extremes of any kind, good or bad. But piercing below the surface one becomes conscious of a darker side. There is evil here-evil positive, deliberate, dynamic. Most of the faces one studies as one wanders on are merely empty. They tell of vacant souls, without resources in themselves, who have come out of com

fortless, unattractive abodes to seek something that can pleasurably fill the hours between work and sleep. They would naturally drift into the vaudeville or the movies, save that they cannot afford it. Young they are for the most part, though with a sprinkling of middle-aged folk: young, vacant, with clamorous passions and hungry appetites. Mere boys and girls, many of them, who have just achieved the freedom of the streets. They have no standards, no moral fibre, no ideals of life. Life means to them a day's uninteresting work somewhere and an evening search for amusement-so much excitement as they are able to pay for. If tonight they cannot pay they can at least mix with the crowd in hopes that something interesting may turn up. And around them and among them, finding them easy prey, circle the positive, determined, intelligent powers of evil.

One studies the faces over again, standing here a little out of the stream, watches them as the fierce light of a sign strikes them; they flow by endlessly, in tens, hundreds, thousands. The faces that express positive qualities are mostly expressive of evil. One is impressed by the absence of strong, virile goodness. Evil will easily be master of these vacant souls. And one meditates on the ineffectiveness of goodness. There is goodness here; and there is what goodness ought to seize upon, harmlessness of intention. Goodness ought, one thinks, to seize and mould this plastic material into fixed habits and desires for the good. But goodness lacks power of combination. Above all, it is not contagious. The rills of good do not flow together into a broad stream of good. But the evil here is alert; it forms and reforms in ever shifting combinations. It passes, through deliberate willing, from soul to soul. The personalities that so many of these faces reveal are centres of contagion. Hard, malignant, sensual faces start out in the light. As one sees a rose unfolded on a screen from the just forming bud to the gorgeous blossom, one sees evil here in all its stages, sees the child seeking amusement and excitement pass into the youth who is finding that his amusements are more exciting when spiced with evil; sees the spice of evil grow in quantity till it dominates, and amusement and evil are identical terms.

Then the process is complete and the tempted has become the tempter. Then the Square becomes not the attractive scene of life, movement, gaiety, but the hunting field where predatory vice prowls till it finds its fellow or its victim, and then drifts into the side streets where complacent hotels offer themselves to the business of the gambler, the pander, and the debauchee.

I suppose all cities in all times have had squares which were essentially as this Square is, nay, all places where men have lived. I recall a square in a country village where there were no houses of entertainment of any kind, and where the only light was the light of moon and stars which filtered down through the branches of overhanging maples and flashed in golden pools on the soft turf. Boys and girls met there, not in eager crowds, but in little groups, and their life was the life of Times Square and their thoughts its thoughts. And the things that we pin our faith to evolution, civilization, progress-seem in no degree to alter the human situation. They only succeed in providing a greater abundance for those who wish to be immersed in things which will amuse them. There is an old joke to the effect that Boston isn't a city but a state of mind; and Times Square is a state of mind, the state of mind of immature humanity seeking pleasant sensation and finding that the senses which began with being easily satisfied become a craving appetite demanding ever more pungent food. Immature humanity is what we find here—immature humanity which will never mature: it will grow old and wither and die, but it will not ripen. It will continue passion's slave when the very food of the passions creates only nausea. You can see it here tonight, hungry and unsatisfied; undeveloped, aborted humanity, creeping, diseased and vile, about the fringes of the gay crowd, selling matches or pencils or craving alms. There are moods when these things press upon one, and the lights of the Square burn baleful, and it seems the very mouth of the pit-a pit into whose mouth streams an everflowing river of young life, laughing and unconscious, to be dashed in pieces on the rocks below. Then one loathes these empty faces, these painted men and women,

the cheapness and vulgarity of the offered entertainment, the life that can satisfy itself with such things.

The problem which Times Square sets is the problem which life sets to all societies, the problem of the conservation of the young. The life of the young is predominantly shaped by the influences that are cast about them. Heredity, no doubt, plays its part, giving something of moral stamina to resist the environing influences which press upon life; but heredity is worn out and beaten in the struggle with circumstance. The moral and spiritual atmosphere in which we live, in the end gets the controlling direction of life; hence, the hopelessness of the task of the teacher who struggles to counteract by a few hours work the steady pressure which is exerted by the habitual environment. The life of the young is all unconsciously shaped by ideas, points of view, maxims of life, which are absorbed from its surroundings and which abide for the most part undisturbed under the coating of conventional teaching, educational or religious, which it is compelled to repeat from time to time, but rarely assimilates. When the young act spontaneously, they act in response to the stimuli of habitual environment, not to the faint promptings of educational maxims.

Times Square is the visible symbol of a set of influences which are of tremendous force in shaping the character of the young throughout our country. Times Square is a state of mind, and the name of that state of mind is vulgarity. Vulgarity stares at you from the electric signs which are symbolic, again, of the life they spring from a life hectic and overstrained, in comparison with a wholesome, self-possessed life, as are the lights with the soft, quieting lights of an evening in the country. Vulgarity looks at you out of tawdry ornament, out of painted faces and little whitened noses, echoes through coarse voices in loud laughter. It dances on bill-boards and leers out of windows. And amid it all you are conscious of eager young faces, which tell of tingling nerves and fast beating hearts as they plunge into the vicious whirlpool which to them means life. The vulgarity we encounter here is not the vulgarity of simple and ignorant people, who indeed are only vulgar in