The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 95 pages of information about The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets.

The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 95 pages of information about The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets.

At times every one possessed with a concern for social progress is discouraged by the formless and unsubdued modern city, as he looks upon that complicated life which drives men almost without their own volition, that life of ingenuous enterprises, great ambitions, political jealousies, where men tend to become mere “slaves of possessions.”  Doubtless these striving men are full of weakness and sensitiveness even when they rend each other, and are but caught in the coils of circumstance; nevertheless, a serious attempt to ennoble and enrich the content of city life that it may really fill the ample space their ruthless wills have provided, means that we must call upon energies other than theirs.  When we count over the resources which are at work “to make order out of casualty, beauty out of confusion, justice, kindliness and mercy out of cruelty and inconsiderate pressure,” we find ourselves appealing to the confident spirit of youth.  We know that it is crude and filled with conflicting hopes, some of them unworthy and most of them doomed to disappointment, yet these young people have the advantage of “morning in their hearts”; they have such power of direct action, such ability to stand free from fear, to break through life’s trammelings, that in spite of ourselves we become convinced that

    “They to the disappointed earth shall give
     The lives we meant to live.”

That this solace comes to us only in fugitive moments, and is easily misleading, may be urged as an excuse for our blindness and insensitiveness to the august moral resources which the youth of each city offers to those who are in the midst of the city’s turmoil.  A further excuse is afforded in the fact that the form of the dreams for beauty and righteousness change with each generation and that while it is always difficult for the fathers to understand the sons, at those periods when the demand of the young is one of social reconstruction, the misunderstanding easily grows into bitterness.

The old desire to achieve, to improve the world, seizes the ardent youth to-day with a stern command to bring about juster social conditions.  Youth’s divine impatience with the world’s inheritance of wrong and injustice makes him scornful of “rose water for the plague” prescriptions, and he insists upon something strenuous and vital.

One can find innumerable illustrations of this idealistic impatience with existing conditions among the many Russian subjects found in the foreign quarters of every American city.  The idealism of these young people might be utilized to a modification of our general culture and point of view, somewhat as the influence of the young Germans who came to America in the early fifties, bringing with them the hopes and aspirations embodied in the revolutions of 1848, made a profound impression upon the social and political institutions of America.  Long before they emigrated, thousands of Russian young people had been caught up into the

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The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.