Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/458

 444 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

are large. I'.vs often pay the fines of those who have been severely mulcted, and even the greediest speculators have shown generous traits in befriending others.

It is especially in the relations between the sexes that the

good results of this feeling of citizenship and mutual respon- sibility come strongly into play. It may be said that girls here are safer than on the streets or under their mothers' con- trol, where they are not kept closely at home. Several cases have occurred where girls with bad records have, on their first

arrival, made overtures to boys of similarly low and weak character. Immediately the better class of girls have seen the situation, and, without suggestion from the management, have taken it upon themselves to make friends of the newcom- ers and to stay by them until the general public opinion of the community had taken strong enough hold to make them self- reliant. I have myself seen the transformation thus wrought ^within a year upon a peculiarly wayward girl of this type, who had been expelled from an institution solely for girls, on account of surreptitious escapades with boys. She is now one of the finest characters in the Republic. Another girl said to a woman visitor : "My ambition is to have the same influ- ence for good over the girls that Jakey (the president) has over the boys."

Here in the Republic there is no glamour of poetry over the opposite sex. The frailties and meannesses of all are too well known. Poetry must be blind to such. The boys, to be sure, are at the "woman-hating" period of life. They either ignore the girls or respect them. Taken altogether, the community seems to contain within itself a sufficient number of individuals of upright life, and enough consciousness of responsibility for others to make the relations between boys and girls more sensi-