Page:Labour and childhood.djvu/101

 Great sociologists joined the teachers who worked and wondered at the adolescent. They had seen the trippers; but they had known some of them in childhood, when they had been promising. Why were they so very disappointing in youth? And why did they lose ambition, hope, energy, power of attention, as they grew older? Charles Booth, in his Life and Labour in London, remarks that many bright boys of thirteen or fourteen who earn four or five shillings per week as milk carriers seem to grow out of all ambition as the years pass, so that at the age of sixteen or seventeen they are content to go on earning what is then a mere pittance—the wage of little boys. Later, as he points out, many of these become casual labourers or drift into the sad army of the unemployed.

What does it mean?—this disappointment of the organism. The question has to be fairly asked at last—and an answer looked for. The restlessness of the child should not end like the restlessness of the young animal—that is to say, in mere lethargy. The movement of life in civilized human beings of normal type and unchecked energy, should swing upward as time goes on into a higher order of activity, into an activity that cannot be followed, measured, and analyzed, not because it is slower, but because it is