THE AGE OF INNOCENCE

History's well-known prerogative of repeating itself is demonstrated in the researches of Mr. A. B. Hulbert, in the Atlantic Monthly. As the title of the article, "The Habit of Going to the Devil", indicates, this is not the first era in which moralists make a good living by denouncing the trend of the times. Mr. Hulbert lists quotations from American periodicals of about a century ago, all bemoaning the younger, generation, the spread of lawlessness, immorality, irreligion--in fact the conventional topics of the modern reformer. Thus from the annals of 1829 one learns the sad state of affairs: "And what of our youth? Today where one child hails with delight the Sabbath as the day for Bible study, one hundred young immortals are growing up in ignorance and sin." And no less pernicious is the morale of 1843--"It is clear that instead of the unasses of our people improving they are degenerating."

Seldom has the general tendency of mankind to view with alarm been so vividly pointed out. One feels less, doubtful concerning national standards of 1926 when one knows that in 1827 people were writing such things us-- "a glance at our country and its present moral condition fills the mind with alarming apprehension." The jazz age has nothing on the age of crinolines and Jenny Lind. It will cheer the public to be apprised of its ancestors' wickedness, for the immobile faces in the family album become more human when their foibles are proclaimed.