The person who can tell us about the morals of our school children is Ben B. Lindsey, judge of the Juvenile Court of Denver. Lindsey knows, not merely because he has been on the job for twenty-five years, but because he has evolved a technique for getting this particular information. The children come to him literally by thousands—not merely to tell him their troubles, but to ask his advice on every sort of question. Instead of sending delinquent children to jail, Lindsey has fought and exposed the gang politicians, the saloon-keepers, the proprietors of wine-rooms and dives who were preying on the young. At every election he has been fought by these powers, backed by the money of Big Business; he has been supported and elected by the children and their friends. “Our little Ben,” they call him; and “court” is more like a home—or like what a school ought to be.

The first principle upon which Lindsey proceeds is that he never “snitches.” Several times the powers that rule Denver have threatened to send him to jail, and on one occasion they fined him five hundred dollars for contempt of court, because he refused to betray a child’s confidence. As I write, the grand jury is threatening him with imprisonment, because he has made the statement that the abortion rate of Denver is one thousand per year, and he will not tell who the abortionists are, because he has learned their names from women and school girls “in trouble.”

The Denver board of education has adopted a righteous attitude upon this question; any teacher or principal who learns of immorality on the part of any Denver student is required to expel the student and notify the parents; which is an excellent way for the school authorities to keep from knowing uncomfortable facts! Lindsey tells me of a school superintendent who made a statement to reassure the parents: “In more than twenty years’ experience in the Denver schools I have known of but three of our high school girls who were guilty of immorality.” It happened that on that very day four such girls had come to Lindsey’s court to seek his advice! He tells me that he knew of more than three hundred sexual cases involving high school girls in a two-year period of investigation; and two-thirds of these girls came to him of their own free will. More than a thousand of high school age have confessed to him.

And, mind you, these are not servant girls and shop girls and waitresses, the victims of poverty, but the daughters of Denver’s leading families, copper kings and coal kings and iron kings and gold kings and silver kings, together with the lawyers who protect their property, and the doctors who look after their bodies, and the clergymen who save their souls. A prominent Denver churchman dramatically denounced Lindsey before a public body because of his attitude on the question of censorship; and this churchman’s beloved daughter, a high school student, had confided her troubles to Lindsey, who helped her to be secretly treated for venereal infection! Another minister’s daughter became involved with the son of a high-up school official; both of them were recent high school students, and the affair developed under the steps of a school building while the young couple were on their way from church!

You might hunt the moving pictures through and find no stranger incidents. Here comes a father, one of the great public utility men, who has been fighting Lindsey tooth and nail in politics. Now the man is broken; he has discovered that his beloved daughter is in trouble, and he is going to shoot the youth who seduced her. But Lindsey persuades him to wait, and the man promises to come back next day; he comes, and in Lindsey’s chambers, by a coincidence not of Lindsey’s planning, he meets his own son. The son, thinking the father has been brought there to confront him, breaks down and tells how he, the son, is responsible for the pregnancy of a young girl!

At the railroad station, as Lindsey and I were parting, a costly limousine came rolling up, and three fashionable society beauties alighted, together with an elderly gentleman. They were the sort of people you see pictured in the fashion plates and advertisements of motor cars; Lindsey remarked to me: “One of those three girls came to my court. She was too rich to attend high school, she went to our fanciest and most expensive finishing school for young ladies; and she got into trouble, one night on the way home from the country club. She went away for two months and had her baby, and I saw to its adoption. I wanted the mother to “adopt” it herself, some day after marriage; but her nerve failed her. There are just five people who know—the girl and myself, a doctor and a nurse, and a prominent young business man, who happened to have a wife already. I suppose that if the girl’s father knew, he’d drop dead on the spot.”

Lindsey insists that these conditions are not peculiar to Denver; on the contrary, matters are worse in other big cities. He attributes the evil in part to the prudery of parents; more girls are “ruined” by the attitude of their parents and teachers than by the girls’ own acts. The parents keep the girls ignorant, and drive them to rebellion by their unwillingness to face the facts of life. Lindsey himself tries to tell the parents, but they will not listen; they prefer to “spit on Lindsey’s shoes”—such was a resolution before the Real Estate Exchange in 1914, when the miners’ wives whose children had been burned in the Ludlow massacre were taken by Lindsey to interview President Wilson in Washington. It happens many times that Lindsey gets permission from some girl to tell the girl’s parents; he sends for the parents, and starts to tell them, and there come looks of incredulity and even of rage—he is accusing their precious children, and the parents are up in arms to deny the charge and defend their offspring.

I told you how Lindsey has been barred from speaking in the Denver high schools. All over the country he is invited to speak in other schools—on his last lecture trip he spoke to thirty-five thousand adolescent boys and girls. He talked to them “straight”; but now and then a principal would timidly ask him to avoid “improper” subjects. In one city he was informed that it would be “distasteful to the school board,” who expected to be present, if he were to discuss “love, marriage, or divorce.” He omitted these delicate matters; but after the lecture fifty children, mostly girls, crowded about him, begging him to answer questions. And what were the questions? What did he think about marriage, divorce, love and beauty! Here were these starved little souls pining for real knowledge about the vital things of their lives; and it was “distasteful to the school board” to permit them to learn!

A still more powerful cause is the example which the parents of these children are setting. Many are brought up in luxurious homes, with a multitude of servants; they are used to every gratification, automobiles and chauffeurs and extravagant clothes. They hear the smart talk of the young matrons, they read the literature of the new license, they go to the movies and drink the poisons of Hollywood. Recently Lindsey visited one of the fashionable hotels at Colorado Springs, and there he met a lovely girl from a Denver high school. She made no concealment of the fact that she was enjoying the gaieties of the season with a lover; and when the judge remonstrated, she laughed and pointed out “Mrs. So-and-So,” one of Denver’s leading society matrons, who was there with a prominent business man not her husband. “Their rooms are on the same floor as ours,” said the girl.

“Society” girls, now-a-days, know that their parents are breaking the laws, not merely in business, but in their private lives; they take it for granted that there is wine on every table, and booze in every hip-pocket and vanity bag. Their religion is a fairy tale, and they have nothing with which to replace it. They have learned about birth-control—but not quite thoroughly, it would appear from Lindsey’s experiences! So they have to ascertain the names and addresses of the fashionable abortionists. The leading doctors possess the knowledge, and will give you the “tip”; the only people who do not know are the prosecuting authorities!

In the course of my trip I visited a certain wealthy relative. According to the fashion of the time, this old gentleman chatted about his bootleggers, and told how the cellar of his country home had been broken into, and some tens of thousands of dollars worth of precious old liquors had been stolen. But there was more to replace it—my relative was making mint juleps for the rest of the company while he denounced the Eighteenth Amendment. After he had said his say, and his son had done likewise, and H. L. Mencken had agreed with them, the old gentleman asked me: “Upton, what do you think about it?” My answer was: “I don’t think it’s a Bolshevik plot, but if it were, it wouldn’t be different!” The old gentleman sat up, for he was keen on Bolshevik plots. I explained: “The poor cannot afford much liquor, so they stay sober; the rich can afford all they want, and they get it. If this continues for another ten years, the rich will have got to a condition where they can no longer pull the trigger of a machine gun. So the Bolsheviks will have their way.”