262 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
the young girl of the American family. That is to say, most of our reading submits to a censorship that reduces it to litttrature pour la jcunc fille. This phrase hints at a striking difference between America and continental Europe in dealing with sug- gestion. There they establish hothouses in which the young are carefully shut away till their characters are sufficiently formed. As this seclusion makes it less needful to purge the general social atmosphere, there ensues a frankness of expres- sion and a freedom of deed that is startling to us. Here there is little isolation ; the young are more and more granted the right to go anywhere and everywhere, and in front of them society vigorously plies the broom. Whatever the American girl invades or touches religion, politics, literature, art, science, drama, social intercourse, festivity or sport must be cleansed of evil suggestion, not by a police des moeurs, but by the far more per- vasive censorship of public opinion.
The immediate effect of all this is to lend to society an outer gloss of respectability that makes decency and courtesy, honesty and public spirit, seem far more common than they are. The innocent can, if they will, tread the mazes of our social life as uncontaminated as they would be in convent or boarding school. Whatever miasma may lurk in the back alleys, the highways are kept decent. The eager air that on the Continent nips adolescent virtue outside the hothouse is here tempered to the immature. Of course this keeping up of appearances in order to purify suggestion is a shining mark to the slings of the cynic and the moral prophet. The cynic wants things to seem as they are, the moral reformer wants things to be as they seem ; but both see in the contrast between being and seeming nothing but cowardice, hypocrisy, and moral decadence. Unmindful of the fact that "conventional lies" seem to grow apace with civiliza- tion, the veritists proclaim the dogma that the truth can never injure.
But the guarding of social suggestion is justified of its fruits. Arizona girds at New England for hiding vice behind a lustrous varnish of respectability, and lauds her own frankness in regard
