A sweeping social crisis dominates the West today; it has stormed the family and battered its foundations alarmingly, until it has become the talk of the social reformers, for all the divergence of their opinions and theories. Some of them hold that this upheaval in the conduct of youth — and it has reached its most violent pitch in Europe and America — is at bottom a natural development of the way of life followed there, and of the educational outlook they adopted after the First World War, which grants young people absolute freedom as one of their natural rights.

A second group considers this social upheaval the

inevitable result of the world wars, which make the family lose its balance and force it to adapt itself to the prevail-ing circumstances.

And the years do their work: they alter the notion of values in the mentality of peoples, and the new conditions become things taken for granted, for whose sake justifications are invented...

This matter would be of no importance to us if we were out of its reach; but a drenching spray of it strikes our social fabric and leaves ugly stains upon its core, which our tastes reject and recoil from. What, one wonders, is the reason for this? Is there a fundamental difference between us and them in our acceptance of the present state of affairs? Otherwise, why do we see them accepting it contentedly, while we reject it in revolt?..

In my opinion, the difference at bottom goes back to the mean-ing of the word "honor." For them, honor means upright-ness in dealing, truthfulness in speech, and faithfulness in work.

For us it has a different meaning, confined almost entirely to the relation of the one sex to the other. The stricter and more reserved one of our people is, the more society receives him with satisfaction and approval; and any mixing or contact between the sexes is spontaneously ascribed to some want of honor!

This conception, strange as it is, is part of our traditions, rooted deep in our minds across generation after generation, and it is not easy to disown it and turn it upside down. Were we to attempt that, we should expose ourselves to an extremist revolution, dragging us into moral calamities incompatible with the moral ideals we were reared on — ideals which mean everything to us and mean hardly anything to the Westerner..

And whoever claims, at the same time, that we are able to cling to our position and shield our traditions from the social upheavals is mistaken, because evolution is the law of the growing universe, and for any society to stop growing and evolving is the sign of its death and its collapse — and that is not what we want for our country and our society!.. We want for it the life

of dignity, together with the con-scious, guided development this age requires, by which we keep pace with the advanced nations — on condition of avoiding extremism and of exercis-ing deliberation and moderation.

There have seeped in to us, along with the other newfangled customs of the West that have seeped in, all the arts of dancing, swimming, and physical sports, accompanied one and all by the modern educational outlook which recommends the mixing of the sexes, especially at the kindergarten, elementary, and university stages. The secondary stage alone remained in doubt, and it was thought preferable to spare adolescents direct contact at that sensitive period.

It was natural that this change should be accompanied by an alteration in the pattern of living and of dress; whereupon an uproar arose from the rigid reactionaries who cling to an old outlook and see in every departure from it an unpardonable sin!

And the newspapers raced one another to snatch social lapses from their lairs and set them in a coarse frame, aiming thereby — so they claim — at reform and the general good... What escapes these people is that lapses of this kind attend every