Seward daily gateway., 1925-02-04
MORAL STANDARDS

A San Francisco girl of sixteen youthful years shot her mother-and showed no remorse. It is a differ ent story from the common run of homicides. Different from the occa- sional homicide whereby child kills
 cne parent to avenge another. It is
 tragic in a multiplicity of ways.
 The normal human mind is stunned
 by tie awfulress of it. X mother
 who wants to keep her girl away from he paths of white light and --azZ. -and worse She rebukes her for her pel sisteTce in breaking down iEe old fashioned barriers. Tho girl, having stalted on the primrose path of ca;i1artc by cutting" scnool and disporting herself with the other girls
 and boys at the beaches, finds it easy
 to take the next step in the company of the cabaret shieks," which is ad-
 diction to the public dance halls Light feet, desire for good time, rebellion against the humdrum of do
 mesticity in her own nome. growing
 conviction that her mothel $ ways are altogether out of date, gravitatiOn in- joyous evening is to become more empty-headed on current bootleg liq- uor-these are few ol the things that were incidental to an unusual
 case.
 The swift moving currents that go downward, however, swept farther in the instance than usual-farther than mere defiance of parental authority or huffy breaking of filial ties. The 16-yearold who thought her mother hopelessly behind the times did not satisfy herself with packing her suit case and leaving home. Instead she wrote climax the most inconceivable in human relations.
 than useless if the public discussion of it had no value. How sharper than a serpent's tooth is to have a thankless child," mourned King Lear
 The sentiment, so graphically ex- pressed by Shakespeare has been echoed by millions of persons. Pos sibly King Lear was not wholly to blame for the upbringing of his daugh-
 ters, nor for their temperaments, but most parents have discovered that the training of children while they are children in the old fashioned virtues antidote for lack of appreciation af
 terward. Somehow ill spite Of the- frequent defense of the modern ideas of liberty and self-expression, it is hard to escape the notion that the old order, as we commonly understand it, made finer contributions to, char acter We are living in an age of jazz and lawlessness. Restraint is but commonly regarded something of which we should be ashamed of, for which We should apologize. The solid virtues are too frequently callously flouted To a notorious degree, par
 ticularly in the larger cities, there has been a breaking down in the moral fibre of youth, the ruling gen. eration of tomorrow.
 The cause? Possibly there is not a cause but a combination of causes And who can say what they are? One student of the tempore ct mores says lit is bOoZe-the failure to make the sale of booze next to impossible, lack of law enforcement, which breeds dis respect for law. Another says it is the law itself which has created new smart set of youthful guzzlers of bootleg whisky. A third planes the war and it's after-affects. upon the sta bility of society. Scores of other contributing causes are assigned, and yet we do not know; nobody knows; because we are in the throes of some kind of psycho-analytica complex which is wordy concealment of the real cause.
 There is no jeremiad. After all current affairs which reflect the weak nesses of society are surface affairs, and do not touch the great heart of the American people, What we see, in one sense is a disease, in another, a symptom. But it serves moral lesson in placing an injunction upon society to maintain the moral stand ards which have made possible the progress of civilizatio