1904] A Call to Young Men 



Far away in the years he is waiting his turn. His body, his 

 brain, his soul, are in your boyish hands. He cannot help 

 himself. 



What will you leave for him? 



Will it be a brain unspoiled by lust or dissipation; a mind 

 trained to think and act; a nervous system true as a dial in its 

 response to the truth about you? Will you, Boy, let him come 

 as a man among men in his time? 



Or will you throw away his inheritance before he has had the 

 chance to touch it? Will you turn over to him a brain distorted, 

 a mind diseased; a will untrained to action; a spinal cord grown 

 through and through with the devil grass we call wild oats? 



Will you let him come, taking your place, gaining through 

 your experience, happy in your friendships, hallowed through 

 your joys, building on them his own? 



Or will you fling it all away, decreeing, wanton-like, that the 

 man you might have been shall never be? 



This is your problem in life the problem vastly more 

 important to you than any or all others. How will you meet it, 

 as a man or as a fool? It is your problem today and every day, 

 and the hour of your decision is the crisis in your destiny! 



Before the National Education Association in ses- Alcohol 

 sion at Oakland, I spoke in the Greek Theater of the a social 

 University of California on " Alcohol and Society," 

 stating reasons why the individual should keep him- 

 self sober, and why society should suppress the dram- 

 shop or saloon in the interest of its own sanitation, a 

 view since taken by the whole nation, although then 

 conceived to belong to a far-off Utopia. As a result of 

 this and similar appeals for temperance, I was men- 

 tioned by a liquor journal as the "most pestilent 

 nuisance in California," while from a leading brewer 

 in the East I received a cordial invitation to spend a 

 week at his home enjoying his golf links ! 



I also took up the subject of " Social Hygiene," General 

 giving a scientific explanation of the nature and s cial 

 effects of vice. This led to my being chosen president 



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