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¶ President Arthur H. Sapp of Rotary International was on hand. He reported on Modern Youth. "Modern youth," said President Sapp, "has neither hope of heaven nor fear of hell. He commits suicide as a part of his college course, and he and his sisters fly across the seas knowing that saltwater is a sure cure for all ills.
"There is a dash and abandon among the youth of our land that is inspiring and terrible to contemplate. . . ."
President Sapp told how Premier Mussolini had lately said to him of the Italians: "'Mr. Sapp, what these people need is discipline.' "
¶ One of the most strenuous delegates was James E. Baum of the American Bankers' Association, whose plan for bands of citizen vigilantes armed with pistols and sawed-off shotguns sounded much like the Ku Klux Klan.
¶ One of the mildest delegates was onetime (1916-21) Secretary of War Newton D. Baker (see POLITICAL NOTES below), who spoke of the U. S. prison population as "just a part of our common citizenship that has been found wanting and taken away." Convicts, he said, are "part of ourselves" and in evolving methods for their rehabilitation "we are dealing with a long procession of men and women who at present are babes in arms; who, as the revolving years come on, are quite certain, under the deadly percentages which the criminologists are beginning to establish ... to lead lives of crime." Mr. Baker's plea was for closer study of criminal psychopathy.
*The Baumes Code, effective last year in New York, copied widely since, imposes life imprisonment upon any thrice-convicted person who is convicted a fourth time, no matter how trivial the fourth offender may seem. Lately, under Michigan's new Baumes Law, a three-time convict was sentenced for _ life when caught with one bottle of bootleg gin.
*Few dog-owners, however, would agree that dog-stealing is a light offense.
†Illinois refused to curb not only pistols but machine guns.