squalid with long-accumulated filth. He wanders about your streets, too low even to seek employment, now snatching from a gutter half-rotten fruit, which the owner flings away. He is ignorant; he has never entered a school house; to him even the alphabet is a mystery. He is young in years, yet old in misery. There is no hope in his face. He herds with others like himself, low, ragged, hungry and idle. If misery loves company he finds that satisfaction. Follow him to his home at night; he herds in a cellar; in the same sty with father, mother, brothers, sisters, and perhaps yet other families of like degree. What served him for dress by day is his only bed by night. Well, this boy steals some trifle, a biscuit, a bit of rope, or a knife from a shop window. He is seized and carried to jail. The day comes for trial. He is marched through the streets in handcuffs, the companion of drunkards and thieves, thus deadening the little self-respect which nature left even in an outcast's bosom. He sits there chained like a beast; a boy in irons! the sport and mockery of men vulgar as the common sewer. His trial comes. Of course he is convicted. The show of his countenance is witness against him. His rags and dirt, his ignorance, his vagrant habits, his idleness, all testify against him. That face so young, and yet so impudent, so sly, so writ all over with embryo villainy, is evidence enough. The jury are soon convinced, for they see his temptations in his look, and surely know that in such a condition men will steal; yes, they themselves would steal. The judge represents the law, and that practically regards it a crime for a boy to be weak and poor. I have been told a story, and I wish it might be falsely told, of a boy, in one of our cities, of sixteen, sent to the house of correction for five years because he stole a bunch of keys, and coming out of jail at twenty-one, unable to write, or read, or calculate, and with no trade but that of picking oakum. Yet he had been five years the child of the State, and in that college for the poor! Who would employ such a youth; with such a reputation; with the smell of the jail in his very breath? Not your shrewd men of business-they know the risk; not your respectable men, members of churches and all that; not they! Why, it would hurt a man's reputation for piety to do good in that way. Besides, the risk is great, and it argues a great deal more Christianity than it is popular to have, for a respectable man to employ such a youth. He is forced back into crime again. I say forced, for honest men will not employ him when the State shoves him out of jail. Soon you will have him in the court again, to be punished more severely. Then he goes to the State prison, and then again, and again, till death mercifully ends his career! The Boy and the Juvenile Court Ben B. Lindsey Judge Lindsey has been doing a great work for wayward boys in Denver because he sympathizes with them-takes their point of view. You must also take a sympathetic attitude in order to speak this declamation effectively. Bring out the dialogue naturally, especially the street dialect of Micky. Boys have feelings. They like to have friends. There isn't much use to try to arouse pride unless there be some one whom they want to please, and, in pleasing, will in turn be pleased. If they have no friends, the first thing to do is to supply the friend, and the pride, in most cases, will come out. If they have the wrong kind of friends, it is a good thing to quietly supply the right kind. Take the case of Micky. Before Micky got in the juvenile court one of the Denver papers had published his picture with a graphic account under the double-leaded headline, "The Worst Kid in Town." Micky had feelings. He made the paper so much trouble that they finally gave him a job. One unlucky day, however, as he himself explains it, he got "canned." After he was placed on probation, he was arrested on a false suspicion, as he stated to me, "simply because the bull had to pinch somebody and he pinched me because he had been reading the Post" (the offending newspaper). The result was a second article entitled, "The Misfortunes of Micky," in which it was announced that he had been sent to the Reform School. Micky was simply the victim of a newspaper exaggeration, as other distinguished people have been before. He came to me in a great state of perturbation the next day, with the offending paper in his hand. He said, "Judge, just look at dat." I read rather surprisedly that I had committed Micky to the Industrial School. "Well," I said, "Micky, this is very distressing." "Yes," he said, "I knowed it was a lie when I seed it, but," he said, the tears welling in his eyes, "dat ain't de worst of it. Deys. done gone and put it on the sporting page, and all my friends will see it." Now, Micky's friends were among the sporting fraternity. If there was a prize-fight on, before Micky got in the juvenile court-and the police would have you believe, even after-Micky was there if he had to go in through the roof. He is now a special probation officer in the juvenile court and very proud of his job. He can "keep tab" on more bad kids than the entire police force. He says himself that he has "done reformed long ago," and I am inclined to credit the statement. The best way to reform a boy waywardly disposed is first to understand him. You have got to get inside of him and see things through his eyes, understand his motives, have sympathy and patience with his faults, just as far as you can, remembering that more can be accomplished through love than by any other method. The Modern Farmer C. W. Burkett THE farmer enters into his own at the very moment he realizes that he ought to be educated; when he uses his powers of thought to till his land and to grow his crops; when he uses his muscles less and his brain more; when he spares his physical body and crowds the tool or machine he has created. The effect of the elimination of hand labor and the use of muscle-saving machinery on the physical and mental man is soon apparent. Before the coming of machinery this was true, as Edward Markham has said: Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox, He stands and leans on his hoe and gazes on the ground; The emptiness of the ages on his face, And on his back the burdens of the world. While now, as he rides and directs every sort of machine that is made to do his will, he fittingly represents his highest and loftiest mission. He stands now as Henry Jerome Stockard sees him: Imperial man's co-worker with the wind And rain and light and heat and cold, and all And render beautiful and glad the world! Foremost among the causes that has occasioned this change in physical and mental man, in adding ease, comfort, and length of life, in making pos |