very strong among the members, and in absolute loyalty to one another
they stand or fall.

These organizations exist among the girls as well as boys, but differ in
the purpose for which they are formed, the girls organizing more as
adults, while the boys' clubs are overwhelmingly to expend energy,
lawfully or otherwise.

The dangers and opportunities growing out of this strong tendency toward
segregation can not be overestimated. A walk along a city street in the
evening reveals the fact that the nurture of the sidewalk and the ice
cream parlor has largely supplanted the nurture of the home on the
social side. The table with the evening lamp--"the home's
lighthouse"--and the family circle complete about it, are an almost
unknown experience in the life of the average American child. In a
recent convention a speaker, who is in charge of a great penal
institution filled with human derelicts, said he believed it to be as
much a duty of the church to preserve at least one evening a week sacred
to the home, as to designate another for the prayer meeting or preaching
service.

The home ought to be the center of the child's social life. Why can not
the lights and music and companionship there be made as attractive as
the lights of the corner store, or billiard hall, or the sound of the
street piano, which pave the way to the saloon and the dance hall later?
That boys and girls will congregate during this period and the next is a
law unchangeable as the laws of the Medes and Persians. Nurture asks
whether the home does not furnish a better environment during this
energetic, habit forming and irresponsible period than the corner store
or the "gang?" It asks whether the society of those invited within its
doors for a good time, under the sympathetic and watchful eye of the
father and mother, is not apt to be more conducive to true character
building than the society of the chance acquaintance with no credentials
save his skill in story telling and initiation into fascinating
mysteries? It asks still further, in this age of hero worship, whether
the home should not erect the ideals of manhood and womanhood through
example, through books, through honored guests who have achieved true
distinction instead of delegating this privilege to the group around the
bonfire or the man who gathers the admiring circle to listen to the
salacious tale? The home which provides for this social craving within
its sheltering walls, blending the fac