parents in youth and has lived in the crowded districts
where the home was congested. He has no adequate playground and he runs
the streets or vacant, waste places. He associates and combines with
others of his kind. He cannot or does not go to school. If he goes to
school, he dreads to go and cannot learn the lessons in the books. He
likes to loaf, just as all children like to play. He is often set to
work. He has no trade and little capacity for skilled work that brings
good wages and steady employment. He works no more than he needs to
work. Every night and all the days that he can get are spent in idleness
on the street with his "gang." He seldom reads books. He lacks the taste
for books, and such teachers as he knew had not the wit to cultivate a
taste for good reading. Such books as he gets only add to his unhealthy
thoughts.

Many writers have classified the crimes that the boy commits. It is
scarcely worth the while. He learns to steal or becomes a burglar
largely for the love of adventure; he robs because it is exciting and
may bring large returns. In his excursions to pilfer property he may
kill, and then for the first time the State discovers that there is
such a boy and sets in action the machinery to take his life. The city
quite probably has given him a casual notice by arresting him a number
of times and sending him to a juvenile prison, but it has rarely
extended a hand to help him. Any man or woman who has fairly normal
faculties, and can reason from cause to effect, knows that the crimes of
children are really the crimes of the State and society which by neglect
and active participation have made him what he is. When it is remembered
that the man is the child grown up, it is equally easy to understand the
adult prisoner.

X

HOMICIDE

Crimes against persons are not always as easy to classify and understand
as crimes against property. These acts are so numerous and come from so
many different emotions and motives, that often the cause is obscure and
the explanation not easy to find. Still here, as everywhere in Nature,
nothing can happen without a cause, and even where limited knowledge
does its best and cannot find causes, our recognition of the connection
between cause and effect and the all-inclusiveness of law can leave no
doubt that complete knowledge would bring complete understanding.

It is always to be borne in mind in considering this class of crimes
that the motive power of lif