ement than an occasional "fanning"
of a policeman's club. And the street has to do for a playground. There is
no other. Central Park is miles away. The small parks that were ordered
for his benefit five years ago exist yet only on paper. Games like
kite-flying and ball-playing, forbidden but not suppressed, as happily
they cannot be, become from harmless play a successful challenge of law
and order, that points the way to later and worse achievements. Every year
the police forbid the building of election bonfires, and threaten
vengeance upon those who disobey the ordinance; and every election night
sees the sky made lurid by them from one end of the town to the other,
with the police powerless to put them out. Year by year the boys grow
bolder in their raids on property when their supply of firewood has given
out, until the destruction wrought at the last election became a matter of
public scandal. Stoops, wagons, and in one place a show-case, containing
property worth many hundreds of dollars, were fed to the flames. It has
happened that an entire frame house has been carried off piecemeal, and
burned up election night. The boys, organized in gangs, with the one
condition of membership that all must "give in wood," store up enormous
piles of fuel for months before, and though the police find and raid a
good many of them, incidentally laying in supplies of kindling-wood for
the winter, the pile grows again in a single night, as the neighborhood
reluctantly contributes its ash-barrels to the cause. The germ of the
gangs that terrorize whole sections of the city at intervals, and feed our
courts and our jails, may without much difficulty be discovered in these
early and rather grotesque struggles of the boys with the police.

Even on the national day of freedom the boy is not left to the enjoyment
of his firecracker without the ineffectual threat of the law. I am not
defending the firecracker, but arraigning the failure of the law to carry
its point and maintain its dignity. It has robbed the poor child of the
street-band, one of his few harmless delights, grudgingly restoring the
hand-organ, but not the monkey that lent it its charm. In the band that,
banished from the street, sneaks into the back-yard, horns and bassoons
hidden under bulging coats, the boy hails no longer the innocent purveyor
of amusement, but an ally in the fight with the common enemy, the
policeman. In the Thanksgiving Day and New Year parades which th