no longer
vagrants, but wayward daughters brought by their parents to be trained to
obedience and industry. In the same period, during which the city's
population increased more than one-fourth, the increase being very largely
made up of just the material to feed its homelessness, the register of the
boys' lodging-houses showed a reduction from 13,155 to 11,435.

In the introductory chapter I pointed out, as a result of the efforts made
in behalf of the children in the past generation, not only by the
Children's Aid Society, but by many kindred organizations, that the
commitments of girls and women for vagrancy fell off between the years
1860 and 1890 from 5,880 to 1,980, or from 1 in every 138-1/2 persons to 1
in every 780 of a population that had more than doubled in the interval,
while the commitments of petty girl thieves fell between 1865 and 1890
from 1 in 743 to 1 in 7,500. Illustrated by diagram this last statement
looks this way, the year 1869 being substituted as the starting-point; it
had almost exactly the same number of commitments as 1865 (see Chart A).

[Illustration: CHART A.]

The year is at the top, and its record of commitments of petty girl
thieves at the bottom. The tendency is steadily downward, it will be seen,
and downward here is the safe course. The police court arraignments for
what is known as juvenile delinquency, which is, in short, all the
mischief that is not crime under the code, make the following showing,
starting with the year 1875, the upper line representing the boys and the
lower the girls:

[Illustration: CHART B.]

Taking, finally, the commitments of girls under twenty for all causes, in
thirteen years, we have this showing:

[Illustration: CHART C.]

These diagrams would be more satisfactory if they always meant exactly
what they seem to show. The trouble is that they share in the general
inapplicability to the purposes of scientific research of all public
reports in this city (save those of the Health Department, which is
fortunate in possessing a responsible expert statistician in Dr. Roger S.
Tracy) by reason of lack of uniformity or otherwise. When one gets down to
the bottom of a slump like that between the years 1888 and 1889, in the
last diagram, one is as likely to find a negligent police clerk or some
accidental change of classification there as an economic fact. Something
like this last is, I believe, hidden in this particular one. The figures
for