Page:Upbuilders by Lincoln Steffens.djvu/172

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mamma don’t live here, and I stay with my aunt down on - Street, so I been swipin’ things, I have, and I come here to ‘cut it out.’” As the tears flowed more abundantly, he said he was sorry and would never do it again if the Judge would “give him a show,” as he had another boy he named. The Judge took the little fellow back in his chambers; they had a long talk, and the boy, put on probation, reported regularly and well. “He turned out to be a splendid boy,” the Judge says.

But the best example the Judge gives of the difference in results between the old criminal court system of vengeance and fear and the new method of friendship and service, is a story he tells of two brothers. “ Both were wayward,” he says. “The older was brought to the criminal court for some boyish offence in the days before the establishment of the Juvenile Court. He was flung into a filthy jail and herded with men and women, where he heard and saw vile and obscene things. He was dragged into court by an officer and put through the police court mill. He was only a little boy. He had been sinned against long before his birth. Both by heredity and environment he had been driven to lawless- ness. But the State took no account of this. It had its chance to make a good man of him. He