Page:Upbuilders by Lincoln Steffens.djvu/227

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place on the bench. He looked over his gang of kids, and then he spoke to those officials, typical American officials.

“I have asked you gentlemen to come here and look at these boys,” he said. “There are also girls in this city who report on Fridays,” he added. The commissioners looked at the boys, and the Judge went on to say that while these children were brought there as delinquents, it was not alone the children who were delin- quent. “Parents, in many cases, and adults who violate the law, and particularly police officials who refuse to enforce the law, they are more re- sponsible than the children,” he said.

He illustrated: “It became the duty of this Court recently to send a young girl to the In- dustrial School. She was not depraved or vicious; she was capable of being a good, pure woman with any kind of favourable environment. But she was subject to temptations. What were these temptations? The wine-rooms; not one, but many. She was induced to enter such places. You knowingly permitted them to run in viola- tion of the law. Yet the child is punished and disgraced. \ou and the dive-keeper, the real culprits, you go scot-free.”

The Judge—from the bench, mind you — said this to those commissioners. Then he