and enacted to meet the new problems of transportation on the highways. Here again old habits and customs find themselves in conflict with the new standards of conduct set by the laws. Moreover, the automobile has made easier many of the old crimes. The bank robber and the holdup man can more easily escape today, because of the automobile, than ever before. The theft of automobiles is entirely a new crime. The horse thief is passing, but in his place we have the automobile thief.

Furthermore, with the rise of new knowledge concerning the cause of disease we have enacted a whole series of laws called dairy and food laws. One may not sell food products unless they conform to certain standards set by the hygienists and the sanitarians. So intricate is our economic life today that we are dependent, not upon our own chicken yard, herd of swine, and herd of cattle for our meats. When we were we could depend upon our selfish regard for the health of ourselves and our families to see that the food was taken care of properly in accordance with the best knowledge we had. When, however, food products are produced for a market there is every temptation to sell food products which we ourselves do not consume but which may endanger the health or life of others.

The same thing is true with respect to sanitation. In the old English village community, before we knew anything about germs, the house and the stable were under the same roof, and the manure pile was beside the house door. Contaminated water was drunk from the town pump or the individual well, and the results were blamed upon the inscrutable wisdom of God. Today anyone who allows garbage to lie about and become a menace to the health of himself or others is subject to prosecution. Moreover, before we understood how disease is transmitted there were no quarantine regulations. Today even measles and chickenpox are subject to quarantine, to say nothing of diphtheria and scarlet fever. Here again is another source of law-breaking. Ignorance and indifference, the children of unsocialized habits and customs, persist in spite of our efforts to control them in the interests of health.

Another explanation of the persistence of crime, which cannot be demonstrated with present statistical methods, is the theory of "social change" or the "costs of progress." Look at the changes in our modern civilization; the changes in thought and ideals, in standards, conventions, customs, and beliefs which have occurred in the last seventy-five years. An echo of it is to be seen in the fundamentalist-modernist controversy. In most matters we take these changes as a matter of course. It takes a case like the fundamentalist controversy to wake us up to a realization of the enormous changes in thought which have occurred. Not only has there been a revolution industrially, but science and philosophy have brought about a revolution in our thinking. The scientific discoveries of the last seventy-five years have been working themselves out in all the realms of thought and action. The spirit of modern science is to question everything for a deeper understanding. It is a spirit of inquiry into all traditions, customs, sanctions, as well as theories of matter and of mind. As a result, many

of the old sanctions of conduct have either been destroyed or have been questioned, and there has been nothing to take their place. The social atmosphere of the present time, due to changing ideals and changing sanctions of conduct,' explains why we have crime in the midst of our civilization. If old sanctions are destroyed, like the fear of hell, or reverence for custom and tradition, new ones of equal force must take their place, else social control is destroyed or weakened. The hands of the clock do not go backward. There is no use raving over our loss of the old sanctions. What we must do is to meet the situation by setting up new sanctions adapted to changed conditions.

We have not kept pace in our social inventiveness with our material progress. We have not devised new social machinery to meet the problems created by the industrial and social changes which have come about in the last century. Consequently the criminal is always about three jumps ahead of the law, and our methods for the prevention of crime are not up with the conditions making for criminality. Our schools have failed to meet the situation demanded by the changing ideals of youth. Our churches too often have failed to adapt their appeals and their teachings to the new conditions. We social workers are in the same situation in that we have failed to invent devices to take up the slack in our social machinery. Not only have we failed in the machinery of prevention, but we have bungled the job of caring for our criminals whom we have succeeded in catching. We insist on retaining the old penal theory of retribution. Punishment is the idea at the bottom of our legislation and our court procedure. Then we wonder why we do not do a better job in reforming the criminal.

The persistence of crime is a testimony to our ignorance of social causation. How little we know about the interplay of personality and social pleasures. How ignorant we are of the influence of social conditions on personalities incapable of adjustment to the more complex conditions of modern life. How little we know about the processes of developing socialized personalities, and how poor is our knowledge of the technique of adapting social institutions to the production of social personality. Even our educational system has not advanced very far in determining just how to direct the developing personalities of children so ' that they shall fit well into the social conditions of our times. Just how much pressure and what kind of pressure should society place upon the individual in order to make him conform happily and usefully to our new social standards? How far can we go by legislation in producing a change in habit and custom? Just how shall we order the life of our homes so that the boys and girls as they grow up will find satisfaction in adapting their conduct to the standards of life which are held to be socially desirable? How shall we handle the abnormal personality so that he may live a life of happy usefulness in the midst of a civilization which is geared to high-grade individuals? How shall we treat the individual who has violated the social standards which we have set up, so that he will not be confirmed in his attitude of rebellion against society? How shall we train

him while he is under detention so that he does not go back into free society with a grudge, but with a desire to conform to the standards of social life we have set for him? These are some of the questions on which we must have more knowledge before we can hope to succeed in the struggle against crime. On such knowledge must be based our programs of social reform and our penological systems. How little we are willing to spend on experiment and investigation which will throw light upon these problems. We spend money upon the investigation of plant, animal, and human diseases, but how little we spend on understanding the fundamental basis of social conduct. Until we are willing to spend more than we are spending today on experiments and research into the springs of human conduct and methods of social control which promise some greater degree of success in controlling the development of human beings who must perforce live in complicated human relations, we shall continue to have the persistence of crime which is challenging our attention at the present day.

PREVENTIVE WORK WITH MINORS

Robbins Gilman, Head Worker, Northeast Neighborhood House,
Minneapolis

The manifestation of crime, that is the actual condition that society is called on to deal with, deserves the closest kind of study, not only to ascertain the causes and to relieve society as well as the individual of the consequences of crime, but as well to formulate some sort of program for the prevention of crime. A study of the cause presupposes an act precedent. A successful effort to prevent may indeed rob the student of his material, but in this no doubt the student would rejoice, for as between a lack of material on criminology and a crimeless social state there is no choice.

Those of us engaged in the preventive side of this ubiquitous subject are constantly thinking in and dealing with human factors at first hand. I know we all wish we had arrived at more successful means of prevention, but Rome was not made in a day and so we continue to build, here a little and there a little, hoping that our structure will approach our ideal just a little more quickly than it would had it not been for our efforts.

I have been asked to confine my remarks to preventive work with boys, and with boys of the adolescent age. Many organizations are in existence to deal with such boys. They have programs, perfected after much study, designed to meet the tastes and proclivities of the adolescent boy and young man. From my experience in the social settlement I have come to respect these agencies and organizations with what amounts to almost a reverence, and yet I realize that many boys are never reached by them. May this not be explained by the fact that despite the number of such organizations there has been from the start a timid attitude of restriction which is summed up in the slogan of "duplication of

effort"? My observation has been that this fear of going ahead, of doing as much good as possible, has given the organized forces of evil their best opportunity. Now we must not blind ourselves probably we here in this room do not, but others may-to the fact that forces for evil are organized. The forces that play most havoc with our boys have an invisible government and a dual motive— money profit and providing an ever growing supply of fodder, not cannon fodder, but crime fodder. Has it ever occurred to anyone that it might be possible to run a decent pool hall? "If so," the reply may be, "why isn't the pool hall decent?" Because the profit isn't large enough. The pool hall proprietor finds he can't make enough from the tables, so he takes a rake-off from the crap games. If that isn't sufficient he sells "moon," and so on. He adds as many different attractions as possible to appeal to as many different types of patron as possible in order to increase his profits. In order to "get away with" infractions of the law there must be some sort of influence with, or protection received from, the officers of the law or those who can influence those officers. Here is where the domain of organization of the forces for evil enters in. It is entirely outside of the province of this paper to deal with this subject, but a knowledge of the existence of the fact is a part of the A B C equipment of the preventive worker.

The boy presents himself as such. When to the social worker the boy is merely John Brown-a name-he ceases to be a human being; when John, on the other hand, fires the imagination of the social worker to the extent of causing him to think of him as a prospective adult member of society, then John has a present and a future. The social worker then thinks of John's present almost wholly in terms of his future, and plans his course of action accordingly. In other words, one's conception of the boy largely determines one's attitude toward him. This applies both to the boy individually and to boys collectively. In any sane plan of preventive work a foundation stone is faith in the average boy. It is a psychological fact that your mental attitude toward the boy determines your method of handling him and his problems, and he knows it. I recall the case of Harry. He was fourteen years old at the time. The red-letter day in his life was when he broke the eyeglasses of one of the settlement workers who was forcibly ejecting him from the settlement. Harry was boisterous, exceedingly so; one of his chief delights was to open the doors of the various clubrooms when the clubs were in session, emit a terrific yell, and slam the door and run for the stairs. Janitors, club leaders, staff members, and residents were all up in arms against him. The public librarian next door to the settlement had her grievances against him also. As a sort of last resort I was appealed to. The boy fascinated me. I began to befriend him, at least to the extent of showing an interest in him. At first he was skeptical; by degrees he responded to my purely friendly advances. I gave strict instructions to each of the workers to leave all disciplinarian measures in my hands, and to report to me instantly all of his infractions— gross or minor of our regulations. One day the librarian asked me if I could

recommend a boy to collect overdue books in the district. I said, "Harry." She gasped at the thought. At my earnest solicitation she agreed to try him. I asked the privilege of making the preliminary arrangements with him. This was agreed to. I told his father, who knew all I was doing for his son, that I wanted to see Harry in my office. When he entered I asked him if he would like a job after school. His large, bright black eyes snapped as he answered "yes," and when I told him it was at the library, he shook his head and said, "She [meaning the librarian] won't employ me." I answered that she would if I recommended him. I then asked him if I could recommend him, explaining that that meant that he'd make good. He looked at me a second and made this significant reply, "Sure you can recommend me, I'll make good. You're the only one who ever trusted me." Harry made good in that job and in many others. The last time I saw his father, who keeps a pushcart on the Rivington Street side of the University Settlement in New York, he told me the boy was married, had two children, and held a responsible position with the Ansonia Clock Company. How many boys go wrong because no one understands them? Or better yet, how many potentially bad boys go right because someone does understand them? This is an instance of that type of case, where the boy had the facilities of a well-equipped settlement house right at hand, but those facilities were not what would save him or prevent him from going wrong. He needed the personal contact of some one who understood him. I remember how I was all but ridiculed when I announced, at a sort of case conference we were holding on him, that I did not think he was a bad boy. Some one said, "He's the worst boy in the district and is the kind gangsters are made of a regular 'Lefty Lewie.'" I saw nothing bad in him, except an exuberance of Indian yell and cowboy unruliness. The second requisite in dealing with Harry was to place some responsibility on his shoulders. After one understood him it was easy to see that responsibility was indicated as an antidote to his wild proclivities. Harry represents a type of which there are millions in this country. The real question is who is going to care for these millions. But I am only expected here to point a method of prevention.

Harry might just as well have been another type, that which, for instance, needs some activity under direction to absorb in a wholesome way his leisure time-the type that goes wrong because he has no useful occupation in his leisure hours. He might have been a member of a gang that hung out at a poolroom. Let me tell you the story of a poolroom gang. One day one of the settlement members asked me if I knew that a new poolroom had just opened, two blocks from the settlement. I had not heard of it but I knew it would require close watching, so I asked the men workers to join me in a periodic observation of this place. Little by little the old story repeated itself. Some of our good promising settlement boys began to patronize the place until they almost wholly dropped out of the settlement. They were boys over sixteen years of age and had never given us more than the usual amount of concern-pranks outside the