The problem of the boy is a great one, and the more we have to do with his life upon the street the greater the task of solution becomes. It is said that two great factors make the sum of human life—heredity and environment. We are told that if you will gather up soil from the arctic regions and carry it on a steamer southward, you will soon see it covered with vegetation. If the soil of the tropics is taken to the frozen regions of Franz Joseph Land, it will become barren. The soil of both regions is full of heredity, but the difference of environment greatly modifies the result. There are in all of us hereditary tendencies to both vice and virtue, and under favorable surroundings, these tendencies will be either dormant or developed. A thief may come from a morally healthy family, a happy prosperous home, but he is an unhealthy exception not the rule. It is the offense of our day that the tendency of life is toward destruction of character. The crowding of population to the cities, is gradually destroying the home feeling. This rapidly increasing rush from the country and small towns to the centres of individual energy, brings a dependent class of boys, and the official reports show a significant increase in the number of juvenile criminals, from small towns, and also that they are much younger than formerly. This does not mean that the energetic young man of the country should stay away from the cities, or should not seek employment or business in a city; it simply means that christian people should take a greater personal interest in trying to make the boy good before he leaves his home, and that the city people should make city life purer. So long as our best reputed citizens, the first men of many of our churches, own the dilapidated tenement houses, receiving from such occupants a rental sufficient to pay taxes, and without caring who occupies the premises or for what purposes, the criminal tendency must increase. For a time charitably-inclined people may check and partially correct an evil, but the tendency will remain, sure to assert itself in one form or another. If the present cheap-John tenements should be wiped out, and it were made possible for the proper classes to secure homes in the country, modest as necessarily they would be, it would go a long way towards correcting one of the greatest evils of the day. “The prison returns of one of our great States show that fifty per cent. of all young criminals come from bad homes, from tenement houses owned by rich men, and only nine per cent. from good homes.” Since the Humane societies are so well organized, and doing such magnificent work, much may be expected for the better in the condition of the houses of the poor. There are many streets in our great cities where people shudder when compelled to walk, on account of their bad reputation.