The school, for instance, must form a whole with the rest of life, using the ideas generated by the latter as the starting-point of its training. The public opinion and traditions of the scholars must be respected and made an ally of discipline. Children’s associations should be fostered and good objects suggested for their activity. In philanthropy it is essential that the unity of the family be regarded and its natural bonds not weakened for the sake of transient benefit to the individual. Children, especially, must be protected from the destructive kindness which inculcates irresponsibility in the parent. In general the heart of reform is in control of the conditions which act upon the family and neighborhood. When the housing, for example, is of such a character as to make a healthy home life impossible, the boys and girls are driven to the streets, the men into saloons, and thus society is diseased at its source. Without healthy play, especially group play, human nature cannot rightly develop, and to preserve this, in the midst of the crowding and aggressive commercialism of our cities, is coming to be seen as a special need of the time. Democracy, it is now held, must recognize as one of its essential functions the provision of ample spaces and apparatus for this purpose, with enough judicious supervision to ensure the ascendency of good play traditions. And with this must go the suppression of child labor and other inhumane conditions. Fruitful attention is being given to boys’ fellowships or “gangs.” It appears—as any one who recalls his own boyhood might have anticipated—that nearly all the juvenile population belong to such fellowships, and put an ardent, though often misdirected, idealism into them. “Almost every boy in the tenement-house quarters of the district,” says Robert A. Woods, speaking of Boston, “is a member of a gang. The boy who does not belong is not only the exception but the very rare exception.”[21] In crowded neighborhoods, where there are no playgrounds and street sports are unlawful, the human nature of these gangs must take a semi-criminal direction; but with better opportunities and guidance it turns quite as naturally to wholesome sport and social service. Accordingly social settlements and similar agencies are converting gangs into clubs, with the best results; and there is also coming to be a regular organization of voluntary clubs in affiliation with the public schools. It is much the same in the country. In every village and township in the land, I suppose, there are one or more groups of predatory boys and hoydenish girls whose mischief is only the result of ill-directed energy. If each of these could receive a little sympathetic attention from kindred but wiser spirits, at least half of the crime and vice of the next generation would almost certainly be done away with. FOOTNOTES: [12] Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 283. [13] Charities and the Commons, Aug. 3, 1907. [14]