“Go to boys’ club twice a week. Go to shows two or three times a week. Like tragedies. Get up shows ourselves and let fellows from the district in. Went to a show and traveled with the show as far as W----. Stay out all night sometimes. Go off to different cities. Jump freights. Sundays sometimes go off on a fishing trip, or a picnic out in the country. “Plague the ragman; upset his cart; run off with the rags. Ran away with banana team. All work for a spell and then all loaf a while. If one of the gang got hit, stand up for one another. Save up our money and then go off for a good time; go to B---- Saturday afternoons; buy our tickets on that trip.” * * * * * Boys’ gangs, then, as one may readily infer from the foregoing accounts, are of various types. They may be large or small, good or bad, long-lived or evanescent. Yet with all their superficial differences, they are fundamentally alike. Each exists for the sake of a definite set of activities--to play games, to seek adventure, to go swimming, boating, and playing Indians in the woods, to make mischief, to steal, to fight other gangs. Few are the groups which do not, at one time or another, do all these things. Especially noteworthy is the desire of the gang for a local habitation--its own special street corner, its clubroom, its shanty in the woods. All normal gangs, in short, are so much alike that if we discovered any group among the lower animals acting with equal uniformity, we should unhesitatingly ascribe their behavior to instinct. Without doubt, there is a gang-forming instinct set deep in the soul of boyhood. Whoever, therefore, would understand boys, must study their spontaneous organizations. CHAPTER III THE ORGANIZATION OF THE GANG The gang age, as we have seen, is from ten to sixteen. In a few cases, this organized group life begins as young as seven; in a few, also, it lasts up to eighteen or nineteen. Between thirteen and fourteen is the average age; and in a general way, the boy’s social education in the gang takes about five years. Before this period, the little boy plays a good deal by himself, or plays in company with other boys a good deal as if he were playing alone. After it, he cultivates individual friendships, or courts a girl. Nearly always, the gang is a strictly local affair, limited to a certain district or to one or two streets. “We all live on L street,” run the boys’ reports. “We all come from one street and a little street off from it.” “Fellows who lived up that way could be in the crowd.” “Come from down around the wharves.” “If he lived down there, and the fellows knew him, he could get in with them.” The neighborhood spirit is strong in boys; it needs to be regarded in all social work. _Nationality and Social Class_