In order to meet and deal with the problems that have been created by the rapid changes of modern life, new organizations and agencies have sprung into existence. The older social agencies, the church, the school, and the courts, have not always been able to meet the problems which new conditions of life have created. The school, the church, and the courts have come down to us with their aims and methods defined under the influence of an older tradition. New agencies have been necessary to meet the new conditions. Among these new agencies are the juvenile courts, juvenile protective associations, parent-teachers’ associations, Boy Scouts, Young Men’s Christian Associations settlements, boys’ clubs of various sorts, and I presume, playgrounds and playground associations. These agencies have taken over to some extent the work which neither the home, the neighborhood, nor the other older communal institutions were able to carry on adequately. These new institutions, perhaps because they are not to the same extent hampered by our earlier traditions, are frankly experimental and are trying to work out a rational technique for dealing with social problems, based not on sentiment and tradition, but on science. Largely on the basis of the experiments which these new agencies are making, a new social science is coming into existence. Under the impetus which the social agencies have given to social investigation and social research, sociology is ceasing to be a mere philosophy and is assuming more and more the character of an empirical, if not an exact, science. As to the present condition of our science and of the devices that we have invented for controlling conduct and social life, I can only repeat what I said at the very outset of our paper: “The thing of which we still know least is the business of carrying on an associated existence.” V. THE GANG AND THE LOCAL COMMUNITY I have sought, in what has been said, to indicate what seems to me to be the relation of the work of the playground association and other social agencies to the more general problem of community organization and juvenile delinquency. But I have a feeling that this paper lacks a moral, and I know that every paper on a social topic should have a moral. If I were asked to state in a few words what seems to me to be suggested by our discussion so far I should say: 1. That the problem of juvenile delinquency seems to have its sources in conditions over which, with our present knowledge, we have very little control; that the whole matter needs, therefore, a more searching investigation than we have yet been able to give it.