Most of the charges are acts of malicious mischief or petty thefts. The offenders have got out of parental control or have eluded the supervision of their parents. In some cases the parents are culpably careless or negligent, taking little interest in their children and making their home worse than it need be. They spoil the child without sparing the rod, for the boy is often hammered without mercy when he annoys them. He keeps out of their way and may fall into bad company and bad habits. Most of these boys show evidences of neglect in their appearance; but they are not, though they may become, desperadoes. Others go astray not so much from the culpable neglect of their parents as because, with the best will in the world to guide the boy, the parent is either incompetent to do so from sheer stupidity, or, more frequently, from being too busily engaged in trying to make a livelihood to have the necessary time to give to his care. A smaller number are the children of parents who are quite competent to look after them, but who have failed to keep themselves in sufficiently close touch with them--which is a more difficult thing to do than it seems. At school the boy may be under good guardianship, but he is away from his mother during the greater part of the day, and he may pick up companions who will not exercise the most favourable effect on him. They need not be bad, but they may be bad for him. Out of school hours he seeks for recreation, and in the effort to obtain amusement of a special kind he may take what does not belong to him, and be found out and complained of; or not be found out and continue the practice. It is all very simple and not at all uncommon--except in the result. Honesty has to be learned, and some people never learn it; though they never commit crimes. There is a difference between being honest and being dishonest within the law. There are few women or men who have not at some time or other "dishonestly appropriated property," though they did not express it that way when they abstracted sweets well knowing the penalty if caught. Some boys do not steal sweets, but they steal money to buy sweets; and in the same way others steal money to pay the price of admission to a place of entertainment. Sometimes they break into shops to steal, and they are then young criminals; but this rarely happens when the necessary money can be picked up at home.