The story of the prodigal son was taken from life itself; it is the moving story of the one greatest affection of the family bond, that for the bone of bone and the flesh of flesh, the child that needs most the tenderness of the parent, the child that has worn out all other patience and lost all other consideration and has only the claim of its deep need to insure its parent's service. =Children's Courts.=--Society has lately become wise and humane enough to establish Children's Courts for Juvenile Delinquents. These, beginning merely in "Separate Hearings" in Boston Courts, and assuming definite and autonomous form in Chicago, have become more widespread and more inclusive in character. Now we are securing, as by a recent State Law in New York, the County Courts for children, in which the limitations of local sentiment and neighborhood reluctance to testify of family conditions are surmounted and yet the near-at-hand interest in the children is preserved. All modern philanthropy tends toward dealing with wayward boys and girls as those who need and should have not punishment but education, necessary but kindly restraint, protection from bad surroundings and training toward self-support. To this we are adding Domestic Relations Courts dealing with juvenile delinquents not, as some one has said, "so as to punish parents for the wrong-doing of their children," but rather as indicating the recognition of the fact that one member of the family cannot be "saved" without an effort to save all the other members, and that in the family relationship there are permanent bonds that courts should recognize and seek to enforce and make more helpful to every individual concerned.