Before closing this part of the Report, it is deemed proper, if not indeed a duty, to refer again, and with stronger emphasis, to the evil “associations” of young persons of our city, their immoral combinations, and the evils to which these societies give rise. Lads whose parents are laboring hard all day to procure a scanty support, find themselves without the restraint of domestic authority, and they use their freedom to procure the gratification of wishes which have been formed without domestic discipline or moral restraints. In many of these cases the parents are little better than the children, and the example of intemperance and ill temper at home is easily followed abroad. In some cases the parents, though virtuous, lack the mental ability to correct the evils of bad association in their children, and the foolish son, without any criminal intent or neglect on the part of the parents, becomes a grief to his father and bitterness to her that bore him. There is scarcely to be found a more effective school for vice at first and crime in succession, than is furnished by one of the clubs of lads with which parts of our city are infested,—infested as much now, though not as obtrusively, as when “nights were made hideous” by the uproar of their juvenile members, and the “day deformed” by the inscription of their titles and deeds upon the fences and house-fronts in the vicinity of their operations. He who would alleviate the miseries of prisons by lessening the number of prisoners, may find object of labor among these most injurious societies. He who would stay the progress of vice and crime in that direction, must deal first with those parents whose vices or whose negligence of parental duties supply members for the clubs, and candidates for the penitentiary. Parental indifference, total disregard to all the obligations of domestic life, is the cause of such a deterioration in the young of the city,—the young we mean of both sexes; for neglect at home operates as injuriously upon girls as upon boys; and the evidence of the equality of the evil is as conspicuous in the bad associations of the young female as in her miserable brother, and the result may perhaps be far more lamentable to the former, because of the almost impossibility of reclaiming her. If the clubs and associations absorb the boys and prepare them for a guilty manhood, public “parties,” coarse exhibitions, and service at the drinking saloon, at dancing halls and casinos, qualify the girl for the lowest grade of vice. The two sexes have different paths downward to destruction, but in this world those pathways usually terminate in the prison; and the cells at Moyamensing have more than once, and at one time, contained father, and mother, with their sons and daughters,—terrible illustration of the evils of home vices, and the neglect of parental duties, the forbearance of domestic restraints.