Need we wonder at it? Need we cavil at this lad who clutches at the very last straw in vain—the father’s help and counsel that means so much to the growing boy? Too often relations between father and son are reversed, and the father must depend on the boy for communication with the strange world around him. He is and remains a stranger, never even learning the language; the boy is born to it and to the new ways that prove a stumbling-block to his father. He, the father, is an Italian, a Greek, a refugee Jew—he is “Dutch.” That sums it all up. He is “Dutch” and he is “slow,” and, in the inevitable conflict between the old and the new, the boy escapes to the street and to the gang. Come now with me to the reformatory and look at their records. Three-fourths of the young men who land there are “without moral sense” yet “of average mental capacity,” which is to say that they had the common sense to benefit by their opportunities had we put any in their way; but we did not. See how all but eight or nine in a hundred had bad homes, or homes which, at all events, had no influence for good upon their lives. But in this it is emphatically true that that which is not for is against. Unless the home is a saving influence in the lad’s life, the door has been opened for all that is bad and corrupting. More than ninety per cent. were adrift at the age when character is formed. And only one in a hundred escaped bad company![3] The street has no other kind of company and the street is the alternative of the home. Footnote 3: See Year Book of Elmira Reformatory.