The boy sees the choice we are making. He sees us building jails when we should have built schools, though the schools are many times cheaper any way one looks at it. If he has heard that I am my brother’s keeper, he must conclude upon the evidence that it means jail-keeper; and, in disgust and derision at our lack of sense, he throws stones and mud. And who shall blame him? Not I. I joined him long ago, only I throw ink; but the idea is the same. The boy has been foully dealt with. And foolishly! Where it would have been—is—so easy to _form_ character, we have been laboring with such infinite toil to _reform_ it. It would have formed itself had we left the boy the home, for that is where character grows. The loss of it thrust a hundred problems upon us of finding props to take its place. All the labor of forty years has been directed to that end. The fresh air holidays are one, and how strong a one, how sadly needed, he may know who hears the child cry out upon his first sight of God’s open fields, “How blue the sky is, and how much there is of it!” Not much in his slum alley! “The fresh air holiday,” said a woman doctor who has labored all her life among the poor in my city, “is a strong plaster for our social ills.” And so it is. Some day, I hope to see the touch from my old home, the neighborly Danish touch, added to it for the good of us all. There they exchange; the boys from the city go out to the country to be made over, and the lads from the farms are taken to town by their teachers to see its wonders and to come nearer to the history of their country that is written there. So they feel more like what they are in fact, neighbors who can pull together all the better because they are no longer strangers. They have been introduced to one another. That idea is worth considering. In our great country, we need to pull together in the days that are coming even more than in the past. There is enough to pull us apart. The boys’ club is another prop. It is the key to the boy that heads off the “gang” and the reformatory that lurks behind it. In the beginning, it grew out of a missionary’s great heart, and wherever there is heart in it one boys’ club is worth a thousand policemen’s clubs in the fight with the slum. The boys were breaking the windows of the mission house in Tompkins’ Square and the police could not drive them off. The missionary’s wife knew a plan, however: she invited them in to have coffee and cakes. That was the gospel in practical form for Tompkins’ Square, and the first boys’ club that grew out of that meeting has to-day an army of members which no building is big enough to house; and Tompkins’ Square, that was once given over to rioting, to “bread or blood” processions, has become orderly and peaceful. The last of the anarchists over there has taken to keeping a beer saloon and accumulating property. We have grafted the boys’ club upon the public school and we never did anything better.