Happy the man who can make himself a boy again! He retains a thousand joys which other adults have irretrievably lost. Such a one is a natural leader and teacher of boys. They delight to make him their hero. His influence with boys is commensurate with his understanding of life in Boyville. You must go to this juvenile city and live there, learn its laws, customs, and manners, and if possible place yourself in a sympathetic attitude of understanding without which you can never hope to be initiated into the mysteries of adolescence. The honor of being admitted to the confidence and fellowship of boys is not permitted to all men--only to those who have retained or who are able to acquire the boy’s viewpoint. “There is a wall around the town of Boyville,” says William Allen White, “which is impenetrable when its gates have once shut upon youth. An adult may peer over the wall and try to ape the games inside, but finds it all a mockery and himself banished among purblind grown-ups. The town of Boyville was old when Nineveh was a hamlet; it is ruled by ancient laws; has its own rules and idols; and only the dim, unreal noises of the adult world about it have changed.” The boy lives in the present, with little thought of the future; he is concerned with today, not the next decade. His mental processes do not prompt him to speculate as to the effect of present acts on future character. He has neither the mental nor moral equipment for such foresight or deduction; it is a task beyond his capabilities. This burden must be shouldered by the parent who should not only do the child’s thinking for him until the latter is able to do it for himself, but should also drill, train, and educate the boy until he is able to make nice distinctions between right and wrong, and should cultivate his will-power until he can school himself into an acceptance of the good as against the bad. Until the child’s mind, will, and moral sense have reached this stage of growth, the parent must substitute his own mind, will, and moral sense. In determining the degree of capability of a child’s offense, we should ask ourselves the question: “What is the developmental stage of his faculties which made the offense possible?” Harsh and stern estimates of childish frailties usually result from the application of the adult viewpoint and the adult standard. The failure to consider the viewpoint and standards of the adolescent causes much injustice to the boy and results in many mistakes in his training. The brightness, joyousness, and optimism of youth suffuses life with an iridescent glow. All the world is bathed in roseate hues when seen through the rose-colored glasses of youth. When we get so old that we delight in sitting by the fire, toasting our slippered feet, and prefer to listen to our arteries harden rather than to hear the noise and laughter of boyhood, we are out of tune with the harmonies of boy-life. CHAPTER VI OBEDIENCE