The Scout movement is playing a huge joke on the boy in supplying him, under the guise of fun, play, sport, and adventure with work, study, and developmental activities whose real import is the upbuilding of character, mind, and body; but this ulterior motive is never suspected by the boy until after these results have been accomplished. If the instinctive tendencies to companionship with those of his own age are not normally gratified by membership in a supervised gang they will find expression in his association with an unsupervised gang with the evil results which inevitably flow from such association. The Boy Scout organization is the ideal gang because it satisfies his natural desires for gangdom while it is silently and surely building both body and character. “Of all present-day organizations for the improvement and happiness of normal boyhood,” Dr. G. S. Hall has written, “the institution of the Boy Scouts is built at once on the soundest psychology and the shrewdest insight into boy-nature. The Scout Patrol is simply a boy’s gang, systematized, overseen, affiliated with other like bodies, made efficient and interesting, as boys alone could never make it, and yet everywhere, from top to bottom, essentially a gang. Other organizations have adopted gang features. Others have built themselves around various gang elements. The Boy Scout Patrol alone is the gang. The whole Boy Scout movement is a shrewd and highly successful attempt to take the natural, instinctive, spontaneous boys’ society, to add nothing to what is already there, but deliberately to guide the boy into getting completely just that for which he blindly gropes. The obvious answer to the whole gang problem, therefore, is this: Turn your gang into a Boy Scout Patrol.” A troop of Scouts is only a denatured gang whose activities have been changed from vicious to character-building tendencies, a result which is accomplished by the systematic, helpful, and inspirational guidance of the Scout Master along the lines of the Scout curriculum. The potent influence of activities disguised as play, which produce physical and moral betterment, is nowhere more apparent than in this organization. The things for which the unsupervised gang was blindly seeking have been completely furnished by the supervised Scout Patrol. Judge Edward Porterfield of the Kansas City Juvenile Court paid this tremendous tribute to the influence of the Boy Scouts: “If every boy in the city would join, the gangs would disappear, the juvenile court would soon be a stranger to the youth, and we would rear a generation of men that would not require much police protection. I have never had a boy scout in my court and there are twelve hundred of them in Kansas City.” President-emeritus Charles W. Eliot of Harvard stated in a recent address: “I feel sure that nothing but good will come from the educational or training qualities of the Boy Scout movement as a whole.