The gradual recognition, by an aroused public conscience, of the evil results of such a system put into operation the forces which in many states have abolished the old plan of regarding and punishing the child as a criminal and substituted the principle that the wayward child is a dependent whom the state, like a wise parent, will restrain from evil and educate in the paths leading to good citizenship, through the agency of the juvenile court and its efficient aid, the probation officer. We now recognize the inability of the child to commit a crime, judged by the standards applicable to the adult criminal, for the reason that his mental and moral concepts have not yet reached the stage of development which can distinguish between right and wrong with the clearness of the adult. What in the adult with full consciousness of the import and effects of his acts would be trespass, assault and battery, larceny, and burglary, are in the child varied forms of moral disease which it is the state’s business to cure--not punish. It is conceded that it would be monstrous and brutal to punish a child for contracting measles, scarlet fever, or whooping cough, and it is equally monstrous for the state to punish the same child before he attains moral maturity, for contracting a moral disease which manifests itself in acts which are crimes only when committed by adults with full comprehension of their moral significance. Again we revert for our guidance to the child’s viewpoint which in many instances is closely akin to that of the untutored savage. During a summer which I spent in the wilderness of the great woods of the North I encountered an Indian who habitually killed deer out of season and in violation of the laws of the state in which he lived. When I asked him why he did not obey the law, he replied, “God made deer for Indian before white man made book [the law].” From his viewpoint, he was not guilty of wrongdoing in killing deer to supply food for his family; from the viewpoint of the law he was a lawbreaker. The underlying principle of the operation of children’s courts is the recognition of the fact that the offender under sixteen years of age should not be judged or punished by adult standards; that he should not be arrested, indicted, convicted, imprisoned, or punished as a criminal. Evidence of the offense is not regarded as proof of criminality but rather as light on the question as to how the state, standing _in loco parentis_, can best exercise its parental function in the formation of the embryo character needed to make the boy a good citizen.