Little Joe, ten years old, had followed his business as a newsboy and
bootblack in Smutville for three or four years, and, of course, had
turned out to be a first-class little citizen of the street. He could
curse and swear, and drink and smoke, just the same as any old hardened
sinner.
One day, after Joe had finished one of his daily fights with some other
small boy, a kind-hearted gentleman stepped up to him and said,----
“My little man, do you go to school?”
“Nope,” said Joe.
“Do you go to Sunday-school?”
“Nope.”
“Well,” said the gentleman, “what do you expect to do when you are
grown?”
“I ain’t going to wait till I’m grown--I’m going to be a jockey; that’s
what I’m going to be.”
“How would you like to be bank cashier or president of a great bank?
Wouldn’t you like that better?”
“Yep,” said the boy, “but a poor boy can’t get no job like that--now you
know he couldn’t.”
“Oh, yes; he could if he were to prepare himself for it. But a poor boy,
and no other boy, will ever be a great business man if he is going to
live forever in the street--cursing and swearing and fighting and, it
may be, stealing, and having no higher ambition than to be a jockey.”
“Are you a parson?” asked the boy, becoming interested.
[Illustration: LITTLE JOE.]
“No, but I am interested in little boys. I am the secretary of the Young
Men’s Christian Association and we have a boys’ department. I want you
to join it. I have found out about your habits and your surroundings; I
was told of the death of your mother and father; and I made up my mind
to come and ask you to come over to the Young Men’s Christian
Association and live with us. You may continue to sell your papers and
black boots, but, you see, living with us, you can go to school at
night, and some day you will have a good education--and you might be a
bank cashier.”
Little Joe took this good man’s advice and went to live in the Y. M. C.
A. building. He did not turn out to be a bank cashier or president, but
what was better, Joe turned out to be a General Secretary of one of the
largest Y. M. C. A.’s among the colored people of this country, and in
that way has been instrumental in saving a great many other boys from
the gutter.
But Joe would never have amounted to anything if he had not been taken
away from the wicked influences of the street, and placed on the road to
higher things. The worst school in this world that any boy can go to is
the school of the street. The school of the street turns out the most
impure, the most dishonest and the most illiterate boys, and those boys
and girls who ever rise to be anything or anybody in the world are the
ones who leave the influences of the street in due time, as Little Joe
did. The street offers most of its work and most of its attractions at
night, as many boys can tell. The life of the street leads to no career
that is worth following. The good careers are made by those whom the
street has not had a chance to spoil, or by those who are taken out of
the streets before they become hopeless cases.
There is no greater error than the common notion that it is a good thing
to let a boy run the streets and become “hard” and “tough” and “have his
wits sharpened” and make “a little man” of himself, as some foolish
people say. A boy learns more downright mischief in one night in the
street than he can unlearn in the home in six months. And so, what will
the teaching of the home, the public school and the Sunday-school amount
to, if we are going to give our boys in their young and tender years the
freedom of the streets? If now and then a street boy--that is to say, a
boy hardened in the ways of the street--does get a good place, in most
cases he will lose it and fall back to the old, free life of the gutter.
The boys who succeed are the boys who get away from, or who are taken
away from, the influences of the street and who are surrounded by better
and more wholesome influences. Those who remain under the influences of
the street become in the course of time members of the great army of
beggars, tramps and criminals. It is a great pity that there should be
so many stories going the rounds which tell about newsboys and messenger
boys and so on rising to be bank clerks and telegraph-operators and so
forth. On the whole, these stories are misleading, and for the reason
that they seem to give the impression to many innocent boys and to many
thoughtless parents that the surest way to give a boy a good start in
life is to send him out into the streets to “rough it” and fight his way
to the front over beer bottles, games of chance, the race-track, and the
pool room, to the accompaniment of vulgar jokes, profane swearing and
evil associates. I repeat: The school of the street is the worst school
in the world, and the sooner boys get out of it the better it will be
for them.