A few months’ experience with boys who spend most of their lives upon
the street, and pride themselves on being tough, will teach one a great
lesson. You will learn you cannot reach a boy unless you get near
him, are of his kind; and the most lasting and truest friendship, and
through which you can gain the best results, is where you place a boy
under personal obligations to you, through kindness. You may buy him
for money, but he does not look upon you with the same interest and
confidence as when you gain his love through personal attention. The
boy must be understood. No two boys are alike. Though many are endowed
with similar characteristics, each has his own individuality. The trees
are not all of one kind. Even the leaves on the same tree differ in
size and contour. One tree in the writer’s yard, one of the choicest
of plums; a long branch sprouted out every spring and grew so rapidly
that before the leaves in the fall began to show signs of decay, it
became strong and reached several feet beyond any other branch. It made
the tree look awkward, unnatural, but when trimmed down, even with
the others, it produced more and better fruit than any other portion
of the tree. The boys are like the birds who are unlike in plumage and
song; the flowers in color and fragrance, and yet nature would not be
perfect were it not for these different lines of beauty, strength, and
fragrance.
In the cultivation of plants the gardner considers the nature and needs
of different stages of growth, furnishing the nourishment and care
that will be most helpful just at that time. So in boyhood we observe
various stages of development, whose natures and needs must be studied
that we may properly provide for them.
It has been said: “That the home, the church, the school with their
natural and uplifting influences have been responsible in the past, and
must continue to be in the future, for the manhood and womanhood of
this nation.” It is a well-known fact that the home sometimes fails, or
there is no home, or one which the church and the school do not reach.
There are times when even these have no power over a boy’s acts. A boy
who violates the laws of the land is answerable not to the home, the
church or the school, but to the State.
Crime among boys, in America, is greatly on the increase. The reports,
official and unofficial, that are made public, of the per cent. of the
criminals serving time in our jails, workhouses, reform schools, and
even our penitentiaries, are astounding, and almost beyond belief.
How to check this is a problem of the greatest importance, and it
cannot be solved without the hearty co-operation of every person.
Among the first things to be done must be the recognition of the power
of home and our neighbors. We cannot live without our neighbor. Each
home depends upon some other home; and when the boy leaves his home
to go upon the street, he is at once overcome by the stronger power
and influence of a boy of some other home, and, perhaps where the
rearing and training was not good. The boy is a result more or less,
of all influences and environment of the lives of his companions.
Every good mother recalls the pang that came over her heart when for
the first time she led her boy to school, knowing that her influence
must be shared with that of the teacher. It is not long until the
boy quotes his teacher, and sometimes in defiance, when he says: “My
teacher says so an’ so.” And how many times we hear this from the boy
when away from home, more frequently than the sayings of his mother.
The boy’s school life soon begins to develop self-reliance, full of
possibilities, of curiosity and questionings, the period of formation
of thoughts, feelings and desires. And when a boy reaches that stage in
his life when he is permitted to go down town alone—he at once begins
a new life. And there is not a mother in our country but who makes this
pleading request to her son as he is about to start: “Don’t go into bad
company.”
It is on this line that the Newsboys’ Association, with all its varied
interests and objects, through its many channels of work, backed
with that true spirit of Christianity characteristic of everything
that means good, with the aid of its president and its many working
officers, in the name of God and humanity, aims to make the bad boy of
the streets of our cities and towns good, so that the mother will not
find it necessary to say: “Now, my dear son, don’t go into bad company.”
Let us all hope, and pray, and work for the time to come when there
will be no “bad company” on the streets.