For the enormous amount of juvenile crime in
the city, which it requires a special court to deal with, the conditions
are more responsible than the children, or even than the parents, who
are unable to maintain home life, and who, through the pinch of poverty
or the impulse of avarice, give over the education of the children to
school or street. Here is a picture of the life on its darker side:
[Sidenote: Street Life of Children]
"Crowded in the tenements where the bedrooms are small and often dark,
where the living room is also a kitchen, a laundry, and often a
garment-making shop, are the growing children whose bodies cry out for
exercise and play. They are often an irritant to the busy mother, and
likely as not the object of her carping and scolding. The teeming
tenements open their doors, and out into the dark passageways and
courts, through foul alleys and over broken sidewalks, flow ever renewed
streams of playing children. Under the feet of passing horses, under the
wheels of passing street-cars, jostled about by the pedestrian, driven
on by the policeman, they annoy everyone. They crowd about the music or
drunken brawls in the saloons, they play hide-and-seek about the garbage
boxes, they shoot 'craps' in the alleys, they seek always and everywhere
activity, movement, life.
Pages:
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228