and binding one (and a decision as to the custody never is, because upon a change in circumstances the court may always enter a new decree) nevertheless, in a proceeding which aims to deprive the parent of the custody of the exclusive custody of the child, the parent ought to be made a party defendant. The supreme court of Utah upheld the law, which, like all of our laws, contains no provision for making the parent a party defendant, but reversed the lower court because it had failed to find that the parents were unfit or unable to take care of the child and because the court had failed to give the parents a proper opportunity to be heard on that question. The amendment of the law which we are now endeavoring to get through in Illinois is the better way of dealing with these matters. The parent has a right to be heard, and ought to have his day in court, upon a question that concerns his right to the custody of his. child. Upon that point the court in the Utah case says:

"By a careful examination of the cases above cited, it will be found that all the decisions rest upon the proposition that the state in its sovereign power has the right, when necessary, to substitute itself as guardian of the person of the child for that of the parent or other legal guardian, and thus to educate and save the child from a criminal career; that it is the welfare of the child that moves the state to act, and not to inflict punishment or to mete out retributive justice for any offence committed or threatened. In other words, to do that which it is the duty of the father or guardian to do and which the law assumes he will do by reason of the love and affection he holds for his offspring and out of regard for the child's future welfare. The duty thus rests upon the father first. As the duty is imposed by the moral as well as the laws of society upon the father first, so it must likewise logically follow that he must be given the first right to discharge that duty. Indeed, the common law based the right of the father to have the custody and dominion over the person of his child upon the ground that he might better discharge the duty he owed the child and the state in respect to the care, nurture and education of the child. The right and duty are therefore reciprocal, and may be termed natural as well as legal and moral. Before the state can be substituted to the right of the parent, it must affirmatively be made to appear that the parent has forfeited his natural and legal right to the custody and control of the child by reason of his failure, inability, neglect, or incompetency to discharge the duty and thus to enjoy the right.

"Unless, therefore, both the delinquency of the child and the incompetency, for any reason, of the parent concur and are so found, the court exceeds its power when committing a child' to any of the institutions contemplated by the act. While we do not wish to be understood as holding that investigations before juvenile courts must be conducted as trials usually are, still these courts should not disregard all rules of procedure."

So much for the legal questions involved. And now, what is the actual work of the court? In the first place, we aim not to arrest the children, not to put them into prison, not to let them come into the police-court and mingle with the harlots and the wags, not to subject them to this moral contamination; we aim to notify them and to notify the parents

to bring them in, and if there is any danger that they will not come in, then in Chicago we provide a separate juvenile home in which they can be detained until brought before the court. And just now the city and the county are combining to build in one of the thickly-populated sections of the city a juvenile court and a detention home together, with the aim of having daily sessions of the court, with a large playground adjoining the school-house on the same grounds, so that the children who are kept there, before the hearing, or who are kept there after the hearing (because the institutions are full to which they are committed) can receive daily instructions and not lose a day out of their school-life. Even in the temporary quarters that we now have we have a most excellent teacher in charge, so that those children who have to be taken away from their homes and brought before the court are not missing school.

Then the next thing is the probation system. You in Minnesota, following the lead of Massachusetts which has had it for 30 or 40 years have probation for adults. We have not reached that stage, as yet, in Illinois. You know, therefore, what the probation system means. But probation, with children, in order to be effective, must be organized and systematized. This subject has been most thoroughly studied by the probation commision of New York, whose excellent report has recently been published.

In Chicago we have, after six years, succeeded in getting probation officers appointed and paid by the county. Heretofore private charity had employed these probation officers. Now the county employs thirty of them and the city gives us the help of thirty policemen, who go about without uniform, and who through long service have become as efficient in many instances as the regular probation officers. Their aim is to help. In the first place they do something which is not probation work, they investigate the cases before they are brought into court, so that when the child comes into court and the inquiry is, as I said before, not "has Johnny Brown done some particular wrong?" but, "What is this boy, what is his life, what are his surroundings, what is his development, and how best can he be dealt with by the state for his

own good and the good of the state?" the probation officer who has made the investigation is able to furnish the court with information upon which it can act judiciously.

Most of the children who come before the court are, naturally, the children of the poor. In many cases the children are foreigners, but not in all. These poor people have not been able to give their children the opportunities that your children have, they are not able to give them that oversight and supervision; the parents themselves often do not know to train and raise their children. What they need, more than anything else, is friendly help; and the aim of the court, in appointing a probation officer for the child is not so much to have the child or the parents feel the power of the state but to have the child and the parents feel the friendly interest of the state, to have them realize that the aim of the court is to help them to train that child right; and so the probation officers must be selected along these lines, men and women who are fitted for these tasks. But in Chicago we have not as yet been able to get from the city and county a sufficiently large number of probation officers properly to do this work. At present our officers have from one hundred to two hundred children. Now, no man or woman can thoroughly know each one of those one hundred or two hundred families so as to be a real friend in need of them, know the soul-life of the child, know the whole family and make them feel that he or she is really trying to help them; and what we need in the large cities, what we need in the small cities, what we need everywhere in connection with the juvenile. court work, is an aroused public interest is to have the entire community feel that this work of saving the child is not our work 'alone, not the work of the court and the paid officials, but the work of the entire community, because the future of that community is going to depend upon whether the children of to-day who are going wrong shall be changed into good citizens or shall be allowed to run the downward course and become the criminals of the future.

And therefore if we can get for every boy and girl that comes into court some one good man or woman, who knows what life really means, who has made a success, (and I don't mean a monetary success) a real success of life, who is imbued with the spirit of that phrase that passes our lips so easily, but is achieved in the lives of so few of us, who realizes the true meaning of human brotherhood, who is willing to give not that which is so easy for anyone who has a surplus above his needs, merely money, but to give that which is hard for most of us to give, ourselves, our time, our thought; if we can get for each boy and girl who comes into the juvenile court just one such person to be a real friend to that child the future is pretty safe; that child is going to be saved, he is going to be kept from going the downward path. We want the decent men and women young and old, who will take that child into their own homes for a Sunday dinner, or their own boys to the ball-game or to the theatre; who, if the lad is out of work, will help him to find a job, who will be interested in him and who will be interested in seeing that the father and the mother do their duty toward their children.

When probation fails and whether we shall put a child on probation once or twice or oftener is a question that must be determined in the individual.

case

when probation fails and the child must be taken away, then the State, which has said, "We are taking your child away because you are unable or unwilling to perform the parental duty," must itself act as the parent should have acted; it must place the child in a real school, not in a prison. And I am sorry to say that we are not doing this in full measure, in a number of jurisdictions; we are calling prisons, schools.

Now, what kind of institutions ought we to have for these children? They ought to be along the most modern lines, not one great building where all of the two or three or four hundred children will live together in one large dormitory, in which there will be no possibility of classification along the lines of age or degrees of delinquency, in which there will be no individualized attention. What we want is a large place, preferably in the country, because these children need the fresh aid and contact with the soil even more than does the normal child; a place with cottages, in which they can live the family life — and. the smaller the cottage, the better, for ten rather than for twenty, for twenty rather than for fifty- and in each cottage, some good man and woman who will live with and for the children. In these schools there must be opportunity for industrial training, so that when the the boys and girls come out they will be fitted to do a man's or woman's work in the world and not be merely a helpless lot drifting aimlessly about, God knows where. The great trouble in America life today among our working boys and girls is the lack of trained technical skill. That is why so many of them go wrong.

And that leads me to another vital point. This juvenile court has been a leading topic in the last six or eight years. There is no subject in all the realm of philanthropy, unless it be that of the treatment of tuberculosis that has been so much discussed. The result is that people have received a rather exaggerated idea of it, and the good women, particularly, have come to think of the court as something superlatively good, and that there is nothing better for a child than to bring it before the court. Now, that is complete fallacy. The juvenile court is a most excellent substitute for the old criminal court in dealing with children. We took a wise step forward when we decided that they shall not be dealt with as criminals. But, nevertheless, it is nothing more or less than an administrative arm of the state, it is not an end in itself, it is not the best thing for a boy to have him come to any court, even to the juvenile court, even to receive the wise paternal advice that he is apt to get from the judge. It is infinitely better to keep him away from the courts, it is infinitely better to prevent our children going wrong than to be compelled to save them after they have gone wrong.

The work of the juvenile court is, as the best palliative, curative. We take these little human beings that are going the downward path and we try and

we fail not merely to uproot the wrong, but to implant in place of it the positive good.

It is well that we have these schools for the delinquent boy and girl, it is well that when they get into these schools they receive a thorough technical training so that they are fitted for something afterwards, but it would be infinitely better if your chil dren and my children and all of these children could get that sort of training before they reach the court; it would be infinitely better if we check this career of delinquency in its incipiency, and the incipiency generally in truancy), it would be infinitely better if we stop these children from becoming truants and afterwards becoming delinquents. There isn't much "fun" in becoming a truant and going out alone, a truant wants somebody else to go with him and then it will begin to wander the streets, and it isn't much fun wandering the streets, it is a "heap more fun" breaking into a railroad car, and then it is lots of fun getting the better of the "cop," and when they begin that way, then there is no telling what the end will be. It starts with truancy. How are we going to stop the truant?

We had a great conference in Chicago, two or three months ago, to consider this problem of the truant child. In the first place, we must make the school interesting, more interesting than it is to-day; and then we must provide for those children who cannot sit at their desk all day long with only mental work, we must put manual training right through the entire school system, so that there will be an outlet for their nervous energies, so that they will have something to work on with their hands instead of merely with the brain; and then we must have the physician and the nurse in the school as they have in New York. There is a proposition before the New York school board at this moment to supply some thirty thousand children with eye-glasses think of it! They have had the medical inspection and found that thirty thousand of those children need eyeglasses. Their parents didn't know anything about it ignorance and neglect. How can those children. fearn properly, how can they be diligent, when they cannot use their eyes properly? And there are more than thirty thousand of those children in the New York schools who need slight operations for adenoid growths and enlarged tonsils. The relation between adenoid growths and criminality is a very close one. Take the boy suffering with adenoid growths whose parent, through ignorance and neglect, knows nothing about it; he can't breathe properly, his nerves are affected, he can't sit still the school-room has too many pupils for one teacher (that is the trouble with all our public schools), the teacher overworked, cannot be bothered with the individual, a lack of harmony follows-what is more natural than that that boy should play hookey? and after he begins to play hookey he will get some others along with him and then they go the downwards career, and all because the boy had adenoids, and the parents didn't know it, and the school had no medical inspection, and he was not cared for.

When the children get into the juvenile court we endeavor to give them examination, mental and physical; we endeavor to find out just what is best to be done for them. But we ought not to wait that long we ought to do this in the school, so that they may be checked in time, and so that some of the greatest

causes of dulness, and the truancy that follows it, may be removed.

And then what do you expect of your boys if you do not give them a place to play? If they are going to be driven to the streets to play, naturally they are going to come in contact with the policeman, naturally there is going to be trouble, and the heroism and hero-worship that follows trouble with the public authorities. And when that sort of heroism begins, they are on the high-road to criminality. How are you going to stop it? Give the boys and girls playgrounds throughout your cities, do not compel them to be in the streets. Give them the small parks, such as we are now getting in Chicago, with their swimmingpools and their skating-rinks and their assembly-halls and their gymnasiums, and give them a chance to convert the "gang" (which you can't eradicate, it is not human to go alone, the crowd is the natural thing) give them a chance to convert the "gang" into a team pulling together for good, instead of working together for bad. That is the result that we get when we establish these small parks throughout the congested. districts of the city. We give the boys what they need. We appeal to their manhood and their honor, we save them through their saving themselves — and that is the best way to save anybody working with them, not entirely for them. Separate ungraded rooms for the backward children, vacation and night-schools, proper child-labor and compulsory-education laws and many more things I should like to touch upon in this connection, had I the time.

Just one more point. I don't know how it is in a city like St. Paul, but in a big City like Chicago, the number of girls that go wrong is enormous. The greater part of them do not start in from love of lust, but from love of joy, the joy of life that is in every normal human being. Take the girl that is working. all day long and then comes home to two of three rooms with a large family in the slum districts that the city fails to keep clean; she doesn't want to stay at home all the evening, she wants to go out, she wants that pleasure and happiness that your girls want, she likes the dance and the play just as much as do your girls. You let your girls enjoy themselves in a decent way under decent surroundings, but what do we do for these girls? The saloon dance-hall offers them the joy and the lights and the pleasures but if the good citizens of the town will offer them those joys, those decent, innocent pleasures, in a decent way and under proper influences, as do our settlements scattered throughout our large cities, the girls will choose the decent nine times out of ten, aye- ninetynine times out of the hundred. But they must have some outlet for their energy, some satisfaction for this cry for joy and happiness, and if we do not give it to them they will get it in the other way.

These are some of the positive needs that mean so much in the development of the child; through them may come the prevention of that delinquency for which the juvenile court offers merely a cure. And it is to a realization of these preventive measures that we, the trained professional men, should give some thought and some care; and I am glad indeed that an association of lawyers such as this has departed from the regular schedule of a bar-association meeting and has given up an hour to a consideration of these thoughts not legal questions but questions of philanthropy.

JUVENILE COURT RECORD

T. D. HURLEY, Editor.

79 Dearborn Street, Chicago, Ill.

ASSOCIATE EDITORS.

Hon. B. B. Lindsey, Judge Juvenile Court, Denver, Colorado. Thomas D. Walsh, Asst. Secretary, New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, 297 4th Ave., New York.

J. L. Clark, Business Manager, 79 Dearborn St., Chicago, Ill. Eastern Office, 53 W. 24th Street, New York City. Boston Office, 71 Kilby Street, Boston, Mass.

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EDITORIAL.

PROBATION PERIODS.

We publish in this issue an interesting account of the release from probation of two hundred and eighty-three wards of the Juvenile Court of Milwaukee.

The Juvenile Court workers throughout the country have given much thought and consideration to the question of a formal discharge of the wards of the Court who have been faithful and complied with the instructions and direction of the Court and the probation officer. The simple fact that the boy or girl has been made a ward of the Juvenile Court does not and should not mean that the child should be subjected to a continuous nagging, on the part of the probation officer.

The wards of the Juvenile Court are composed of the ordinary boys and girls that are to be met in everyday life. It certainly cannot and will not benefit any child to be forever notified and informed that they have at some time in the past violated some rule of society. No one will question the advisability of diverting the child's mind from its past misbehavior and directing it into more. wholesome and uplifting ways. The sooner that the

child forgets the past and starts life anew the better it will be for him and for the entire Juvenile Court work.

The JUVENILE Court Record is very much impressed with the work of the Milwaukee Juvenile Court and we are seriously considering the question as to the advisability of submitting an amendment to the Illinois Juvenile Court Law which will limit the probation for the first offense to a period of three months, a second offense to six months and a third offense for a longer period; the child in the meantime being subject to the order of the Court as to the commitment to an institution or the placement in a foster home. The continuous reporting, nagging and following up of the child from day to day, week to week and month to month does not as a rule accomplish any great good. It is not the voluminous report of the probation officer that is so much desired as it is the individual good results that are accomplished with the particular boy or girl.

Probation work like all governmental work, can be made obnoxious and objectional. Let us see to it that we do not make the probation system oppressive to the poor. If that day ever arrives there is no doubt or question but what the whole Juvenile Court system will be repealed.

Attention is directed to the annual report of E. Fellow Jenkins, Supt. of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. The report shows much good accomplished for the children in New York City.

Fourteen hundred and seventy-nine boys and girls were before the court during the year 1908 and received the kindly assistance of the court and probation officers.

In commenting on the former probationers, the superintendent says: "Reference must be made to children paroled during the first years of the courts' operations for anything like conclusive figures, and even these must be subject to revision, for who can say that because a boy behaves for a year or two or five after his first parole that his reformation is complete. Parole is not calculated to deaden criminal or wayward tendencies or to undo what it has taken generations to do, nor has the court any ideals to foster, such as surgical operations to curb boys who are on the downward path. It counts rather on the common sense application of practical methods by practical men and women, each of the Religion of the child in charge to teach the boy of his errors and to make him see in his own way how best to help himself. No "sweet sentiment" dominates, their being none in such work, but enough of real sentiment exists to prompt the workers to spend endless hours with their charges. The result is encouraging."

The report shows that the average percentage of the reformation for the entire period stands surprisingly high, being thirty-eight per cent. The report speaks well for the great work that is being done in New York City. May the good work continue to prosper.