anything about it, but it looked wrong to charge these boys with burglary. It was unnecessary under the Law, too; the school law of 1899 P er “ mitted children to be brought to the County Court as ‘juvenile disorderly persons.’ And here they were being arraigned as thieves and burglars. We were dealing with the thing the child did, not with the child; and the child was what should concern us. I don’t blame anybody in particular. I had been at fault myself. A good many children were brought into my Court, and I had been following the thoughtless routine. The fact is, I was pretty free in sending boys to the Industrial School at Golden till these special cases awoke my special interest. Then I began to consider the situation generally. I found that there was no system about juvenile cases. Some were sent to the District Court, others to the Justice Courts, others to mine. We all were ‘trying’ the boys for the ‘crimes’ they had committed, finding many of them guilty and sending them away. It was absurd; it was criminal, really. The thing a child had stolen was treated as of more importance than the child. This was carrying the idea of property to an extreme. It was time to get back to the idea of men and women, the men and women of to-morrow, and obviously some system of character-building was needed in
