where he has fresh air and exercise.

Of course here as everywhere we must allow for the defective, the
imperfect, the subnormals and the children of the very poor. These
unfortunates furnish a large percentage of the inmates of prison, and
most of the victims for the scaffold which civilization so fondly
preserves.

The growth of the big cities has produced the child criminal. He is
clearly marked and well defined. He is often subnormal even down to
idiocy. In most cases he is the result of heredity. Many times he may
have fair intelligence, but this is usually attached to an unstable,
defective nervous system that cannot do its proper work, and he has had
no expert treatment and attention. He is always poor. Generally he has
lost one or both parents in youth and has lived in the crowded districts
where the home was congested. He has no adequate playground and he runs
the streets or vacant, waste places. He associates and combines with
others of his kind. He cannot or does not go to school. If he goes to
school, he dreads to go and cannot learn the lessons in the books. He
likes to loaf, just as all children like to play. He is often set to
work. He has no trade and little capacity for skilled work that brings
good wages and steady employment. He works no more than he needs to
work. Every night and all the days that he can get are spent in idleness
on the street with his "gang." He seldom reads books. He lacks the taste
for books, and such teachers as he knew had not the wit to cultivate a
taste for good reading. Such books as he gets only add to his unhealthy
thoughts.

Many writers have classified the crimes that the boy commits. It is
scarcely worth the while. He learns to steal or becomes a burglar