whose parents, like themselves, occupy temporarily these restricted
quarters--these homes attenuated beyond recognition.

A garden plot, small live stock, pets, woodpile, and workshop are all
out of the question, for the city has deprived the average boy not only
of fit living quarters but of the opportunity to enact a fair part of
his glorious life-drama within the friendly atmosphere of home. He
cannot collect things with a view to proprietorship and construction and
have them under his own roof. The noise and litter incident to building
operations of such proportions as please boys will not be tolerated.
Moreover, this home, which has reached the vanishing point, makes almost
no demand for his co-operation in its maintenance. There are no chores
for the flat boy wherein he may be busy and dignified as a partner in
the family life. To make the flat a little more sumptuous and call it an
apartment does not solve the problem, and with the rapid decrease of
detached houses and the occupation of the territory with flat buildings
the city is providing for itself a much more serious juvenile problem
than it now has.

But the industrial usurpation takes toll of the family in other ways.
The intense economic struggle and the long distance "to work" rob the
boy of the father's presence and throw upon the mother an unjust burden.
To return home late and exhausted, to be hardly equal to the economic
demand, to see the prenuptial ideals fade, to pass from disappointment
to discouragement and from chronic irritability to a broken home is not
uncommon. The boy is unfortunate if the "incompatibility" end in
desertion or divorce, and equally unfortunate if it does not.

Owing to the fact that the male usually stands from under when the home
is about to collapse, and to the further fact that industrial accidents,