vicious life through their very search for romance, are many little
children ensnared by means of the most innocent playthings and pleasures
of childhood. Perhaps one of the saddest aspects of the social evil as
it exists to-day in the modern city, is the procuring of little girls
who are too young to have received adequate instruction of any sort and
whose natural safeguard of modesty and reserve has been broken down by
the overcrowding of tenement house life. Any educator who has made a
careful study of the children from the crowded districts is impressed
with the numbers of them whose moral natures are apparently unawakened.
While there are comparatively few of these non-moral children in any one
neighborhood, in the entire city their number is far from negligible.
Such children are used by disreputable people to invite their more
normal playmates to house parties, which they attend again and again,
lured by candy and fruit, until they gradually learn to trust the
vicious hostess. The head of one such house, recently sent to the
penitentiary upon charges brought against her by the Juvenile Protective
Association, founded her large and successful business upon the
activities of three or four little girls who, although they had
gradually come to understand her purpose, were apparently so chained to
her by the goodies and favors which they received, that they were quite
indifferent to the fate of their little friends. Such children, when
brought to the psychopathic clinic attached to the Chicago juvenile
court, are sometimes found to have incipient epilepsy or other physical
disabilities from which their conduct may be at least partially
accounted for. Sometimes they come from respectable families, but more
often from families where they have been mistreated and where dissolute
parents have given them neither affection nor protection. Many of these
children whose relatives have obviously contributed to their delinquency
are helped by the enforcement of the adult delinquency law.