is followed by nothing else that it defeats its own end, that it uses
up strength and does not create it. In the actual experience of these
boys the excitement has demoralized them and led them into
law-breaking. When, however, they seek legitimate pleasure, and say
with great pride that they are "ready to pay for it," what they find
is legal but scarcely more wholesome,--it is still merely excitement.
"Looping the loop" amid shrieks of simulated terror or dancing in
disorderly saloon halls, are perhaps the natural reactions to a day
spent in noisy factories and in trolley cars whirling through the
distracting streets, but the city which permits them to be the acme of
pleasure and recreation to its young people, commits a grievous
mistake.

May we not assume that this love for excitement, this desire for
adventure, is basic, and will be evinced by each generation of city
boys as a challenge to their elders? And yet those of us who live in
Chicago are obliged to confess that last year there were arrested and
brought into court fifteen thousand young people under the age of
twenty, who had failed to keep even the common law of the land. Most
of these young people had broken the law in their blundering efforts
to find adventure and in response to the old impulse for
self-expression. It is said indeed that practically the whole
machinery of the grand jury and of the criminal courts is maintained
and operated for the benefit of youths between the ages of thirteen
and twenty-five. Men up to ninety years of age, it is true, commit
crimes, but they are not characterized by the recklessness, the
bravado and the horror which have stained our records in Chicago. An
adult with the most sordid experience of life and the most rudimentary
notion of prudence, could not possibly have committed them. Only a
utilization of that sudden burst of energy belonging partly to the