"gang." Every street in a town and every corner in a city has its
gang. And if your boy has red blood and hard grit in him, he is a
member of one of these gangs. He can't help it. He does not join
because it is the fashion, or because he is afraid to keep out, or
because he has social ambitions. He joins because it is his instinct
to join with others in carrying on the activities to which other
instincts drive him. If you stand in the way of the gang, you are
fighting against one of the strongest forces in human nature.

Now if you feel the way Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Green felt about the
gangs, I do not blame you. But you must not stop there. Let's try to
find out first what the gang means to the boys and what it means to
the race. When a boy joins a gang, he does not discard his instinct
for play or for running and shouting. He simply takes on a new
relation to the world about him. As a member of the gang, he still
runs and plays and shouts; but now he has become conscious of his
place in the world, and that place is with his fellow-members,
surrounded by all sorts of enemies and dangers and obstacles to his
well-being. In his gang he finds comfort and support for his
struggle with the outside world. Here he finds opportunity for
satisfying exchange of thought; here he finds sympathy and
understanding such as he can get nowhere else.

The gang, without a written code in most cases, without formal
rules, without very definite aims, even, nevertheless has a moral
scheme of its own that every boy understands and lives up to as
earnestly and as devotedly as ever man followed the dictates of
conscience. The gang demands of the boy unfailing loyalty, and--what
is more--it usually gets it. Of how many other institutions or
organizations can as much be said? The gang demands fair play and