The problem solved itself in personal experiences, convincing us that we must try to catch the candidates for prison before they have been debased and to keep them decent. “It is the Christian, decent, brotherly way for one thing, and it is the cheapest way in dollars and cents for another.”
It is a rule, rather than an exception, that people have always considered a newsboy bad, and he is therefore treated accordingly.
Everybody knows or can soon learn to know, that the street is the great school of crime. Betting and gambling are typical of the combination of work and play of man and boy that street work produces.
One of the greatest evils of the street was that of begging; of boys working on the sympathies of the public by taking advantage of men and women on street-cars or in public places.
Some boys made a business of begging, the majority not from their own choice, but by compulsion of their parents.
One boy in particular was doing more to injure the success of the association’s work on the street than hundreds of others who were bad in other lines.
The father of this boy would wait until the theatres were out, at night, and instruct the boy to “work the car,” by begging, and if that failed by forcing papers upon young men who were compelled to purchase what they did not want.
It took some time, almost a year, to stop this kind of business, and then the president had to call upon the efficient Humane officer to stop it. As every case of begging was traced to the fault of parents the Humane Society had to deal directly with them.
The Boyville association gradually stamped this evil entirely out.
