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It is rather that their opportunities for mischief are greater than those for harmless amusement; made so, it has sometimes seemed to me, with deliberate purpose to hatch the "tough." Given idleness and the street, and he will grow without other encouragement than an occasional "fanning" of a policeman's club. And the street has to do for his playground. There is no other. Central Park is miles away. The small parks that were ordered for his benefit five years ago, exist yet only on paper. Games like kite-flying and ball-playing, forbidden but not suppressed, as happily they cannot be, become from harmless play a successful challenge of law and order that points the way to later and worse achievements. Every year the police forbid the building of election bonfires, and threaten vengeance upon those who disobey the ordinance; and every election night sees the sky made lurid by them from one end of the town to the other, with the police powerless to put them out. Year by year the boys grow bolder in their raids on property when their supply of firewood has given out, until the destruction wrought at the last election became a matter of public scandal. Stoops, wagons, and in one place a showcase containing property worth many hundreds of dollars, were fed to the flames. It has happened that an entire frame house has been carried off piecemeal and burned up on election night. The boys, organized in gangs, with the one condition of membership that all must "give in wood," store up enormous piles of fuel for months before, and though the police find and raid a good many of them, incidentally laying in supplies of kindling wood for the winter, the pile grows again in a single night as the neighborhood reluctantly contributes its ash-barrels to the cause. The germ of the gangs that terrorize whole sections of the city at intervals, and feed our courts and our jails, may, without much difficulty, be discovered in these early and rather grotesque struggles of the boys with the police.

Even on the national day of freedom the boy is not left to the enjoyment of his firecracker without the ineffectual threat of the law. I am not defending the firecracker, but arraigning the failure of the law to carry its point and maintain its dignity. It has robbed the poor child of the street-band, one of his few harmless delights, grudgingly restoring the hand-organ, but not the monkey that lent it its charm. In the band that, banished from the street, sneaks into the back-yard, its instruments hidden under bulging coats, the boy hails no longer an innocent purveyor of amusement, but an ally in the fight with the common enemy, the policeman. In the Thanksgiving Day and New Year parades, which he formally permits, he furnishes them with the very weapon of gang organization which they afterward turn against him to his hurt.

And yet this boy who, when taken from his alley into the country for the first time, cries out in delight, "How blue the sky and what a lot of it there is!" -- not much of it at home in his barrack -- has, in the very love of dramatic display that sends him forth to beat a policeman with his own club or die in the attempt, in the intense vanity that is only a perverted form of pride capable of any achievement, a handle by which he may be most easily grasped and held. It cannot be done by gorging him en masse with apples and gingerbread at a Christmas party. (3) It can be done only by individual effort, and by the influence of personal character in direct contact with the child -- the great secret of success in all dealings with the poor. Foul as the gutter he comes from, he is open to the reproach of "bad form" as few of his betters. Greater even than his desire eventually to "down" a policeman, is his ambition to be a "gentleman," as his sister's is to be a "lady." The street is responsible for the caricature either makes of the character. On a playbill in an East Side street, only the other day, I saw this repertoire set down: "Thursday -- 'The Bowery Tramp; 'Friday -- 'The Thief.'" It was a theatre I know newsboys and the other children of the street who were earning money to frequent in shoals. The playbill suggested the sort of training they received there. Within sight of the window where it hung was a house occupied by a handful of courageous young women, who settled there a couple of years ago, to see what they could do among the children on the other tack. They had a different story to tell. Having once gained their confidence they had found boys and girls most eager to learn from them the ways of polite society. Perhaps that may be thought not the highest of aims; but it will hardly be denied that to find a girl who was fighting in the street yesterday, to-day busying herself with the anxious inquiry whether it is proper, at table, to take bread from the plate with the fingers or with the fork, argues progress; or to see the battle-scarred young tough who a month ago sat on the table with cigar in his mouth, hat on the back of his head, and kicked his heels, who was ashamed to own where he lived, and so terrorized the others with his scowl that the boy who knew said he would get killed if he told -- to see this product of the street with carefully brushed clothes, a clean collar, and a human smile inviting the lady manager to the foot-ball game because he knew she was from Princeton and a partisan, and what is more, escorting her there like a gentleman.