f slides, a poor woman is wearily bending over some
sewing, a baby is crying in the cradle, and two little boys of nine
and ten are asking for food. In despair the mother sends them out into
the street to beg, but instead they steal a revolver from a pawn shop
and with it kill a Chinese laundry-man, robbing him of $200. They rush
home with the treasure which is found by the mother in the baby's
cradle, whereupon she and her sons fall upon their knees and send up a
prayer of thankfulness for this timely and heaven-sent assistance.

Is it not astounding that a city allows thousands of its youth to fill
their impressionable minds with these absurdities which certainly will
become the foundation for their working moral codes and the data from
which they will judge the proprieties of life?

It is as if a child, starved at home, should be forced to go out and
search for food, selecting, quite naturally, not that which is
nourishing but that which is exciting and appealing to his outward
sense, often in his ignorance and foolishness blundering into
substances which are filthy and poisonous.

Out of my twenty years' experience at Hull-House I can recall all
sorts of pilferings, petty larcenies, and even burglaries, due to that
never ceasing effort on the part of boys to procure theater tickets. I
can also recall indirect efforts towards the same end which are most
pitiful. I remember the remorse of a young girl of fifteen who was
brought into the Juvenile Court after a night spent weeping in the
cellar of her home because she had stolen a mass of artificial flowers
with which to trim a hat. She stated that she had taken the flowers
because she was afraid of losing the attention of a young man whom she
had heard say that "a girl has to be dressy if she expects to be
seen." This young man was the only one who had ever taken her to the
theater and if he failed her, she was sure that she would never go
again, and she sobbed out incoherently that she "couldn't live at all
without it." Apparently the blankness and grayness of life itself had
been broken for her only by the portrayal of a different world.

One boy whom I had known from babyhood began to take money from his
mother from the time he was seven years old, and after he was ten she
regularly gave him money for the play Saturday evening. However, the
Saturday performance, "starting him off like," he always went twice
again on Sunday, procuring the money in all sorts of ill