ible position which he now holds.

[Illustration: THE GUILD, First Baptist Church, Detroit, Mich.]

There was, to be sure, nothing distinctly spiritual in his story, but
after he had finished the young men kept him for two hours answering
their questions and there was there revealed to the pastor more of their
fine hopes and purposes and possibilities--their deep-buried yet vital
dreams--than he had ever heard unfolded in any religious meeting. Many
of these youths were taken in hand in a personal way and are now "making
good." Their subsequent use of leisure, their patronage of evening
schools, Y.M.C.A. courses, and many other helps to their ambitions
testified to the depth and tenacity of good purposes which were timidly
voiced but heroically executed. On the other hand, the writer has
knowledge of many cases of delinquency in which apparently the deciding
cause was the vocational misfit foisted upon the young would-be laborer
in the trying years between fourteen and sixteen.

There comes to mind the instance of a lad of seventeen found in the Cook
County jail. He had left his Michigan home with fifty dollars of
savings and had come to Chicago to make his fortune. His mother's story,
which was secured after he got into trouble, narrated how that as a boy
he had taken to pieces the sewing-machine and the clocks and, unlike
many boys, had put them together again without damage. Reaching Chicago
he hired in a garage and conceived the idea of building an automobile.
After the fashion of a boy he became totally absorbed in this project.
His ingenuity and thrift and the help of his employers enabled him to
get well along with his enterprise. But at last he was balked because of
lack of a particular part which he knew to be essential, but as to the
nature of which he was not informed.

Going along the street one day in profound concern over this matter an
impulse seized him to learn at once the nature of the needed part. He
jumped into an automobile standing by the curb, drove it to the nearest
alley, and crawled under it to make the necessary disconnections, when
the police caught him in the act. The case was a clear one and he was
thrown into jail. The mother in her letter to the Juvenile Protective
Association which was working for his release said that now, since he
had been so unfortunate as to fall into the hands of the authorities,
she wondered whether they might not perform an operation for his
benefit, for she ha