Another lesson about boys I learned from little
"Mickey" when I was investigating his charge that
the jailer had beaten him. The jailer said: "Some
o' those kids broke a window in there, and when I
asked Mickey who it was, he said he didn't know. Of
course he knew. D'yu think I'm goin' to have kids
lie to me?" A police commissioner who was present
turned to Mickey. "Mickey," he said, "why did you
lie?" Mickey faced us in his rags. "Say," he asked,
"Do yoh t'ink a fullah ought to snitch on a kid?"
And the way he asked made me ashamed of myself.
Here was a quality of loyalty that we should be fostering
in him instead of trying to crush out of him. It was
the beginning in the boy of that feeling of responsibility
to his fellows on which society is founded. Thereafter,

no child brought before our court was ever urged
to turn state's evidence against his partners in crime--much
less rewarded for doing so or punished for refusing.
Each was encouraged to "snitch" on himself,
and himself only.

Another interview with a boy under sentence to the industrial school
emphasizes the same point:

"I can _help_ you, Harry," I said. "But you've
got to carry yourself. If I let boys go when they do
bad things, I'll lose my job. The people 'll get another
judge in my place to punish boys, if _I_ don't do it. I
can't let you go." We went over it and over it; and
at last I thought I had him feeling more resigned and
cheerful, and I got up to leave him. But when I
turned to the door he fell on his knees before me
and, stretching out his little arms to me, his face distorted
with tears, he cried: "Judge! Judge! If you let
me go, _I'll never get you into trouble again_!"

I had him! It was the voice of loyalty.... This
time he "stuck." "Judge," the mother told me
long afterward, "I asked Harry the other day, how it
was he was so good for _you_, when he wouldn't do it for
me or the policeman. And he says: 'Well, Maw, you
see if I gets bad ag'in the Judge he'll lose his job. I've
got to stay with him, 'cause he stayed with me.'"
I have used that appeal to loyalty hundreds of times
since in our work with the boys, and it is almost
infallibly successful.

In eight years, out of 507 cases of boys put upon their honor to take
themselves fr