.8 per cent. poor parents; 38.4 per
cent. of the prisoners had drunken parents, and 13 per cent. parents of
doubtful sobriety. Of more than twenty-two thousand inmates of the
Juvenile Asylum in thirty-nine years one-fourth had either a drunken
father or mother, or both. At the Protectory the percentage of drunkenness
in parents was not quite one-fifth among over three thousand children
cared for in the institution last year.

There is never any lack of trashy novels and cheap shows in New York, and
the children who earn money selling newspapers or otherwise take to them
as ducks do to water. They fall in well with the ways of the street that
are showy always, however threadbare may be the cloth. As for that, it is
simply the cheap side of our national extravagance.

The cigarette, if not a cause, is at least the mean accessory of half the
mischief of the street. And I am not sure it is not a cause too. It is an
inexorable creditor that has goaded many a boy to stealing; for cigarettes
cost money, and they do not encourage industry. Of course there is a law
against the cigarette, or rather against the boy smoking it who is not old
enough to work--there is law in plenty, usually, if that would only make
people good. It don't in the matter of the cigarette. It helps make the
boy bad by adding the relish of law-breaking to his enjoyment of the
smoke. Nobody stops him.

The mania for gambling is all but universal. Every street child is a born
gambler; he has nothing to lose and all to win. He begins by "shooting
craps" in the street and ends by "chucking dice" in the saloon, two names
for the same thing, sure to lead to the same goal. By the time he has
acquired individual standing in the saloon, his long apprenticeship has
left little or nothing for him to learn of the bad it has to teach. Never
for his own sake is he turned away with the growler when he comes to have
it filled; once in a while for the saloon-keeper's, if that worthy
suspects in him a decoy and a "job." Just for the sake of the experiment,
not because I expected it to develop anything new, I chose at random,
while writing this chapter, a saloon in a tenement house district on the
East Side and posted a man, whom I could trust implicitly, at the door
with orders to count the children under age who went out and in with
beer-jugs in open defiance of law. Neither he nor I had ever been in or
even seen the saloon before. He reported as the result of three and a