e year round, and though the attendance in
summer decreases one-half, yet the rooms are never empty.

The wish expressed by the President of the Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Children, in a public utterance a year ago, that there might be
a boys' club for every ward in the city, has been more than fulfilled.
There are more boys' clubs nowadays than there are wards, though I am not
sure that they are so distributed that each has one. There are some wards
in which twenty might not come amiss. A directory of the local gangs,
which might be obtained by consultation with the corner-grocers and with
the policeman on the beat after a "scrap" with the boys, would be a good
guide to the right spots and also in the choice of managers. Something
over a year ago a club was opened in Bleecker Street that forthwith took
on the character of a poultice upon a rather turbulent neighborhood. In
the second week more than a hundred boys crowded to its meetings. It
"drew" entirely too well. When I looked for it this fall, it was
gone--"thank goodness!" said the owner of the tenement, a little woman who
kept a shop across the street, with a sigh of relief that spoke volumes.
Yet she had no more definite complaint to make than what might be inferred
from the emphasis she put on the words "them boys!" A friend of the club,
or of some of the boys belonging to it, whom I hunted up, interpreted the
sigh and the emphasis. The boys got the upper hand, he said. They had just
then made a fresh start under another roof and with a new manager.

Such experiences have not been uncommon, and, as it often happens when
inquiry is pursued in the right spirit, the mistakes they buoyed have been
the greatest successes of the cause. There has been enough of the other
kind too. Any club manager can tell of cases, lots of them, in which the
club has been the stepping-stone of the boy to a useful career. In some
cases the boys, having outgrown their club, have carried on the work
unaided and organized young men's societies on a plane of in-door
respectability that has raised an effectual barrier against the gang and
its club-room, the saloon. These things show what a hold the idea has upon
the boy and how much more might be made of it. So far, private benevolence
has had the field to itself, properly so; but there is a way in which the
municipality might help without departing from safe moorings, so it seems
to me. Why not lend such schools or class-room