me stop here to tell
you.

CHAPTER IX

THE GENESIS OF THE GANG

Jacob Beresheim was fifteen when he was charged with murder. It is now
more than six years ago, but the touch of his hand is cold upon mine,
with mortal fear, as I write. Every few minutes, during our long talk on
the night of his arrest and confession, he would spring to his feet,
and, clutching my arm as a drowning man catches at a rope, demand with
shaking voice, "Will they give me the chair?" The assurance that boys
were not executed quieted him only for the moment. Then the dread and
the horror were upon him again.

Of his crime the less said the better. It was the climax of a career of
depravity that differed from other such chiefly in the opportunities
afforded by an environment which led up to and helped shape it. My
business is with that environment. The man is dead, the boy in jail. But
unless I am to be my brother's jail keeper merely, the iron bars do not
square the account of Jacob with society. Society exists for the purpose
of securing justice to its members, appearances to the contrary
notwithstanding. When it fails in this, the item is carried on the
ledger with interest and compound interest toward a day of reckoning
that comes surely with the paymaster. We have heard the chink of his
coin on the counter, these days, in the unblushing revelations before
legislative investigating committees of degraded citizenship, of the
murder of the civic conscience, and in the applause that hailed them
from the unthinking crowd. And we have begun to understand that these
are the interest on Jacob's account, older, much older, than himself. He
is just an item carried on the ledger. But with that knowledge the
account is at last in the way of getting squared. Let us see how it
stands.

We shall take Jacob as a type of the street boy on the East Side, where
he belonged. What does not apply to him in the review applies to his
class. But there was very little of it indeed that he missed or that
missed him.

He was born in a tenement in that section where the Gilder Tenement
House Commission found 324,000 persons living out of sight and reach of
a green spot of any kind, and where sometimes the buildings--front,
middle, and rear--took up ninety-three per cent of all the space in the
block. Such a home as he had was there, and of the things that belonged
to it he was the heir. The sunlight was not among them. It "never
entered" there. Darkness