disease. Prophylactic treatment is clearly indicated. The
boy who flings mud and stones is entering his protest in his own way
against the purblind policy that gave him jails for schools and the
gutter for a playground; that gave him dummies for laws and the tenement
for a home. He is demanding his rights, of which he has been
cheated,--the right to his childhood, the right to know the true dignity
of labor that makes a self-respecting manhood. The gang, rightly
understood, is our ally, not our enemy. Like any ailment of the body, it
is a friend come to tell us of something that has gone amiss. The thing
for us to do is to find out what it is, and set it right.

That is the story of the gang. That we have read and grasped its lesson
at last, many things bear witness. Here is the League for Political
Education providing a playground for the children up on the West Side,
near the model tenements which I described. Just so! With a decent home
and a chance for the boy to grow into a healthy man, his political
education can proceed without much further hindrance. Now let the League
for Political Education trade off the policeman's club for a boys' club,
and it may consider its course fairly organized.

I spoke of the instinct for the crowd in the man as evidence that the
slum had got its grip on him. And it is true of the boy. The experience
that the helpless poor will not leave their slum when a chance of better
things is offered is wearily familiar to most of us. One has to have
resources to face the loneliness of the woods and the fields. We have
seen what resources the slum has at its command. In the boy it laid hold
of the instinct for organization, the desire to fall in and march in
line that belongs to all boys, and is not here, as abroad, cloyed with
military service in the young years,--and anyhow is stronger in the
American boy than in his European brother,--and perverted it to its own
use. That is the simple secret of the success of the club, the brigade,
in winning back the boy. It is fighting the street with its own weapon.
The gang is the club run wild.

How readily it owns the kinship was never better shown than by the
experience of the college settlement girls, when they first went to make
friends in the East Side tenements. I have told it before, but it will
bear telling again, for it holds the key to the whole business. They
gathered in the drift, all the little embryo gangs that were tuning up
in the dis