the educational forces of the community.

The state which supports the public school is also coming to the rescue
of children through protective legislation. This is another illustration
that the beginnings of social advance have often resulted from the
efforts to defend the weakest and least-sheltered members of the
community. The widespread movement which would protect children from
premature labor, also prohibits them from engaging in occupations in
which they are subjected to moral dangers. Several American cities have
of late become much concerned over the temptations to which messenger
boys, delivery boys, and newsboys are constantly subjected when their
business takes them into vicious districts. The Chicago vice commission
makes a plea for these "children of the night" that they shall be
protected by law from those temptations which they are too young and too
untrained to withstand. New York and Wisconsin are the only states which
have raised the legal age of messenger boys employed late at night to
twenty-one years. Under the inadequate sixteen-year limit, which
regulates night work for children in Illinois, boys constantly come to
grief through their familiarity with the social evil. One of these, a
delicate boy of seventeen, had been put into the messenger service by
his parents when their family doctor had recommended out-of-door work.
Because he was well-bred and good-looking, he became especially popular
with the inmates of disreputable houses. They gave him tips of a dollar
and more when he returned from the errands which he had executed for
them, such as buying candy, cocaine or morphine. He was inevitably
flattered by their attentions and pleased with his own popularity.
Although his mother knew that his duties as a messenger boy occasionally
took him to disreputable houses, she fervently hoped his early training
might keep him straight, but in the end realized the foolhardiness of
subjecting an immature youth to these temptations. The vice commission
report gives various detailed instances of similar experiences on the
part of other lads, one of them being a high-school boy who was merely
earning extra money as a messenger boy during the rush of Christmas
week.

The regulations in Boston, New York, Cincinnati, Milwaukee and St. Louis
for the safeguarding of these children may be but a forecast of the care
which the city will at last learn to devise for youth under special
temptations. Because the vari