Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/454

 440 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

though lacking definite organization, are essentially clubs, with their presidents the real leaders. Their assembly hall is the street in summer, and, if so fortunate, an old barn or shed, or an underground cave, of which there are several in the city, or in a few instances a back room or a barber-shop or some old building. They meet here by appointment, and in some places have boxing-gloves, and a little home-made apparatus for a "gym" pitiful attempts of the boy nature to find adequate expression. The telephone poles, and the cables supporting them, form their principal gymnasium. Smoking is almost uni- versal, the cigarette having a strong hold upon them. Too often, unguided and undirected, taking their ideals from the street- and saloon-life, they find in the cheap novel food for their imagination and thought, and consequently for action. An observing justice remarked: "Thoughts are deeds and may become crimes." The wildest of our country boys gives expres- sion to his imagination by taking a boat and rowing down the river to be Robinson Crusoe, and his expression ends in harm- less disillusion. With the city boy it is not so. Different are the sources from which he gets his ideas of bravery, and the carrying out of his " noble deeds " usually ends in the police courts, and he has entered upon the first stage of that process we have devised for making misguided boys hardened criminals.

There are, of course, exceptions. The gave me in

simple, telling terms its definition of a good novel. 1 Two of the eleven drink, and these two are being ostracized by the others. The "order of business " of these clubs is not fixed, but consists in telling the biggest lies and the best, which often signifies the dirtiest, stories, and in gossip about their " girls." The nearest approach to real business is in plans to dodge the police. Faulty as they are, bad as is their influence in many cases, they serve ofttimes to keep the boys together and away from the saloons, and form a nucleus about which here and there an occasional club has been formed by a settlement or

1 " It's none o' them trashy stories about things that couldn't never happen. You are sure there ain't nothing improbable in it. Maybe no one ever did it, but anybody could have done it."