Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/858

 OUR ISHMAEL.

You may see him in all our crowded centers of life, this Ish- mael of the city desert, this appalling product of modern indus- trialism, this distorted travesty of childhood the street boy, newsboy, bootblack, fakir ; and in all these guises, convenient scapegoat upon whose defenseless head the undiscriminating policeman daily wreaks the vengeance of outraged society.

Thrust upon the street while yet a mere infant, and made to add his small quota to the family earnings, his pennies some- times supplement the hard-earned dollars his mother bend- ing over the washboard, or crawling over office floors painfully brings to the support of the family in a fatherless, or worse than fatherless, home. Sometimes the shortsighted greed of the Old World peasant sends the toddler to the pavement with the warn- ing that it will not be well for him to return with unsold papers, or lacking their price in his baby hand.

Whatever be the motive that starts the boy upon his indus- trial career as a sidewalk merchant or mechanic, he usually con- tinues in this primary commercial school until he is of an age and stature to command some more lucrative employment ; for after a year or two of this vagrant life it is almost impossible to induce a boy to submit to the restraints of ordinary school life, even when, in rare cases, the opportunity opens for him to exchange the freedom of the street for the confinement and dis- cipline of the schoolroom.

This training of the street produces certain well-marked effects upon those who survive its hardships effects that lead the child of poor heredity, the degenerate, the weakling, by a clearly traceable path to the reform school, the house of correc- tion, the penitentiary. But upon the boy of stronger fiber, pos- sessed of physical vigor, ingenuity, will-power, and a certain elemental honesty, the effect of this harsh training is not, per- haps, altogether bad, considering the conditions he must meet as he advances in life; it certainly develops courage, persistency,

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