Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/126

114 on this subject are very crude. Punishment—very severe and the same for every folly and crime—satisfies them for a while, but the time surely comes when some one suggests the possibility of mitigating circumstances, and finally, after hours of discussion, punishment is graded. Then some one has the thought that, after all, punishment is not the word to be used, or, indeed, the idea to be carried out in a club, and that the various penalties paid for breaking laws (suspension or expulsion usually) should merely be regarded as a means of self-defense by the club, and as the natural consequence of crime by the offender. Little by little, from a crude and brutal or sentimentally weak set of laws, grows a constitution not only written in the correct form, but containing much truth and justice. But in starting a new club it is better for the director not to give the club a perfect constitution, for it is only the years of discussion and experience out of which that perfect constitution is evolved, that helps the boys. All the good that comes from club life must come slowly and gradually—so gradually that all the minutest details of the machine of government are known and understood by the boys, and acknowledged by them, one by one, to be necessary. Figuratively speaking, and perhaps stretching the idea a little to make the meaning clear, they have broadly in the two hours of the club's session, and in detail in the three years of club life and growth, lived through all the stages of man's development, from his simplest attempts at law-making thousands of years ago to the complex machinery by which we are governed to-day. By understanding the necessity for every law as it is made, the boys become willing law-keepers; they become intelligent ones also, for they see that constant watchfulness and thoughtfulness are necessary to keep those laws up to the ever-growing and changing requirements of humanity.

Although the ultimate authority is, of course, vested in the director, in the Junior Good Government Clubs the boys are encouraged to stand on their own feet, so to speak, and to make decisions on all questions themselves, as it is believed that in this way their characters will be strengthened and their reasoning powers developed. The director of "No. 1" goes so far as to tell her boys that she does not claim infallibility; that if they see any untruth in what she tells them, or any flaw in her logic, it will not signify disrespect or impertinence to argue against her, just as they would if they disagreed with an ordinary member. Indeed, more than once has the director humbly given in to the superior judgment of one of the boys. However, it is sometimes more convenient if the boys have not the habit of making points of order against her.

The importance of letting the boys see the natural consequences of wrong-doing is inestimable, and it is because of this that the