Page:Upbuilders by Lincoln Steffens.djvu/126

Rh The fact that that boy had a good home; the circumstances which led him to—not steal, but ‘swipe’ something; the likelihood of his not doing it again—these were ‘evidence’ pertinent, nay vital, to his case. Yet the Law did not require the production of such evidence. The Law? Justice ? I stopped the machinery of justice to pull that boy out of its grinders. But he was guilty; what was to be done with him ? I didn’t know. I said I would take care of him myself, but I didn’t know what I meant to do — except to visit him and his mother at their home. And I did visit them, often, and—well, we—his mother and I, with the boy helping—we saved that boy, and to-day he is a fine young fellow, industrious, self-respecting, and a friend of the Court.”

This was the beginning, the Judge will tell you, of his practice of putting juvenile offenders, not in prison to be punished, but on probation to be saved. It wasn’t. The Judge is looking backward, and he sees things in retrospect as he has thought them out since, logically, with his mind. If you should take his word for it, you would get the impression that this first “probation case” was the beginning of his famous Juvenile Court, the most remarkable institution of the kind in all the world. And if you got that impression in just that way, you might do as the reformers of