Page:Upbuilders by Lincoln Steffens.djvu/160



of having the boys bring reports from the schools. “If you want a boy’s loyalty, excite his interest.” It was easy enough for the Judge to excite the boy’s interest; the problem was to keep it. In the early history of the court, before the new laws, he had no probation officers to follow up his cases, and since there was too much for him to do, he bethought him of the school teachers. The Judge has always been clear on the point that his Juvenile Court is merely supplementary, that the home and the school are the places where juvenile character should be moulded, and that he had to do only with those children who, for some reason, were not successfully treated in the regular way. Thus he was helping the teachers, and since he needed help, he went to the teachers for it, and he got it. The school teachers of Denver have been his mainstay. All that the Judge required of the teachers was a report as to how the boys in his Court of Probation were doing in deportment and studies.

“What I was after,” the Judge explained, “was something for which I could praise the boy in open court. Believing in approbation as an incentive, I had to have their reports for the boy to show me, in order that I might have a basis for encouraging comment, or, if the reports were not up to the mark, for sympathy. It didn’t