Page:Upbuilders by Lincoln Steffens.djvu/185



taught them some elementary lessons about crime and, putting them on their honour, let them go “on probation.” Their “crimes” ceased.

The Judge says his service in the Juvenile Court has taught him many things about chil- dren, but the information he has gained there about parents he characterizes as “amazing.” He ranks fool fathers and incompetent mothers among the first causes of the troubles of children, and if you add vicious and negligent parents you have nine-tenths of all his children’s “cases” accounted for.

“ Children don’t rebel at authority,” he says, “only at ignorant authority,” and there is where many parents fail. “Every father and mother ought to know more about their own children than anyone else. Perhaps, in most cases, they do, but it is amazing how often they don’t. And the reason they don’t is that they haven’t enough love for children to understand them, and not enough character to hold their respect. Their children lie to them, and it is the parents’ fault. I recall hardly a single case in the thousands I have dealt with when we did not get the truth from the child; yet in hundreds of these cases the children had lied to the parents. Why ? They were afraid of their parents; they were not under- stood at home.”