Page:Upbuilders by Lincoln Steffens.djvu/217



wrote him not to steal, and he didn’t. When he came back a month later, he showed me a letter from a man he had worked for to prove it.”

There is more of the story, more triumphs, and more disappointments, and there are more stories just like it, of other gangs. For all the time the Judge was devoting himself to the “River-Fronts,” he was giving himself with the same devotion to his other “cases.” And there were failures as well as successes, and the police and the cynics clung to the failures. As the Judge says, however, the failures were really weak boys. “The husky kids, the kind the cops call ‘dangerous,’ they stuck with me; they showed the police that there ‘ain’t no really bad kids.’ Bad ? I believe,” the Judge said, smiling, and he quoted Riley:

“‘I believe all childern’s good Ef they’re only understood —

Even bad ones, ’pears to me,

’S jes as good as they kin be!’”

He smiles as he quotes, then the smile disap- pears, and he adds, “And that’s so of men, too.”

“Yes, but,’’you say,“ there are criminals born ?”

“Yes,” he replies, “there are criminals born, and there are criminals bred, minors and majors, too. But who bears them, and — what breeds them ? What makes bad boys bad