But on the score of the city’s inevitable “Thou shalt not,” it is the boy who suffers more than any other member of the community.  His intensely motor propensities, love of adventure, dim idea of modern property rights, and the readiness with which he merges into the stimulating and mischief-loving “gang” operate to constitute him the peerless nuisance of the congested district, the scourge of an exasperated and neurasthenic public, the enemy of good order and private rights.

Hence juvenile delinquency and crime increase proportionately with the crowding of the modern city, the boy offending five times to the girl’s once, and directing 80 per cent of his misdemeanors against property rights.  In the city of Chicago alone the 1909 records show that in one year there passed through the courts 3,870 children under seventeen years of age, 10,449 under twenty years, and 25,580 under twenty-five years of age.  But it is not the actual delinquency of which the law takes account that most impresses one; it is rather the weight of failure and mediocrity, the host of “seconds” and “culls” that the city treatment of childhood produces.

The constrictions, vicissitudes, and instability of city life often make such havoc of the home that the boy is practically adrift at an early age.  He has no abiding-place of sufficient permanency to create a wealth of association or to develop those loyalties that enrich the years and serve as anchorage in the storms of life.  He moves from one flat to another every year, and in many cases every six months.  In such a kaleidoscopic experience the true old-fashioned neighbor, whose charitable judgment formerly robbed the law of its victims, is sadly missed.  Formerly allowance was made out of neighborly regard for the parents of bothersome boys, but among the flat-dwellers of today proximity means alienation, familiarity breeds contempt, and far from being neighbors, those who live across the hall or above or below are aggrieved persons who have to put up with the noise of an unknown rascal whose parents, like themselves, occupy temporarily these restricted quarters—­these homes attenuated beyond recognition.

A garden plot, small live stock, pets, woodpile, and workshop are all out of the question, for the city has deprived the average boy not only of fit living quarters but of the opportunity to enact a fair part of his glorious life-drama within the friendly atmosphere of home.  He cannot collect things with a view to proprietorship and construction and have them under his own roof.  The noise and litter incident to building operations of such proportions as please boys will not be tolerated.  Moreover, this home, which has reached the vanishing point, makes almost no demand for his co-operation in its maintenance.  There are no chores for the flat boy wherein he may be busy and dignified as a partner in the family life.  To make the flat a little more sumptuous and call it an apartment does not solve the problem, and with the rapid decrease of detached houses and the occupation of the territory with flat buildings the city is providing for itself a much more serious juvenile problem than it now has.