This desire for adventure also seizes girls.  A group of girls ranging in age from twelve to seventeen was discovered in Chicago last June, two of whom were being trained by older women to open tills in small shops, to pick pockets, to remove handkerchiefs, furs and purses and to lift merchandise from the counters of department stores.  All the articles stolen were at once taken to their teachers and the girls themselves received no remuneration, except occasional sprees to the theaters or other places of amusement.  The girls gave no coherent reason for their actions beyond the statement that they liked the excitement and the fun of it.  Doubtless to the thrill of danger was added the pleasure and interest of being daily in the shops and the glitter of “down town.”  The boys are more indifferent to this downtown life, and are apt to carry on their adventures on the docks, the railroad tracks or best of all upon the unoccupied prairie.

This inveterate demand of youth that life shall afford a large element of excitement is in a measure well founded.  We know of course that it is necessary to accept excitement as an inevitable part of recreation, that the first step in recreation is “that excitement which stirs the worn or sleeping centers of a man’s body and mind.”  It is only when it is followed by nothing else that it defeats its own end, that it uses up strength and does not create it.  In the actual experience of these boys the excitement has demoralized them and led them into law-breaking.  When, however, they seek legitimate pleasure, and say with great pride that they are “ready to pay for it,” what they find is legal but scarcely more wholesome,—­it is still merely excitement.  “Looping the loop” amid shrieks of simulated terror or dancing in disorderly saloon halls, are perhaps the natural reactions to a day spent in noisy factories and in trolley cars whirling through the distracting streets, but the city which permits them to be the acme of pleasure and recreation to its young people, commits a grievous mistake.

May we not assume that this love for excitement, this desire for adventure, is basic, and will be evinced by each generation of city boys as a challenge to their elders?  And yet those of us who live in Chicago are obliged to confess that last year there were arrested and brought into court fifteen thousand young people under the age of twenty, who had failed to keep even the common law of the land.  Most of these young people had broken the law in their blundering efforts to find adventure and in response to the old impulse for self-expression.  It is said indeed that practically the whole machinery of the grand jury and of the criminal courts is maintained and operated for the benefit of youths between the ages of thirteen and twenty-five.  Men up to ninety years of age, it is true, commit crimes, but they are not characterized by the recklessness, the bravado and the horror which have stained our records in Chicago.  An adult with the most sordid experience of life and the most rudimentary notion of prudence, could not possibly have committed them.  Only a utilization of that sudden burst of energy belonging partly to the future could have achieved them, only a capture of the imagination and of the deepest emotions of youth could have prevented them!