my fellow townsman, who has done such splendid work for this system, said, I was fortunately one of the pioneers in the East under his assistance, in the development of this system and have worked it out in the court in our big city and have built up a system, the results of which are such that I may say to you, if I may speak in a personal way, that when I lay in a hospital last winter, and the doctors told me I was dying, I was consoled with this thought, that whatever I had done to offend my God, or my fellow-men, I had partly atoned for in the creation of the probation system in the city of Yonkers.

We are met there by very difficult and unusual problems. It is a city of nearly 100,000 people, adjacent on the one hand to the city of New York, with 5,000,000 population, on the other to the city of Mount Vernon with about 40,000 people. There are four railroads running through our boundaries, and 19 railroad stations, with the greatest carpet works in the world, the largest soft hat factories in the world, great sugar refineries offering employment to the unskilled. We have there Italians and Poles from the great de-nationalized Polish Empire; Assyrians and Hungarians, Slavs and Finlanders, all the odds and ends of the earth, earning very little money, pitiful beyond belief. Inasmuch as families of six or seven are being provided for on that many dollars a week, it gives rise to tremendous problems, especially on the boy's side of it with reference to probation.

Curiously enough the number of juvenile delinquents has never increased; in other words, with a 40 per cent. increase in the population of our city, the number of boys hasn't increased any in over ten years. It is one of those things I have never been able to figure out. We have had, I should say, 6,000 boys brought into the children's court and probably in the neighborhood of a thousand girls, and most of those cases have been successful. The boy that comes back to us the second and third and fourth time is the boy that has been in the institution. Of course, you have got to allow for this, that if the boy hadn't been fundamentally bad, I never would have put him in the institution in the first place, but the fact is, the recurrent cases are not the probation cases; they have been sent to institutions and somehow or other they

keep coming to me and I have to send them to the jails or penitentiaries.

I want to say to you probation has been a tremendous success. Let me illustrate. Two boys of about fifteen years of age made up their minds to elope with a girl. Of course, fortunately, in most juvenile crimes we do not have to look for the woman at the bottom of it, but in this case there was a woman at the bottom of it. They concluded to elope. One of these boys was an apprentice in a drug store and the druggist carried considerable money in his cash drawer. So it was arranged that this boy who brought his meals to the druggist should administer to him chloral and rob the cash drawer, and then the two boys and girl were going to leave, and they did. The boy gave the man chloral and got $300 and they were apprhended by our police at the New York State line, and brought back. Now, there wasn't a thing on earth against either of those boys outside of that charge. There is the judge's problem; what am I to do. You know from your experience that the boy who gets into trouble is the man that is going to get somewhere else if he grows up to be a man. You know that the boy who never got into any mischief and never into trouble is never going to get into anything. It is the strong, resourceful, the fearless, and courageous boy that gets into mischief. He is the one who breaks the windows; he is the chap who climbs into the orchard and takes the fruit, and the one who sometimes steals other things. I had these boys and I took a chance. I put them on probation; let them out, and the town stood aghast. But the boys made good and grew up. One is working for a great railroad and the other is foreman in a prominent factory and they are as good as anybody so far as I know, and they were just on the border line where if we hadn't had this probation rope to throw out and haul them in, we would have had to commit them to an institution.

Years ago I learned of the collection of money in domestic relations cases. I want to emphasize it to you, that that kind of money has bigger purchasing power than any other money I know of. It goes further; it is the most needed money; it is generally where a man has abandoned his family and there are a lot of chil

dren and the woman is going to make the money spread over a big space. So I got my Board of Estimate to let me appoint a domestic relations probation officer to care for these domestic relations cases and the result has been that today in Yonkers we are collecting over the counter of our court and paying out in the neighborhood of $10,000 every year of that kind of money. It is an especially fine thing for this reason, that the non-support laws of the State of New York, just like the old age support laws, are a failure. It is no remedy to lock a man up in jail. If they would take him and put him to work, and make him produce something and turn the wages over to the woman, we would have some solution; but next to that is this unconstitutional domestic relations court of mine which works pretty well. The men come every Saturday night and Sunday and put up the $2, $3 or $5 until that amounts to $10,000 a year.

Let me repeat what I said at the beginning, that this probation work is more important, more farreaching in your own community for the future of the State, in connection with the administration of justice, than any other power or influence operating in our Commonwealth today.

DR. C. EDWARD JONES, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, ALBANY: I have been listening to find out where we stand, as school men, in connection with this great and interesting work which you men and women are doing throughout the State. I do not believe it is possible for me to do my work or for you to do your work unless we understand what each other is trying to do. The thought that came to me most emphatically and has come out of this meeting today is the thought that is underlying all education, whether it is along academic lines or lines in which you are concerned, it is that we have gotten away beyond treating children as masses. There is no longer the idea that here is a school, but today, here are so many souls, each one different from the other. It is no longer the case of whether the punishment shall fit a specific offense, but how does that child fit to his environment; what can we do to bring about a more perfect harmony that his life may

be the better and stronger for it. I hear you say, the environment and it comes back to my own work as I realize how much environment counts in the work we do, and I mean every one of us, for I find that your work and my own is not so far different. We are all working for the same purpose. Where you find the home of poverty, you find the home of the delinquent and you are going to treat that case differently than if it comes from the better home.

We are confronted by the problem of feeble-mindedness as you are. We have all sorts of "Jukes" right here and by different names. One mother of these came to my office the other day bringing along with her a six year old, and a happy smile on her face. Why it would take all the knowledge of the Constitutional Convention and domestic relations court to untangle the matrimonial relations connected with that particular family. One of the members of that family was in Dannemora; another is in Industry and the third one we sent to the truant school and she came bringing the other and said, “Mr. Jones; I think there is something the matter with Johnnie; I wish you would see what you can do for him." Of course, there is something the matter with Johnnie, there is something the matter with Johnnie's father and mother. I find that you too are intérested in that problem. I hear some people say, "If you can solve the home relations and conditions, you can solve these problems." True you can, but you have got to get hold of the future and not of the past. You cannot expect to do so much for this particular child and woman; when you find the conditions there that you find, you know it is the home of the future you must get hold of, and I find that is one of the keynotes of this meeting today. It is building up homes for the future; you cannot spend too much time on what is already wasted and destroyed. Do what you can, but realize there are limita

tions.

Another thought that has come out of this work, is in regard to the physical condition. Is the child beer fed and coffee fed at home? Take our children who have had nothing but coffee and bread, or bread and beer, do you expect them to be able to maintain the same moral strength as the child that is well fed? We don't. You know something of those conditions; those things temper the severity with which you are to judge of these cases.

Then, here is the question brought up by our Health Director. It is the mentality of the child. A boy came into my office, six feet two inches high, sixteen years old, and said, "Dr. Jones, I want a job." "What can you do?" "I don't know." "James, can you tell me what stret you live on?" "No, sir, but I want a job." "Can you read that sign?" "No, sir, but I want a job." That boy had been in school eight years and yet the eight years in school had done practically nothing for him, not because the school was bad, but because that boy stopped growing mentally when five years of age, and the boy had gone on to be six feet two inches with a weight of nearly 200 pounds and a mind of five years of Such a boy goes out; we cannot keep him after sixteen; he becomes a social problem, perhaps a problem for the probation officers; he gets into trouble; he commits an offense, possibly murder. Is he criminal? To what extent is that kind of a person to be held responsible? Here is the great work, as it seems to me, that lies before you men and women to try and determine and help fix the status of responsibility for all those boys and girls.

age.

It seems to me that we men and women in the schools should be at the bottom of the ladder trying to make your work easier finding these cases before they reach you. If a child is hungry, somehow we must feed him. If a child has bad relations at home, somehow we must endeavor to improve those relations. If there is a need of open-air treatment, then we will put the child in the open-air schools. If it is a case where the child is mentally defective, we will put him in a special class where we can give him the very best he is able to get. We will go to the very limit of that child's power to try to give him all the training that will make him as near as possible self-supporting. If he does become delinquent while with us, we shall endeavor to put him in special classes with men and women whose hearts are in the work and who know how to bring out the best that is in the children. That is the place we must bear in relation to your work. We are all doing probation work; we are but one link of a great chain; we are down at the bottom and I want to feel in my work that by doing the best we can and by coming in as close contact with you as possible, we may be able to make it possible for you to bring