are brought before the grand jury of Cook County, and that most of the offenders are either juveniles or have laid the foundation for a criminal career in their youth, and that the present repressive agencies are inadequate to stem the tide of crime in the great cities, the beneficent purposes of this act, tending as they do to minimize crime by striking at its roots, call for the co-operation of the officers of the law and all good citizens to render it as effective as possible under present constitutional limitations. Embodying, as it does, the ripest thought upon this question, the results of scientific inquiry and special study of the causes and conditions of crime, and the lessons from practical experience, with various corrective and repressive agencies employed, not only in this country but in Europe, this act, unless thwarted by persistent and unnatural foes, by niggardly means for carrying out its provisions, or by the assaults of those who seek to defeat rather than promote beneficial legislation, will prove the dawn of a new era in our criminal history, and of a brighter day for the people of Illinois."

All of which is respectfully submitted,

Chicago, Oct. 28, 1899.

EPHRAIM BANNING,

HARVEY B. HURD,
JOHN W. ELA,

EDWIN BURRITT SMITH,
MERRITT STARR.

WHAT THE FUTURE PROMISES

The Juvenile Court law, as has been said already, is an assured success. Still though no longer an experiment, it cannot be said to have passed completely out of the stage of its infancy. Coupled to the wonder that such a law had not been enacted years and years ago, is the still greater wonder aroused by the immense field of activity which it opens up, and the practically limitless area of possibility which it controls.

The little group of workers in Chicago which first conceived the law has been magnified into an immense army of earnest, thinking men and women who recognize in the child problem the problem of problems. Herein, they have discovered, lie the forces which move civilization toward weal or toward woe. How to regulate these forces is a question that ranks above all other questions. And so the

movement begun humbly in the late Judge Hurd's office in Chicago, December 10, 1898, now claims disciples in every section of the country. They are to be numbered by the thousand, and are to be found in the churches and in the schools, in the clubs and in social organizations of every description, in the academic sections of the learned professions, and especially among the men who shape a nation's destiny into its permanent form, the thinkers and students in the domain of active research in our great universities. The movement gathers strength every day, intellectual strength; it is enlisting recruits all the time, thoughtful, educated men and women, their sympathies with their struggling kindred, the class that has in every age furnished the guides and leaders in all great social movements.

This is a movement whose growth and full force cannot yet be measured by statistics, though the statistics available are enilghtening and well worthy of study. Twenty states have followed the lead of Illinois, and in twice as many of our great cities, courts, probation officers and specially trained observers are grappling with the difficult problem of how to deal with the dependent, the delinquent and the defective among the child population. The active, positive work of rescue and regulation being accomplished, great as it is, must be ranked as second in importance to its investigation and research phases. Every Juvenile Court is a laboratory. Everyone of its sessions is a clinic -of priceless value to science and to society. The causes that produce delinquency, the infantile disease that in later years broadens into crime, are here diagnosed and tabulated. Inferences are arranged into appropriate groupings, and effects, apparently divergent and different, credited to their generic causes. The sources curacy, the question of remedy arises next. The scientist engaged in his laboratory assiduously seeking some mystic vims to save mankind from physical disease, has not a higher or nobler

mission than that which aims to check, and to reduce to a minimum, if possible, to eradicate, the germs of child abnormalities which in their development are the scourge of society.

It would be impossible to overestimate the importance of the problems embraced in the field of operations covered by the Juvenile Court law. These problems affect every section of the community, from the most obscure cranny in a slum to the gilded drawing room of the millionaire's palace. No person can afford to ignore them. They influence not only the Nation's health, but the Nation's life. Of what avail are wealth, splendor, international prestige, if the millions of men and women upon which these depend for permanency have in their midst perennial springs of degeneracy and moral disease? Therefore it is, that we

find all the agencies of civilization, the press, the school, the pulpit, the legislative bodies, local, state and national, co-operating in the effort to cope with an ever-increasing youthful delinquency.

In Chicago the movement has been singularly fortunate in the number and quality of its supporters. The beginning made by the late Judge Hurd and his associates was skillfully and intelligently followed up by Judge Tuthill and an increased guard of enthusiastic workers. All the time it gained in strength and importance. Today its failure is impossible.

No more convincing evidence of this could be cited than the unanimity and earnestness with which the county and city authorities joined in the movement which eventuated in the Juvenile Court buildings. Chicago is to have a model children's block-court house, school, dormitories, with appropriate offices and appurtenances. This group of buildings will be situated in the most densely populated section of the city, the section, too, from which most of the material for the court work is expected to be drawn. Adjoining the buildings will be playgrounds and a small