a program, and that the only difficulty lay in finding leaders who were
able to carry it out. This difficulty has been with us through all the
years of growth and development in the Boys' Club until now, with its
five-story building, its splendid equipment of shops, of recreation and
study rooms, that group alone is successful which commands the services of a resourceful and devoted leader.
The dozens of younger children who from the first came to Hulb
House were organized into groups which were not quite classes and not
quite clubs. The value of these groups consisted almost entirely in
arousing a higher imagination and in giving the children the opportunity which they could not have in the crowded schools, for initiative
and for independent social relationships. The public schools then contained little hand work of any sort, so that naturally any instruction
which we provided for the children took the direction of this supplementary work. But it required a constant effort that the pressure of
poverty itself should not defeat the educational aim. The Italian girls
in the sewing classes would count that day lost when they could not
carry home a garment, and the insistence that it should be neatly
made seemed a super-refinement to those in dire need of clothing.
As these clubs have been continued during the twenty years, they
have developed classes in the many forms of handicraft which the
newer education is so rapidly adapting for the delight of children; but
they still keep their essentially social character and still minister to
that large number of children who leave school the very week they are
fourteen years old, only too eager to close the schoolroom door forever
on a tiresome task that is at last well over. It seems to us important
that these children shall find themselves permanently attached to a
House that offers them evening clubs and classes with their old companions, that merges as easily as possible the school life into the working life and does what it can to find places for the bewildered young
things looking for work. A large proportion of the delinquent boys
brought into the Juvenile Court in Chicago are the oldest sons in large
families whose wages are needed at home. The grades from which
many of them leave school, as the records show, are piteously far from
the seventh and eighth where the very first instruction in manual
training is given, nor have they been caught by any other abiding interest.
In spite of these flourishing clubs for children early established at