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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