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249 Appendix Selections from Articles and Speeches of Madeline McDowell Breckinridge A Day in Judge Mack’s Juvenile Court in Chicago A day in Judge Mack’s Juvenile Court in Chicago is apt to be a day full of the sound of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Children accused of some petty crime when they are told to give their version, when the judge bids them “look up at him and speak out,” usually dissolve in tears; this doesn’t indicate either guilt or innocence; sometimes the judge’s kindly bantering, “what you scared of” restores confidence, if not composure; sometimes it seems as if no human power could stop the flow. But the most vociferous wailing comes from the small boys upon whom sentences are passed that are not to their mind. John Worthy is a juvenal [sic] penal institution, a prison school within the city; St. Charles is a State Industrial school in the country, which means protracted banishment from the joys of the streets. There were no more copious tears shed, no more bitter wailings voiced, one morning that I sat by and listened, than by three small boys to whom these fates were allotted. They had wasted no tears before the sentence; they had defended themselves with a pretty good show of confidence, but when the judge, after listening and questioning good naturedly, spoke their doom with the same calm kindness , the boys knew that the time had passed for defense and had come for appeal. They had all been before the court a number of times before; they were confirmed street urchins with the waywardness and the impudence of the species; but the casual observer would have been taken in, 250 Madeline McDowell Breckinridge would have had hard work to resist the impulse to pity, when the big gray eyes of the youngest overflowed, the muscles around the mouth worked pathetically and he clutched the bar of justice and held on even after the bailiffs of the court were hustling him away, wailing, “Please, jedge, yer honor, give me one more chance. Oh, please, jedge, yer honor.” Nor did the wail of these three cease as long as there was a chance that “jedge, yer honor” might be moved; they could be heard resounding all down the court house corridor to the elevator shaft. Three other boys who had run away from a Catholic institution and who gave as their proper reasons for so doing that they had been given sour milk to drink and that the brother beat them with a horsewhip, were almost as vociferous in their distress because they weren’t sent to St. Charles; they had come to the conclusion that as a choice of evils St. Charles was preferable to the discipline of the brothers. They told the judge that they would get more beatings now for running away; he encouraged them to face the music, and he sent a private injunction to the brother to try milder methods of receiving the prodigal sons this time, but he destroyed the fallacy in those youthful minds that by running away they could escape the long arm of justice. But not all the cases are even mildly comic. There is the mother, whose one redeeming trait is her love for her child, told that she has been given her last chance and that the court will this time have to take her child away from her; she doesn’t weep, this mother, but she takes her child to a corner of the court room and sits holding it in her lap and coddling it till the officers of the institution to which it has been confided come to take it, and the sight is touching. There is the mother with a child of six, whose father had deserted it and left it to her support, and for whom the struggle and the sorrow have been too much; she is convinced now that “things” are following her, and she consents to let the child be taken because it will then be safe from the “following things.” The probation officer is told to take the mother to the Hull House physician for examination , and one chokes down a feeling in the throat, hoping that the fact of the juvenile court having taken cognizance in this case may finally mean for the mother restoration to mental health and to her child. There is another mother with seven children, from four to eleven, whose...

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