Little Joe took this good man’s advice and went to live in the Y. M. C. A. building. He did not turn out to be a bank cashier or president, but what was better, Joe turned out to be a General Secretary of one of the largest Y. M. C. A.’s among the colored people of this country, and in that way has been instrumental in saving a great many other boys from the gutter.
But Joe would never have amounted to anything if he had not been taken away from the wicked influences of the street, and placed on the road to higher things. The worst school in this world that any boy can go to is the school of the street. The school of the street turns out the most impure, the most dishonest and the most illiterate boys, and those boys and girls who ever rise to be anything or anybody in the world are the ones who leave the influences of the street in due time, as Little Joe did. The street offers most of its work and most of its attractions at night, as many boys can tell. The life of the street leads to no career that is worth following. The good careers are made by those whom the street has not had a chance to spoil, or by those who are taken out of the streets before they become hopeless cases.
There is no greater error than the common notion that it is a good thing to let a boy run the streets and become “hard” and “tough” and “have his wits sharpened” and make “a little man” of himself, as some foolish people say. A boy learns more downright mischief in one night in the street than he can unlearn in the home in six months. And so, what will the teaching of the home, the public school and the Sunday-school amount to, if we are going to give our boys in their young and tender years the freedom of the streets? If now and then a street boy—that is to say, a boy hardened in the ways of the street—does get a good place, in most cases he will lose it and fall back to the old, free life of the gutter. The boys who succeed are the boys who get away from, or who are taken away from, the influences of the street and who are surrounded by better and more wholesome influences. Those who remain under the influences of the street become in the course of time members of the great army of beggars, tramps and criminals. It is a great pity that there should be so many stories going the rounds which tell about newsboys and messenger boys and so on rising to be bank clerks and telegraph-operators and so forth. On the whole, these stories are misleading, and for the reason that they seem to give the impression to many innocent boys and to many thoughtless parents that the surest way to give a boy a good start in life is to send him out into the streets to “rough it” and fight his way to the front over beer bottles, games of chance, the race-track, and the pool room, to the accompaniment of vulgar jokes, profane swearing and evil associates. I repeat: The school of the street is the worst school in the world, and the sooner boys get out of it the better it will be for them.