The spirit of enquiry and experiment leads many boys into mischief, and some of their malicious acts are the result of it. Men too readily forget that the boy sees things in a quite different light and relationship from them. Some of the housebreaking adventures that look so bad on a charge-sheet appear quite different when the story is told from the boy's standpoint, and they do not always show such depravity as one would expect. Some boys are always seeking adventures and becoming absorbed in them; others are content to read about deeds of daring, and the works they favour are often crude enough. Occasionally one is taken with a mask and pistol in his possession attempting to rob in the highway, and then we have homilies on the evils of pernicious literature of the "Dick Turpin" sort, which might be more convincing if the homilists were themselves free from connection with stuff that is worse.
The adventurous boys are not those who read much of any kind of book; they are too busy living. The "Blood" is devoured more by the boy who dreams rather than acts; but of the thousands of men who as boys read prohibited books and enjoyed them, few are likely to spend much time on the equally sensational publications that circulate in millions among adults. On the whole, the boy will not get a more distorted view of life from the highly coloured papers he reads than he would obtain from some of the newspapers; and when he is being condemned for his preference for "Bloods," it would not be amiss to remember that these productions have never set themselves to foment in his mind feelings of ill-will against people of other lands. It is not the boys but the adults who are raised by the papers they read into hysterical outbursts of senseless rage or equally senseless fear now of one and now of another continental power; and if "literature" is to be judged by its apparent effect, then these papers are more pernicious than the "Bloods," which the boy prefers to the books which are designed for his moral instruction. There is no comparison between his highwayman--a boy's highwayman who robbed the rich and gave to the poor, to the inversion of all social order--and the industrious apprentice who married his master's daughter, poor girl. The hero is a hero to him because he dares all risks, is true to his friend, is gallant and generous, and faces death with a brave heart. If he does the wrong thing he does it in the right way, and it is not the thief but the man who gains the boy's admiration. As for the industrious one, even a boy knows that there are not enough masters' daughters to go round; and if he revolts at the selfishness of the gospel of getting on, he is right in rejecting such a false basis of morals. We know that the boy's Robin Hood or Dick Turpin never existed in fact; but if they exist in his fancy?