Many of these children have come to grief through their premature
fling into city life, having thrown off parental control as they
have impatiently discarded foreign ways. Boys of ten and twelve
will refuse to sleep at home, preferring the freedom of an old
brewery vault or an empty warehouse to the obedience required by
their parents, and for days these boys will live on the milk and
bread which they steal from the back porches after the early
morning delivery. Such children complain that there is "no fun"
at home. One little chap who was given a vacant lot to cultivate
by the City Garden Association insisted upon raising only popcorn
and tried to present the entire crop to Hull-House "to be used
for the parties," with the stipulation that he would have "to be
invited every single time." Then there are little groups of
dissipated young men who pride themselves upon their ability to
live without working and who despise all the honest and sober
ways of their immigrant parents. They are at once a menace and a
center of demoralization. Certainly the bewildered parents,
unable to speak English and ignorant of the city, whose children
have disappeared for days or weeks, have often come to
Hull-House, evincing that agony which fairly separates the marrow
from the bone, as if they had discovered a new type of suffering,
devoid of the healing in familiar sorrows.
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