A VETERAN BURGLAR AT FOURTEEN.
By T.
A LAD of fourteen was recently caught in a robbery in a suburb of New York City. He confessed in the police court to sixty-five house robberies, and admitted having confederates in his evil deeds. Promises of clemency, threats of severe punishment, and solitary confinement, were all alike unavailing in inducing him to reveal who his confederates were. He showed all the hardihood and tactfulness of an old experienced and hardened criminal. The child belonged to a respected family, who are members of the church, and he himself was a Sunday-school scholar. The church and the Sunday-school were working to plant the seeds of morality, but the baleful literature that crowds the news-stands and book-marts did their awful work. Instances of this kind emphasize the fact that parents should make close companions of their children, and not only know the books and papers they read, but also the company they keep. The fact that our city life affords such a university of criminality that a boy of fourteen may be graduated into a hard-faced criminal, should thoroughly arouse every father and mother in the land. When we consider that the city population is greatly on the increase, and then take into account how our boys and girls in the cities are being tutored in vice and crime, what a terrible prospect is placed before us. We must not shut our eyes to these things. They present conditions that this generation will surely have to deal with, and that, too, at a very early day.