Yet that mother, when he was breaking her heart by his actions and most willing to do it, never failed in love, in patience, in deep understanding of his moral twist and incapacity.
A girl born of ordinarily intelligent and moral parents became a prodigy of sex perversion and the accomplice of thieves and murderers.
She gave untold misery to all her family, but the father never gave up his search for her when she left the home and never failed to give her succor and the most tender care when she came back worn and ill, and at last left all other interests in life to snatch her away from bad companions and try to establish her in a new place and a better surrounding.
The story of the prodigal son was taken from life itself; it is the moving story of the one greatest affection of the family bond, that for the bone of bone and the flesh of flesh, the child that needs most the tenderness of the parent, the child that has worn out all other patience and lost all other consideration and has only the claim of its deep need to insure its parent's service.
=Children's Courts.=--Society has lately become wise and humane enough to establish Children's Courts for Juvenile Delinquents.

These, beginning merely in "Separate Hearings" in Boston Courts, and assuming definite and autonomous form in Chicago, have become more widespread and more inclusive in character.

Now we are securing, as by a recent State Law in New York, the County Courts for children, in which the limitations of local sentiment and neighborhood reluctance to testify of family conditions are surmounted and yet the near-at-hand interest in the children is preserved.
All modern philanthropy tends toward dealing with wayward boys and girls as those who need and should have not punishment but education, necessary but kindly restraint, protection from bad surroundings and training toward self-support.

To this we are adding Domestic Relations Courts dealing with juvenile delinquents not, as some one has said, "so as to punish parents for the wrong-doing of their children," but rather as indicating the recognition of the fact that one member of the family cannot be "saved" without an effort to save all the other members, and that in the family relationship there are permanent bonds that courts should recognize and seek to enforce and make more helpful to every individual concerned.
=Domestic Relations Courts.=--When the history of cases coming before either Children's Courts or Domestic Relations Courts is studied, certain facts of social condition stand out prominently as causes for juvenile delinquency.

First of all, the broken family, one in which there has been separation of father and mother, is a cause of child-neglect and consequent wrong-doing.