Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 42, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 July 1877 — A Plea for City Boys. [ARTICLE]

A Plea for City Boys.

The boy is an offense in himself. He must have something to do, and as his hands are idle the proverbial provider of occupation for idle hands is always ready with instructions for him. A boy makes noise in utter defiance of the laws of acoustics. Bhoe him in velvet and carpet your house as you tyill, your boy shall make such a hubbub with his heels as no watchman’s rattle ever gave forth. Doors in his hands always shut with a violence which jars the whole house, and he is certain to acquire each day the art of screaming or whistling in some wholly new and excrutiating wajr. Loving his mother so violently that his caresses derange her attire and seriously endanger her bones, ready to die in her defense if need be, he nevertheless torments her from morning to night, and allows her no possible peace until slumber closes his throat and eyelids, and Deprives his hands and feet of their demoniac canning. In publicyour boy isequally a nuisance. Collectively or individually he offends the public in the streets. Whatever he does is sure to be wrong. He monopolizes space and takes to himself all the air theie is for acoustical purposes. Your personal peculiarities interest him, and with all the frankness of his soul he comments upon your appearance, addressing his remarks to his fellow on the next block. Nevertheless, the boy has his uses. He is the material out of which men are to be made for the next generation. He is not a bad fellow—that is to say, he is not intentionally or consciously bad. There are springs in his limbs which keep him in perpetual motion, and the devil of uproar of which he is possessed utters the ear-piercing sounds which annoy his elders, but the utterance of whicn he can no more restrain than he can keep his boots or trousers from wearing out. In a ten-acre lot, well away from the house, the boy is a picturesque and agreeable person; it is only when one must come into closer cortact with him that his presence causes suffering and suggests a statue to King Herod. It is in cities that the boy makes himself felt most disagreeably, and we fancy that the fault is not altogether his. As the steam which bursts boilers would be a perfectly harmless vapor but for the sharp restraint that is put upon it, so the effervescent boy becomes dangerous only when he is confined, when an effort is made to compress him into smaller space than the law of his expansive being absolutely requires. We send him upon the war-path by encroaching upon his hunting grounds; we drive him into hostility by treating him as a public enemy. In most of our dealings with him, in cities, our effort is to suppress him, anu it is an unwise system. If his ball-playing in the streets becomes an annoyance, we simply forbid ball-playing in the streets, and it is an inevitable consequence that, deprived of his ball, he will throw stones at streetlamps or at policemen. What else is he to do? In Brooklyn, for example, whose streets are long ana wide, there wits thought to be room enough for boys, and the inspiriting rumble of the velocipede was heard there until somebody objected, when straightway the policemen were directed to arrest all machines of that character, whether with two, three or four wheels,, found upon sidewalks. Now this order; we hold, was not only cruel, but it tfiiß unwise as well. Without a doubt the velocipedes were a source of serious annoyance in crowded thoroughfares, but they are not so in streets in which jedestrians aro few, as they are in fully one-half of Brooklyn thoroughfares. Velocipederiding might have been forbidden in the main thoroughfares, and permitted in iessfrequented ones, and the boy would have been content; to forbid it where it offends nobody—merely for the sake ot preventing it where, it does offend—is illogical and unjust, and, worse still, it is unwise. The boy cannot be banished or confined, and, lacking his velocipede, he will resort to something more annoying still. What it will be we do not pretend to guess, but for its capacity to annoy we may safely trust to the boy’s ingenuity. Speaking in all seriousness, it is not well to suppress the sports of boys from which they derive strength and health and manly vigor of body. We may and must regulate these things; but mere suppression is a crude and tyrannical method of dealing with them. In Boston, a city of notions, whose notions are sometimes surprisingly wise and good, care is taken to give the boys room. A sport which becomes annoying is not suppressed, but is given ample room in places where it will annoy least; and when, for example, certain streets are publicly set apart for coasting, as they are in Boston every winter, the police have no difficulty in preventing coasting elsewhere. The boy who may ride his sled or his velocipede to his heart’s content in one street will npt care to intrude upon another. We heed to adopt a like system in our larger cities. The boys most have room in which to exercise and grow. If we do not give it to them in one place they will take it in another, to our sore inconvenience. —N- Y. Keening Feet. —We ask advice, but we mean approImtion.— Colton. 7