a magnificent civic center. In these centers are grouped most of the municipal and other public buildings. From them the great avenues of the city radiate. Not only are they breathing spaces in the heart of the city and beauty spots to gaze upon, but convenient groupings of public buildings and convenient in transacting public business. The adoption of city plans will go far in starting American cities along the road to scientific city building.

SUPPLEMENTARY READING

CHAPTER IV

Municipal Functions

1 The Juvenile Court.-Very decided improvements in the police magistracy are being made by the creation of separate courts for special classes of offenders. Long ago the attention of reformers was drawn to the anomaly of arraigning little children charged with petty offenses alongside hardened criminals at the bar of justice. It took many years of agitation, however, to secure the establishment of separate courts for the trial of juvenile offenders. The first children's court in the United States, according to official investigation of the Bureau of the Census, was established in Rochester, on August 23, 1895. Albany followed in 1897, Woonsocket (R. I.) in 1898, and Denver in 1899. At the present time all of the large cities have juvenile courts; Chicago (1899), New York (1902), Philadelphia (1903), St. Louis (1903), Cincinnati (1904), Seattle (1905).

The offenses triable in juvenile courts vary from city to city. In New York crimes of all kinds are included, except capital offenses. In St. Paul all violations of state laws and city ordinances by children are triable in the juvenile court. In Chicago, dependents and delinquents, and in Pittsburgh incorrigible delinquents are brought before the children's court. The maximum age of offenders triable in juvenile courts is about sixteen years. In Chicago it is seventeen years for boys and eighteen years for girls; in New York it is sixteen years for boys and girls alike; in Detroit it is sixteen years for boys and eighteen for girls.

The New York law provides that whenever a child is taken into custody it shall be the duty of the officer making the arrest to proceed with all convenient speed to the children's court if in session and if not in session, to the rooms of a duly incorporated

society (the Gerry Society) for the prevention of cruelty to children. It was at first specifically declared to be unlawful for a police officer to take a juvenile offender to a police station; but this requirement was omitted in an amendment of 1911.

Experience shows that the judge in the children's court should be a man peculiarly qualified for the work, and should devote his entire attention to trying juvenile offenders. The law of 1910 reorganizing the lower courts of New York City, however, did not create a special children's magistracy, but provided that justices of the court of special sessions should be assigned from time to time by the chief justice to hear and dispose of cases involving the trial of children.-Charles A. Beard, "American City Government,” p. 179.

2 Fire Losses and Fire Apparatus.-A recent expert investigation shows that the actual fire loss, in one year, in the destruction of buildings and contents in the United States, was $215,000,000 or about eight times the per capita loss sustained by European countries from fire. It is estimated that in the period of thirty-six years, from 1875 to 1910, property to the amount of $5,120,000,000 was destroyed by fire in the United States.

This terrible annual loss in life and property is thus graphically portrayed by a fire insurance expert: "If the buildings consumed were placed on lots with sixty-five feet frontage they would line both sides of a street extending from New York City to Chicago; and if we reckon the killed and injured by fire, a person in journeying along this street of desolation would pass in every thousand feet a ruin from which an injured person was taken, while at every three-quarters of a mile he would encounter the charred remains of a person who had been burned to death. Words are unequal to the task of depicting the awful sorrow which follows in the pathway of fire or of properly characterizing the act of those who are even innocently or ignorantly responsible for the waste of life and property so frequently chronicled in the fire record of the United States."

To combat this dreadful enemy, American cities have the most highly organized and the best-equipped fire fighting systems to be found anywhere in the world.