represented by tickets transferred, so that debts were paid with "butters" that had
never been seen. An agrarian party arose and demanded a redistribution of land
from the monopolists, as Sir Henry Maine shows often happened in the old
village community. Legislation and judicial procedure were developed and
quarrels settled by arbitration, ordeal, and wager, and punishment by bumping
often followed the decision of the boy folk-mote. Scales of prices for
commodities in "butters" or in pie-currency were evolved, so that we here have
an almost entirely spontaneous but amazingly rapid recapitulation of the social
development of the race by these boys.
From a study of 1,166 children's organizations described as a language lesson in
school composition, Mr. Sheldon[28] arrives at some interesting results.
American children tend strongly to institutional activities, only about thirty per
cent of all not having belonged to some such organization. Imitation plays a very
important rôle, and girls take far more kindly than boys to societies organized by
adults for their benefit. They are also more governed by adult and altruistic
motives in forming their organizations, while boys are nearer to primitive man.
Before ten comes the period of free spontaneous imitation of every form of adult
institution. The child reproduces sympathetically miniature copies of the life
around him. On a farm, his play is raking, threshing, building barns, or on the
seashore he makes ships and harbors. In general, he plays family, store, church,
and chooses officers simply because adults do. The feeling of caste, almost
absent in the young, culminates about ten and declines thereafter. From ten to
fourteen, however, associations assume a new character; boys especially cease to
imitate adult organizations and tend to form social units characteristic of lower
stages of human evolution—pirates, robbers, soldiers, lodges, and other savage
reversionary combinations, where the strongest and boldest is the leader. They
build huts, wear feathers and tomahawks as badges, carry knives and toy-pistols,
make raids and sell the loot. Cowards alone, together they fear nothing. Their
imagination is perhaps inflamed by flash literature and "penny-dreadfuls." Such
associations often break out in decadent country communities where, with fewer
and feebler offspring, lax notions of family discipline prevail and hoodlumism is
the direct result of the passing of the rod. These barbaric societies have their
place and give vigor; but if unreduced later, as in many unsettled portions of this
country, a semisavage state of society results. At twelve the predatory function is
normally subordinated, and if it is not it becomes dangerous, because the
members are no longer satisfied with mere play, but are stronger and abler to do
harm, and the spice of danger and its fascination may issue in crime. Athleticism
is now the form into which these wilder instincts can be best transmuted, and