CHILDREN'S COURTS. Special judi ciary institutions for dealing with cases of juvenile waywardness or parental remissness in a reformative rather than a retributive spirit. The general theory of these courts is that, for obvious reasons, children should not be judged in ways and by means designed for their elders; that, in other words, the delinquent child is not to be regarded and treated as a criminal, but merely as an unfortunate needing the special supervision or protection of the State. The most advanced view of the matter is that such children, being themselves the victims of un favorable environment over which they have no control, must be dealt with sympathetically and educationally. From this standpoint, the children's courts may well be considered a sociological and educational agency rather than a legal institution. Their inception and develop ment, at any rate, were more in line with the former than the latter, as we shall see pres ently. They received both their impetus and their general character from the enlightened modern view of juvenile delinquency, and were made imperative by the scientific results at tained in the general field of Child Study (q.v.). Although the juvenile court is a comparatively new institution — less than 20 years old, in fact— there is no unanimity among writers on this subject as to where and when the very first real children's court was established. Claims of priority are made for the States of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Colorado and Illinois — which leaves the honor safely to the United States. The uncertainty on this point is due partly to failure to dis criminate between the actual establishment of children's courts and the sundry legislative en actments that preceded them. Thus Massa chusetts, which passed the first statutory law on the subject of probation and granted children separate trials as early as 1869, has the best claim to priority in children's court legislation — legislation which practically started the children's court movement in America; while Illinois, with her officialjuvenile court estab lished at Chicago in 1899, seems to have an equally valid claim to priority in the matter of actual children's courts. The Illinois innova
tion gave such impetus to the juvenile courts' movement that children's court laws were soon passed in New York, Rhode Island, Kansas, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Colorado and else- where. The second children's court was estab lished at Philadelphia in 1901. New York city and Baltimore followed suit in 1902, and Saint Louis a year later. It is neither possible nor desirable to enumerate all the others, since there is hardly a city worthy of the name that has not established some kind of juvenile court. An idea of the rapid growth of the movement may be had from the fact that in four years (1903-07) no fewer than 18 States either es tablished children's courts or adopted legisla tion to that end.
Of course, the children's court movement has not been confined to the United States, where it originated and is best developed. Among its foreign promoters, Canada may be ranked first, since herjuvenile court legislation ante dates even the famous Juvenile Court Act of Illinois. Indeed, the Chicago court itself seems to have been forestalled in South Aus tralia, which created a State children's depart ment in 1895 and a juvenile court three years later that served as a model for the very effi cient children's court of Toronto. Since then every important country in Europe and at least one in Asia has been studying and adopting the American juvenile court system in one form or another. Several international congresses for the study of juvenile court problems have already been held, and the world-wide interest in this new movement is most encouraging. Both Eng land and Germany have very comprehensive laws on the subject, though the former has made greater progress in juvenile court legislation than any other country in Europe, as may be judged by her unique Children's Charter.