PRODIGAL SONS AND DAUGHTERS
"Because of fathers' sins the cost
Is counted in the children's blood;
They starve where once they might have stood
Content and strong as bird or bee."--H.H.
"The primary function of social science is to interpret men's
experience in passing from stage to stage in the evolution of
human values."--ALBION W. SMALL.
"Every wrong-doer should have his due. But what is his due? Can we
measure it by his past alone, or is it due any one to regard him
as a man having a future as well? As having possibilities for good
as well as achievements in bad?"--JOHN DEWEY.
"Judge not, that ye be not judged. He that is without sin among
you, let him first cast a stone."--JESUS.
"The Sage is ever the good Saviour of men; he rejects none. For
the good men are the instructors of other good men and the bad men
are the material for the good men to work upon. The good I would
meet with goodness, the not-good I would meet with goodness
also."--LAO-TSZE.
"The good man is apt to go right about pleasure and the bad man is
apt to go wrong. It is only to the good man that the good presents
itself as good, for vice perverts us and causes us to err about
the principle of action."--ARISTOTLE.
"I cannot but think that the extreme passion for getting rich,
absorbing all the energies of life, predisposes to mental
degeneracy, to moral defects, or to outbreaks of insanity in the
offspring."--MAUDESLEY.
"Nothing can possibly be conceived in the world or out of it which
can be called good without qualification except a Good
Will."--KANT.
"The object of moral principles is to supply standpoints and
methods which will enable the individual to make for himself an
analysis of the elements of good and evil in the particular
situation in which he finds himself,"--JOHN DEWEY.
"I call that mind free which resists the bondage of habit, which
does not live on its old virtues, which does not enslave itself to
precise rules, but which forgets what is behind, listens for new
and higher monitions of conscience, and rejoices to pour itself
forth in fresh and higher exertions."--CHANNING.
=Who Should Hear Sermons on the Prodigal Son?=--A young woman deeply
interested in social service was asked by the warden of a prison to
address its fifteen hundred inmates on a Sunday morning when they
should be all assembled in Chapel. Hesitating at undertaking such a
difficult task, she asked the warden what he would think she should
talk about. "Anything you like," he said, "except this: don't speak on
the prodigal son, for the last fourteen ministers and speakers have
read that parable and talked about it." "Indeed, no," answered the
young woman, "that parable is not for them. They should be taught what
is justice to the elder brother and preached to from the text, 'Work
out your own salvation.'" It is really a bit difficult to find just
the right audience for a preachment on that appealing parable. The
harsh-natured fathers who most need its lesson are not likely to be in
church when it is read and the tender fathers often need to be
stiffened up to work with all the rest of society to make the prodigal
behave better; and the elder brothers, the hard-working "sons of
Martha," who have to save in order to pay the taxes for the
institutions and agencies that take care of the prodigal, should not
have the fact that their sacrifice and service are usually taken as a
matter of course unduly emphasized when they meet their fellows.
The fact is that the prodigal, like the genius, is often one who takes
life's practical affairs so lightly that until he is really hungry in
the far land whither he has taken himself for pleasures denied at
home, he seldom considers how his behavior affects the rest of the
family. Moreover, the prodigal is often such a charming and engaging
creature that all is forgiven him many times more than is good for his
soul, and who, therefore, has many fatted calves set before him in
renewed festivals over his repeated home-comings.
Yet, when all is said in the way of caution against overindulgence of
the wayward, the one thing about parental love that marks it as the
supreme type of affection is the fact that it holds all its own in
permanent bond whatever the character of the child or his return for
devotion.
=Distinction Between the Mentally Competent and Defective in Criminal
Class.=--The parent who has a prodigal son or daughter to-day has the
benefit of much social wisdom and much educational treatment of the
wayward, unknown in the past. In the first place, we are learning to
sort out in the criminal and vicious classes those who are mentally
responsible and those who may be supposed to be the helpless victims
of their instincts and tendencies.[15] If it is true, as one has said,
that "the test of sound moral character is that it possesses coherence
under liberty and has learned those various arts of adaptation to
ever-varying circumstance which make it a working quality, constant,
rational, and automatic," we must perceive the intimate connection
between mental power and moral competency. In point of fact, we now
know that the overwhelming majority of criminals and constantly
vicious persons, in ordinary times when no social hysteria of recent
war gives a "crime wave," come from the mentally feeble or perverted
types.
The draft examinations in the Great War gave a shock to all students
of social conditions in their revelation of the widespread
deficiencies, physical and mental, of young men of our country. Mr.
Henry Wysham Lanier, writing on this topic, shows "that out of a total
of fifty-four millions of men twenty-six millions were either in the
Army or Navy or registered and ready for call," and that of these
"three millions out of thirteen were unfit to serve their country as
soldiers." Nearly three-quarters of a million had some mechanical
incapacity, defects in bones, joints, etc. About one-half million had
imperfections of sense organs and nearly as many serious troubles of
the circulatory system. A third of a million showed nervous and
mental incapacity for the soldier's work. About 300,000 had
tuberculosis or severe venereal disease. About the same number had
skin or teeth ailments. Altogether, the first severe examinations
weeded out as unfit for the service nearly one-third of those who were
drafted.
In addition to the revelation of physical and mental defects in the
average young manhood of our country, it was found by further
examination that five and a half millions of our young men were
illiterate. These facts show that in the mass of people from which
criminals and vicious people are recruited, large numbers have defects
of body, mind, or education, which handicap them in pursuit of an
honest living or in the search for helpful pleasures. The step to be
taken in order to help the family to deal justly and humanely, but
with due response to social duty, with the prodigal sons and
daughters, may be briefly outlined as follows:
First and foremost, the weeding out from every field of competitive
life those manifestly incapable of holding their own in
self-protection and self-support. The unemployable among the
unemployed, the hopelessly criminal and vicious who cannot be rescued
from their condition, the more permanently backward among the school
pupils, the incompetent among parents, and the dead weight of the
"born paupers," all these must somehow be socially carried with least
expenditure of social force and at least cost to family stability and
family well-being. We have not yet learned to do this, but in every
field of social effort the primary need is to see what is the right
thing to do. When the ideal is accepted we are already a long way
toward learning the lesson of the method to be pursued to carry out
the ideal.
=Moral Invalids.=--In the second place, when we have really
ascertained who among criminals and the habitually vicious, and who
among the recipients of "material relief" who are constantly returning
for more aid, and who among the unmarried mothers, and who among the
dependent children are really feeble-minded or morally imbecile, we
must segregate these as fast as we are able to supply the right
artificial environment for their weakness and treat them as incurable
moral and mental invalids. We must cease to deal with such as with
responsible human beings, who might do better if only they would. The
"indeterminate sentence" is a step toward such treatment, but it is
often rendered wholly futile by being mixed with "reward of shortening
term for good behavior in prison." Good behavior inside prison walls
gives no proof of ability to take good care of one's self outside
those walls; it may be only a proof that the moral weakling has to
have an external conscience and a strict watch in order to be amenable
to even simple rules. The parole system is also liable to great
misunderstanding and serious social dangers when it is used without
the most scientific knowledge of the mental power of the man or woman
concerned, and without utmost care in selection of work-place and
living conditions of the paroled prisoner. The essential thing in all
social effort to do justice to the wayward is to find out about them
and manage for them the essentials of environmental influence. If, as
many think, after careful study of large groups of wayward and
criminal, more than half, almost two-thirds of those who come before
the law for punishment are of less mental capacity than normal
children of twelve years of age, then we must take social care of them
as we would undertake to do if they were really under twelve. And the
parents of prodigal sons and daughters must help with all the might of
their parental affection in inspiring and supporting a public opinion
to that end.
=Rehabilitation of the Competent.=--In the third place, for the
one-half to one-third of criminal and habitually vicious left after
the mentally incompetent are given proper care, we must use all the
rehabilitation methods that society has devised and be more ingenious
than we have yet been in adding to them. When such methods as Thomas
Mott Osborne used fail, they generally fail because they are applied
to those whom we should put under perpetual care, those indicated
above as incompetent to life's demands. To try and make over a nature
too weak in fibre to have anything of will or determination to "stitch
to" is to have a response only when under constant supervision, and
inevitable backslidings follow as soon as self-control is called for.
It is true, however, that many who have gone far wrong make good and
reach to a high attainment of character. They are the "occasional
criminals," the "fallen" who met with extraordinary temptation, the
too hardly used by fate, the too early exposed to evil influences, the
wild natures too strictly curbed by mistaken methods of control, the
orphans without parental love and guidance, the victims of broken
family life, the "under-dogs" that could not make a way out to
successful vocation or to happy human companionship. These occasional
criminals among men, and the women or girls leading to sex
temptations, may be often saved if so as by fire, and live to help all
others to a stronger and better life than they have known. As this
book is written the news comes of the death of such a woman in
Chinatown of New York slums, a girl who had descended to the depths of
vice but who came up at the call of the Salvation Army and spent the
life left to her in helping others, such as she had once been, to hear
and obey that call. Some men show such power of moral recovery as to
put to shame those never tempted to a fall. These prove that mental
power and the raw material of character, even after many untoward
experiences, may take a fresh start and enable men and women to "rise
on stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things."
=The Right Use of Leisure Time.=--In the fourth place, the agencies of
social protection of child-life must coöperate with all parents,
whether those parents are wise or foolish, strong or weak, in
preventing occasional criminality and preventable vice.
The helpful use of leisure time is a vital factor in the prevention of
vice and crime. The pioneer study of "Public Recreation Facilities" in
the _Annals of the Academy of Political and Social Science_ of March,
1910, indicates lines of social service in this particular which have
been followed to great social advantage.
=The Moving Picture.=--The influence of the "movies" is the strongest,
the most all-compelling influence to which children have ever been
subjected. There has never been an agency that so appealed to all the
senses, especially to the eye with its supreme registry of
impressions, and we have so far let it play upon child-life with
little direction from the educative process. What it is right and
helpful to read is not always right and helpful to put upon the stage,
with the more vivid and popular appeal to eye and ear and with the
lessened opportunity of the drama to explain and soften and balance
the presentation of tragedy and evil. What the drama may safely give
to the smaller and generally older audiences which it draws may not be
suitable from any point of view, either of art or of moral influence,
for the coarser and more pronounced representation of the moving
picture. There is a place for film presentation that is unique and it
may easily become the greatest educational agency in all recreational
life. That place, however, seems self-limited to pictures of life that
can be imitated without social harm, insofar as very young children
are concerned.
=Needed Supervision.=--Although much will inevitably be given in the
moving pictures which contains incidents that any wise person would
not take part in for themselves, the main ideal and the outcome of the
situations must be such as to leave a tendency toward good and not
toward evil, if children and youth are safely to receive its strong
impressions. This is understood by those who are "trying to elevate
the moving picture," but too often the reformers and the educators are
so far removed from the main sources of control of any business or art
centre that they only brush the outskirts of the agencies that purvey
to public amusement and fail to reach any citadel of real control.
There is a general uneasiness, however, among many people of all
classes, even those usually very easy-going about any social
influence, as they read the tales of children testifying in the courts
as to their "hold-ups" and their burglaries that they did them "like
the movies" they had seen. It is surely true that the next thing we
must do is to tame these "movies" and make them work in social harness
for the better, and not the worse, in the lives of children and youth.
What line of cleavage may be drawn between what the elders may see and
what should not be allowed so vividly to impress the younger minds, no
one can predict. The recent public announcement of a determination to
cleanse and uplift the moving picture business from within its own
management is a most hopeful sign. But surely no parent can throw all
the blame of any evil influence of a film exhibit upon the managers of
a theatre! Where are the parents, and what are they about, that they
do not know what pictures their children see and how often they go to
any place of amusement?
=The Automobile and Its Influence.=--The same thing is true of the
automobile, that now so often takes the youth of the well-to-do
classes too swiftly away from necessary social safeguarding. The
inventors and makers of these machines are not responsible that
criminals use them for unprecedented escape from arrest, and boys and
girls go to destruction of honor and purity in a whirl of wind and
dust. As in all the new inventions and discoveries, we have gained
more control over material things than we have yet learned how to use
for either our physical or moral good. We shall sober down, no doubt,
and learn to wholly profit by the new wonders of motion and of
recreation.
=Parents Need Social Help in Moral Training of Children.=--Meanwhile,
the parents who are trying to make the right atmosphere and secure the
right influences for their children have a more difficult task than in
any previous time; for the young can so much more easily take on all
the new appliances as a part of their daily life and can so swiftly
change from old ways to the unaccustomed. Some of the most selfish and
cruel of the prodigal sons and daughters of our time find it easy to
escape from any parental appeal in the air or by the whirling wheels
of the machine or in any of the various ways by which space and time
are now annihilated. And "out of sight, out of mind" is true of their
psychology. All of which makes it clear that to-day, as in no previous
time, we must all stand or fall together. The old home privacy is for
the most part gone, the old home isolation wholly departed. All
recreation is more and more in the open and appeals at one and the
same time to all youth. The standards have to be raised for all or
they cannot be held firm for the favored few. Democracy, which aims to
make all better, may work to make all cheaper in taste, more vulgar in
language, less capable of fine expression of noble ideals, unless a
social conscience and a social intelligence take command of the common
life.
It is, therefore, to-day, not enough to call upon parents to try and
keep their own sons and daughters from the prodigal life, it is a
necessity, stronger than ever before, to make the influences which all
must share what all careful and wise parents wish for their own
children.
This is a mighty task, one that in the United States of America, with
its cosmopolitan population, and its multitude of people with a
smattering only of education or culture but with economic ability to
gratify their undeveloped tastes, is more vast and more pressing than
any nation has yet tried to accomplish. While we are working at it we
may well comfort ourselves by remembering that each generation has to
meet new problems, and that somehow, even when the young start wrong
or meet with overwhelming temptations or fail to get at the right time
the impulse toward the best which they need, life has them in hand and
teaches by experience much which helps them onward. The tendency of
life is toward strength and health and goodness and idealistic aims
and choice of the best each person knows. It is true, and the best
thing in human experience, that what parents cannot do for those they
love, life itself does for them, perhaps with needless suffering that
the wise and loving parent would have saved them had they but heeded,
but with a thoroughness which experience alone can give.
=Parental Love for the Black Sheep.=--The attitude of parents toward
the black sheep who does not change his ways of evil and does not
become a comfort but remains always a burden and sorrow, is one of the
saddest and one of the noblest of human exhibits in sympathy and
affection. A woman of the finest nature who as a girl was captured in
imagination by a man of brilliant quality but of peculiar cruelty and
wickedness of nature, and guilty, after their marriage, of many
crimes, had two sons. One was like herself and became a man honored by
all, and of the greatest help to his mother. The other seemed the
image of his father in all ways, personal beauty, brilliant talent,
and a naturally depraved character. He landed in prison, sentenced for
many years for forgery and long-sustained robbery of a bank. His
mother said with truth that she never had had a moment's relief from
the most wearing anxiety until he was safely behind prison bars, where
he could no longer torture his young wife or hurt anyone else by his
wrong actions. 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. The death of either parent,
also, is often the cause of such unhappiness or privation in the home
as to induce disobedience to law and bring the child before a court.
The lack of employment by the father or his too low wages, which
reduces the family income dangerously and makes the mother attempt to
be both breadwinner and care-taker of the home, and hence lessens
family comfort and sends the children on the streets for amusement, is
also a cause often appearing as a reason for delinquency. The evils of
housing congestion, too many families living in one building or in one
neighborhood without chance for privacy, choice of companionship or
household arrangements conservative of domestic virtue or happiness,
these evils constitute a heavy indictment of society in the returns of
Children's Courts. The complex problems which the immigrant faces,
with his children early learning the language of the country to which
he has come, while it is to him a sealed book, are responsible for
much juvenile delinquency. Jacob Riis has told us, in compelling
description, the story of the evolution of the "gang" and of the
"tough" from the children of parents who, well-meaning and in their
own ancestral land capable of parental control, here lose command of
the family life because the children have to become the interpreters
and representatives of the family in the new country to a degree that
reverses the natural order of dependence and direction in the family
life, and gives the children undue power of leadership in family
affairs. As Professor Cooley wisely says, "It is freedom to be
disciplined in as rational a manner as you are tit for." We might give
the converse of this truth in the statement that it is not freedom but
dangerous tendency toward anarchy and disaster to be called upon for
rational decisions in advance of our intelligence and will-power, and
a tragedy to lose the habit-drill of parental control in the period of
life when that is a necessary foundation for wisdom in independent
choice. The child of the immigrant often lands in the Children's Court
not because he is bad or stupid or even mischievous by nature, but
because he is too early forced by circumstances into a position of
command and of unrestricted choice in action, due to the ease with
which the young can learn new ways and the difficulty of the old in
mastering strange language and manners.
=Dangerous Rebound from Ancient Family Discipline.=--Again, the
Children's and the Domestic Relations Courts bear testimony to the
fact that to-day we are in a rebound from inherited forms of
discipline of children and youth which have given to all, immigrant
and native-born alike, a feeling that society exists for their benefit
and that they owe nothing to society in return. The very
standardization of child-care by public demand, in matters of health
and education, of free books and free recreation and free music and
free parks and playgrounds and even free lunches in schools, and free
baths and medical and nursing care--all that is increasingly called
for and provided out of the public purse for the nurture and
development of child-life--tend toward giving children and youth the
idea that the world belongs to them.
The old crushing and often cruel pressure of older life upon the young
is happily gone. The new ideals of education, within the school and
the home, which emphasize the right of each human being to its own
development into a unique, a free and a happy personality, are ideals
that must grow in realization more and more if we are to have fit
people for making democracy work toward the rule of the best. It is,
however, profoundly true that we have gone farther in demand for and
effort toward individual freedom than we have in any translation of
the old social pressure upon the individual conscience and life to
assume social obligations and bear them worthily and usefully. There
is a dry rot at the core of any class or any nation which turns its
inmost psychology toward what it can get from life without regard to
what it should give back to life. Too many children and youth in
conditions in which, happily, the old despotism of age is outgrown,
have unhappily missed the old sense of obligation and old call to
service which the earlier forms of family and school discipline
implanted in all responsive natures.
=Do Modern Youth Need New Community Disciplines?=--There is abundant
evidence that William James was profoundly right when he suggested a
need in youth for some required devotion to "the collectivity that
owns us," some "moral equivalent for war" and the military drill of
older forms of civic order. When the Athenian youth took his oath of
devotion to the city of his birth, he signalized his coming of age and
expressed the ideal of service of each to all and all to each. This is
not the place for detailed discussion of what is lacking in modern
training of American Youth analogous in spirit and effect to this
classic custom. It must be insisted, however, as we discuss the
conditions that make for juvenile delinquency, among the children and
youth otherwise normal and capable of useful life, that we have not
done all that democracy demands when we have made children healthy,
sent them to tax-supported schools, prevented them from too early
earning at "gainful occupations," and instituted all manner of
recreative and stimulating provisions for their free use. We must also
give them some sense of what Seneca meant when he said, "We are all
members of one great body; remember that each was born for the good of
all." We must also burn deep into the consciousness of youth in some
fashion that shall be through our modern mechanisms as effective as
were the old "Fraternities" of primitive life, and as are still the
outworn but persistent forms of military discipline, that idea of
subordination of private whim to public well-being which lies at the
base of all true and ordered social advance. The Children's Courts are
a response to the effort of society to give each child a fair chance
in life. There are needed, also, devices of education and of
compulsory social service and social obedience which may tend to give
society a fair deal from every adult.
Prodigal sons and daughters, therefore, who are abnormal, weak,
morally invalid, must be cared for in the way easiest and best for the
social whole. Parents must help and not hinder in that task.
Prodigal sons and daughters who are normal save for some accidental
divergence from legal or actual right-doing must be helped to come
back into the line of social usefulness. And, above all, the facts of
juvenile delinquency should give us impetus, strong and intelligent,
toward a social and family discipline that shall make freedom and
happiness of childhood a way to social order and never a pathway
toward social degeneracy or personal wrong-doing.
QUESTIONS ON PRODIGAL SONS AND DAUGHTERS
1. What has been the general trend of social ideal and practice
in the treatment of the criminal and the vicious?
2. What part has the family played in restraint of evil tendency
or in responsibility before the law for offences against social
order?
3. What part should the family now play in these vital social
matters?
4. What is "sentimentality" and what is "justice" in dealing with
the prodigal?
5. What can be done through physical and mental examinations, by
experts, of all children, to prevent development of
criminality, vice, and waywardness?
6. In 1724 the English law held any one legally responsible for
action subversive of law and order unless he was "totally
deprived of his understanding and memory and doth not know what
he is doing, no more than an infant, than a brute or a wild
beast." Since 1843, the criterion of responsibility under the
law is "knowledge of what is right or wrong in the particular
case." Following the same line of change, our statutes now ask,
in addition, if the person on trial is generally competent to
understand and to obey social rules of conduct. Is this trend
toward the lessening or toward the increase of crime and vice?
7. What does social well-being require shall be done for and with
those proved incapable of social habits?
8. Head "The Socially Inadequate; How Shall We Designate and Sort
Them?" by Harry H. Laughlin, Carnegie Institution, Cold Spring
Harbor, Long Island, in _American Journal of Sociology_, July,
1921. This is an attempt to introduce a blanket term under
which feeble-minded; insane; criminalistic, including
delinquent and wayward; epileptic; inebriate, including drug
habitues; diseased, including tuberculous, lepers, and others
with chronic infectious diseases; blind, including all of
seriously impaired vision; deaf, including those with seriously
impaired hearing; deformed, including the crippled; and
dependent, including orphans, old folks, soldiers and sailors
in "homes," chronic charity-aided folk, paupers, and
ne'er-do-wells, may be listed. This article attempts to make a
classification inclusive, yet subject to minute subheading,
which may make reports more definite in listing human beings.
Is such an attempt wise, and if so, how would each member of this
group classify the "socially inadequate?"
FOOTNOTES:
[15] See a valuable study by Dr. Bernard Glueck, Director Psychiatric
Clinic at Sing Sing Prison, entitled, "Concerning Prisoners," and
published in _Mental Hygiene_ for April, 1918, showing the need for
mental examination of all convicted persons as an indispensable basis
for right understanding and treatment of prisoners.