FAULTS, LIES, AND CRIMES
Classifications of children's faults--Peculiar children--Real faults
as distinguished from interference with the teacher's ease--Truancy,
its nature and effects--The genesis of crime--The lie, its classes and
relations to imagination--Predatory activities--Gangs--Causes of
crime--The effects of stories of crime--Temibility--Juvenile crime
and its treatment.
Siegert[1] groups children of problematical nature into the following
sixteen classes: the sad, the extremely good or bad, star-gazers,
scatter-brains, apathetic, misanthropic, doubters and investigators,
reverent, critical, executive, stupid and clownish, naive, funny,
anamnesic, disposed to learn, and _blasé_; patience, foresight, and
self-control, he thinks, are chiefly needed.
A unique and interesting study was undertaken by Közle[2] by
collecting and studying thirty German writers on pedagogical subjects
since Pestalozzi, and cataloguing all the words they use describing
the faults of children. In all, this gave 914 faults, far more in
number than their virtues. These were classified as native and of
external origin, acute and chronic, egoistic and altruistic, greed,
perverted honor, self-will, falsity, laziness, frivolity, distraction,
precocity, timidity, envy and malevolence, ingratitude,
quarrelsomeness, cruelty, superstition; and the latter fifteen were
settled on as resultant groups, and the authors who describe them best
are quoted.
Bohannon[3] on the basis of _questionnaire_ returns classified
peculiar children as heavy, tall, short, small, strong, weak, deft,
agile, clumsy, beautiful, ugly, deformed, birthmarked, keen and
precocious, defective in sense, mind, and speech, nervous, clean,
dainty, dirty, orderly, obedient, disobedient, disorderly, teasing,
buoyant, buffoon, cruel, selfish, generous, sympathetic, inquisitive,
lying, ill-tempered, silent, dignified, frank, loquacious, courageous,
timid, whining, spoiled, gluttonous and only child.
Marro[4] tabulated the conduct of 3,012 boys in gymnasial and lyceal
classes in Italy from eleven to eighteen years of age (see table given
above). Conduct was marked as good, bad, and indifferent, according to
the teacher's estimate, and was good at eighteen in 74 per cent of the
cases; at eleven in 70 per cent; at seventeen in 69 per cent; and at
fourteen in only 58 per cent. In positively bad conduct, the age of
fifteen led, thirteen and fourteen were but little better, while it
improved at sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen. In general, conduct was
good at eleven; declined at twelve and thirteen; said, to its worst at
fourteen; and then improved in yearly increments that did not differ
much, and at seventeen was nearly as good as at eleven, and at
eighteen four points better.
[Illustration: Percentage x Age]
He computed also the following percentage table of the causes of
punishments in certain Italian schools for girls and boys near
pubescent ages:
Boys Girls
Quarrels and blows 53.90 17.4
Laziness, negligence 1.80 21.3
Untidiness 10.70 24.7
Improper language .41 14.6
Indecent acts and words 1.00 .24
Refusal to work .82 1.26
Various offenses against discipline 19.00 19.9
Truancy 9.60 .0
Plots to run away 1.70 .0
Running away .72 .0
Mr. Sears[5] reports in percentages statistics of the punishments
received by a thousand children for the following offenses: Disorder,
17-1/3; disobedience, 16; carelessness, 13-1/3; running away, 12-2/3;
quarreling, 10; tardiness, 6-2/3; rudeness, 6; fighting, 5-1/3; lying,
4; stealing, 1; miscellaneous, 7-1/3. He names a long list of
punishable offenses, such as malice, swearing, obscenity, bullying,
lying, cheating, untidiness, insolence, insult, conspiracy,
disobedience, obstinacy, rudeness, noisiness, ridicule; injury to
books, building, or other property; and analyzes at length the kinds
of punishment, modes of making it fit the offense and the nature of
the child, the discipline of consequences, lapse of time between the
offense and its punishment, the principle of slight but sure tasks as
penalties, etc.
Triplett[6] attempted a census of faults and defeats named by the
teacher. Here inattention by far led all others. Defects of sense and
speech, carelessness, indifference, lack of honor and of
self-restraint, laziness, dreamy listlessness, nervousness, mental
incapacity, lack of consideration for others, vanity, affectation,
disobedience, untruthfulness, grumbling, etc., follow. Inattention to
a degree that makes some children at the mercy of their environment
and all its changes, and their mental life one perpetual distraction,
is a fault which teachers, of course, naturally observe. Children's
views of their own faults and those of other children lay a very
different emphasis. Here fighting, bullying, and teasing lead all
others; then come stealing, bad manners, lying, disobedience, truancy,
cruelty to animals, untidiness, selfishness, etc. Parents' view of
this subject Triplett found still different. Here wilfulness and
obstinacy led all others with teasing, quarreling, dislike of
application and effort, and many others following. The vast number of
faults mentioned contrasts very strikingly with the seven deadly sins.
In a suggestive statistical study on the relations of the conduct of
children to the weather, Dexter[7] found that excessive humidity was
most productive of misdemeanors; that when the temperature was between
90 and 100 the probability of bad conduct was increased 300 per cent,
when between 80 and 90 it was increased 104 per cent. Abnormal
barometric pressure, whether great or small, was found to increase
misconduct 50 per cent; abnormal movements of the wind increased it
from 20 to 66 per cent; while the time of year and precipitation
seemed to have almost no effect. While the effect of weather has been
generally recognized by superintendents and teachers and directors of
prisons and asylums, and even by banks, which in London do not permit
clerks to do the more important bookkeeping during very foggy days,
the statistical estimates of its effect in general need larger numbers
for more valuable determinations. Temperature is known to have a very
distinct effect upon crime, especially suicide and truancy. Workmen do
less in bad weather, blood pressure is modified, etc.[8]
In his study of truancy, Kline[9] starts with the assumption that the
maximum metabolism is always consciously or unconsciously sought, and
that migrations are generally away from the extremes of hot and cold
toward an optimum temperature. The curve of truancies and runaways
increases in a marked ratio at puberty, which probably represents the
age of natural majority among primitive people. Dislike of school, the
passion for out-of-door life, and more universal interests in man and
nature now arise, so that runaways may be interpreted as an
instinctive rebellion against limitations of freedom and unnatural
methods of education as well as against poor homes. Hunger is one of
its most potent, although often unconscious causes. The habitual
environment now begins to seem dull and there is a great increase in
impatience at restraint. Sometimes there is a mania for simply going
away and enjoying the liberty of nomadic life. Just as good people in
foreign parts sometimes allow themselves unwonted liberties, so
vagrancy increases crime. The passion to get to and play at or in the
water is often strangely dominant. It seems so fine out of doors,
especially in the spring, and the woods and fields make it so hard to
voluntarily incarcerate oneself in the schoolroom, that pubescent boys
and even girls often feel like animals in captivity. They long
intensely for the utter abandon of a wilder life, and very
characteristic is the frequent discarding of foot and head dress and
even garments in the blind instinct to realise again the conditions of
primitive man. The manifestations of this impulse, if read aright, are
grave arraignments of the lack of adaptability of the child's
environment to his disposition and nature, and with home restraints
once broken, the liabilities to every crime, especially theft, are
enormously increased. The truant, although a cording to Kline's
measurements slightly smaller than the average child, is more
energetic and is generally capable of the greatest activity and
usefulness in more out-of-door vocations. Truancy is augmented, too,
just in proportion as legitimate and interesting physical exercise is
denied.
The vagrant, itinerant, vagabond, gadabout, hobo, and tramp, that Riis
has made so interesting, is an arrested, degenerate, or perverted
being who abhors work; feels that the world owes him a living; and
generally has his first real nomad experience in the teens or earlier.
It is a chronic illusion of youth that gives "elsewhere" a special
charm. In the immediate present things are mean, dulled by wont, and
perhaps even nauseating because of familiarity. There must be a change
of scene to see the world; man is not sessile but locomotor; and the
moment his life becomes migratory all the restraints and
responsibilities of settled life vanish. It is possible to steal and
pass on undiscovered and unsuspected, and to steal again. The vagabond
escapes the control of public sentiment, which normally is an external
conscience, and having none of his own within him thus lapses to a
feral state. The constraint of city, home, and school is especially
irksome, and if to this repulsion is added the attraction of a love of
nature and of perpetual change, we have the diathesis of the roadsman
already developed. Adolescence is the normal time of emancipation from
the parental roof, when youth seeks to set up a home of its own, but
the apprentice to life must wander far and long enough to find the
best habitat in which to set up for himself. This is the spring season
of emigration; and it should be an indispensable part of every life
curriculum, just before settlement, to travel far and wide, if
resources and inclination permit. But this stage should end in wisely
chosen settlement where the young life can be independently developed,
and that with more complacency and satisfaction because the place has
been wisely chosen on the basis of a wide comparison. The chronic
vagrant has simply failed to develop the reductives of this normal
stage.
Crime is cryptogamous and flourishes in concealment, so that not only
does falsehood facilitate it, but certain types of lies often cause
and are caused by it. The beginning of wisdom in treatment is to
discriminate between good and bad lies. My own study[10] of the lies
of 300 normal children, by a method carefully devised in order to
avoid all indelicacy to the childish consciousness, suggested the
following distinct species of lies. It is often a well-marked epoch
when the young child first learns that it can imagine and state things
that have no objective counterpart in its life, and there is often a
weird intoxication when some absurd and monstrous statement is made,
while the first sensation of a deliberate break with truth causes a
real excitement which is often the birth pang of the imagination. More
commonly this is seen in childish play, which owes a part of its charm
to self-deception. Children make believe they are animals, doctors,
ogres, play school, that they are dead, mimic all they see and hear.
Idealising temperaments sometimes prompt children of three or four
suddenly to assert that they saw a pig with five ears, apples on a
cherry tree, and other Munchausen wonders, which really means merely
that they have had a new mental combination independently of
experience. Sometimes their fancy is almost visualisation and develops
into a kind of mythopeic faculty which spins clever yarns and suggests
in a sense, quite as pregnant as Froschmer asserts of all mental
activity and of the universe itself, that all their life is
imagination. Its control and not its elimination in a Gradgrind age of
crass facts is what should be sought in the interests of the highest
truthfulness and of the evolution of thought as something above
reality, which prepares the way for imaginative literature. The life
of Hartley Coleridge,[11] by his brother, is one of many
illustrations. He fancied cataract of what he named "jug-force" would
burst out in a certain field and flow between populous banks, where an
ideal government, long wars, and even a reform in spelling, would
prevail, illustrated in a journal devoted to the affairs of this
realm--all these developed in his imagination, where they existed with
great reality for years. The vividness of this fancy resembles the
pseudo-hallucinations of Kandinsky. Two sisters used to say, "Let us
play we are sisters," as if this made the relation more real.
Cagliostro found adolescent boys particularly apt for training for his
exhibition of phrenological impostures, illustrating his thirty-five
faculties. "He lied when he confessed he had lied," said a young
Sancho Panza, who had believed the wild tales of another boy who later
admitted their falsity. Sir James Mackintosh, near puberty, after
reading Roman history, used to fancy himself the Emperor of
Constantinople, and carried on the administration of the realm for
hours at a time. His fancies never quite became convictions, but
adolescence is the golden age of this kind of dreamery and reverie
which supplements reality and totalizes our faculties, and often gives
a special charm to dramatic activities and in morbid cases to
simulation and dissimulation. It is a state from which some of the
bad, but far more of the good qualities of life and mind arise. These
are the noble lies of poetry, art, and idealism, but their pedagogic
regime must be wise.
Again with children as with savages, truth depends largely upon
personal likes and dislikes. Truth is for friends, and lies are felt
to be quite right for enemies. The young often see no wrong in lies
their friends wish told, but may collapse and confess when asked if
they would have told their mother thus. Boys best keep up complotted
lies and are surer to own up if caught than girls. It is harder to
cheat in school with a teacher who is liked. Friendships are cemented
by confidences and secrets, and when they wane, promises not to tell
weaken in their validity. Lies to the priest, and above all to God,
are the worst. All this makes special attention to friendships,
leaders, and favorites important, and suggests the high value of
science for general veracity.
The worst lies, perhaps, are those of selfishness. They ease children
over many hard places in life, and are convenient covers for weakness
and vice. These lies are, on the whole, judging from our census, most
prevalent. They are also most corrupting and hard to correct. All bad
habits particularly predispose to the lie of concealment; for those
who do wrong are almost certain to have recourse to falsehood, and the
sense of meanness thus slowly bred, which may be met by appeals to
honor, for so much of which school life is responsible, is often
mitigated by the fact that falsehoods are frequently resorted to in
moments of danger and excitement, are easily forgotten when it is
over, and rarely rankle. These, even more than the pseudomaniac cases
mentioned later, grow rankly in those with criminal predispositions.
The lie heroic is often justified as a means of noble ends. Youth has
an instinct which is wholesome for viewing moral situations as wholes.
Callow casualists are fond of declaring that it would be a duty to
state that their mother was out when she was in, if it would save her
life, although they perhaps would not lie to save their own. A doctor,
many suggested, might tell an overanxious patient or friend that there
was hope, saving his conscience perhaps by reflecting that there was
hope, although they had it while he had none. The end at first in such
cases may be very noble and the fib or quibble very petty, but worse
lies for meaner objects may follow. Youth often describes such
situations with exhilaration as if there were a feeling of easement
from the monotonous and tedious obligation of rigorous literal
veracity, and here mentors are liable to become nervous and err. The
youth who really gets interested in the conflict of duties may
reverently be referred to the inner lie of his own conscience, the
need of keeping which as a private tribunal is now apparent.
Many adolescents become craven literalists and distinctly morbid and
pseudophobiac, regarding every deviation from scrupulously literal
truth as alike heinous; and many systematized palliatives and
casuistic word-splittings, methods of whispering or silently
interpolating the words "not," "perhaps," or "I think," sometimes said
over hundreds of times to neutralize the guilt of intended or
unintended falsehoods, appear in our records as a sad product of bad
methods.
Next to the selfish lie for protection--of special psychological
interest for adolescent crime--is what we may call pseudomania, seen
especially in pathological girls in their teens, who are honeycombed
with selfishness and affectation and have a passion for always acting
a part, attracting attention, etc. The recent literature of telepathy
and hypnotism furnishes many striking examples of this diathesis of
impostors of both sexes. It is a strange psychological paradox that
some can so deliberately prefer to call black white and find distinct
inebriation in flying diametrically in the face of truth and fact. The
great impostors, whose entire lives have been a fabric of lies, are
cases in point. They find a distinct pleasure not only in the sense of
power which their ability to make trouble gives, but in the sense of
making truth a lie, and of decreeing things into and out of existence.
Sheldon's interesting statistics show that among the institutional
activities of American children,[12] predatory organizations culminate
from eleven to fifteen, and are chiefly among boys. These include
bands of robbers, clubs for hunting and fishing, play armies,
organized fighting bands between separate districts, associations for
building forts, etc. This form of association is the typical one for
boys of twelve. After this age their interests are gradually
transferred to less loosely organized athletic clubs. Sheldon's
statistics are as follows:
Age 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 Total
No. of
predatory 4 5 3 0 7 1 1 3 1 0 25 = Girls
societies 4 2 17 31 18 22 (11) 7 1 0 111 = Boys
Innocent though these predatory habits may be in small boys, if they
are not naturally and normally reduced at the beginning of the teens
and their energy worked off into athletic societies, they become
dangerous. "The robber knight, the pirate chief, and the marauder
become the real models." The stealing clubs gather edibles and even
useless things, the loss of which causes mischief, into some den,
cellar, or camp in the woods, where the plunder of their raids is
collected. An organized gang of boy pilferers for the purpose of
entering stores had a cache, where the stolen goods were brought
together. Some of these bands have specialized on electric bells and
connections, or golf sticks and balls. Jacob Riis says that on the
East Side of New York, every corner has its gang with a program of
defiance of law and order, where the young tough who is a coward alone
becomes dangerous when he hunts with the pack. He is ambitious to get
"pinched" or arrested and to pose as a hero. His vanity may obliterate
common fear and custom as his mind becomes inflamed with flash
literature and "penny dreadfuls." Sometimes whole neighborhoods are
terrorized so that no one dares to testify against the atrocities they
commit. Riis even goes so far as to say that "a bare enumeration of
the names of the best-known gangs would occupy the pages of this
book."[13] The names are sufficiently suggestive--hell's kitchen gang,
stable gang, dead men, floaters, rock, pay, hock gang, the soup-house
gang, plug uglies, back-alley men, dead beats, cop beaters, and
roasters, hell benders, chain gang, sheeny skinners, street cleaners,
tough kids, sluggers, wild Indians, cave and cellar men, moonlight
howlers, junk club, crook gang, being some I have heard of. Some of
the members of these gangs never knew a home, were found perhaps as
babies wrapped in newspapers, survivors of the seventy-two dead
infants Riis says were picked up on the streets in New York in 1889,
or of baby farming. They grow up street arabs, slum waifs, the
driftwood of society, its flotsam and jetsam, or plankton, fighting
for a warn corner in their resorts or living in crowded
tenement-houses that rent for more than a house on Fifth Avenue.
Arrant cowards singly, they dare and do anything together. A gang
stole a team in East New York and drove down the avenue, shopping to
throw in supplies, one member sitting in the back of the wagon and
shooting at all who interfered. One gang specialized on stealing baby
carriages, depositing their inmates on the sidewalk. Another blew up a
grocery store because its owner refused a gift they demanded. Another
tried to saw off the head of a Jewish pedler. One member killed
another for calling him "no gent." Six murderous assaults were made at
one time by these gangs within a single week. One who is caught and
does his "bit" or "stretch" is a hero, and when a leader is hanged, as
has sometimes happened, he is almost envied for his notoriety. A
frequent ideal is to pound a policeman with his own club. The gang
federates all nationalities. Property is depreciated and may be ruined
if it is frequented by these gangs or becomes their lair or
"hang-out." A citizen residing on the Hudson procured a howitzer and
pointed it at a boat gang, forbidding them to land on his river
frontage. They have their calls, whistles, signs, rally suddenly from
no one knows where, and vanish in the alleys, basements, roofs, and
corridors they know so well. Their inordinate vanity is well called
the slum counterpart of self-esteem, and Riis calls the gang a club
run wild. They have their own ideality and a gaudy pinchbeck honor. A
young tough, when arrested, wrenched away the policeman's club, dashed
into the street, rescued a baby from a runaway, and came back and gave
himself up. They batten on the yellowest literature. Those of foreign
descent, who come to speak our language better than their parents,
early learn to despise them. Gangs emulate each other in hardihood,
and this is one cause of epidemics in crime. They passionately love
boundless independence, are sometimes very susceptible to good
influence if applied with great wisdom and discretion, but easily fall
away. What is the true moral antitoxin for this class, or at least
what is the safety-valve and how and when to pull it, we are now just
beginning to learn, but it is a new specialty in the great work of
salvage from the wreckage of city life. In London, where these groups
are better organised and yet more numerous, war is often waged between
them, weapons are used and murder is not so very infrequent. Normally
this instinct passes harmlessly over into associations for physical
training, which furnishes a safe outlet for these instincts, until the
reductives of maturer years have perfected their work.
The causation of crime, which the cure seeks to remove, is a problem
comparable with the origin of sin and evil. First, of course, comes
heredity, bad antenatal conditions, bad homes, unhealthful infancy and
childhood, overcrowded slums with their promiscuity and squalor, which
are always near the border of lawlessness, and perhaps are the chief
cause of crime. A large per cent of juvenile offenders, variously
estimated, but probably one-tenth of all, are vagrants or without
homes, and divorce of parents and illegitimacy seem to be nearly equal
as causative agencies. If whatever is physiologically wrong is morally
wrong, and whatever is physiologically right is morally right, we have
an important ethical suggestion from somatic conditions. There is no
doubt that conscious intelligence during a certain early stage of its
development tends to deteriorate the strength and infallibility of
instinctive processes, so that education is always beset with the
danger of interfering with ancestral and congenital tendencies. Its
prime object ought to be moralization, but it can not be denied that
in conquering ignorance we do not thereby conquer poverty or vice.
After the free schools in London were opened there was an increase of
juvenile offenders. New kinds of crime, such as forgery, grand
larceny, intricate swindling schemes, were doubled, while sneak
thieves, drunkards, and pick-pockets decreased, and the proportion of
educated criminals was greatly augmented.[14] To collect masses of
children and ram them with the same unassimilated facts is not
education in this sense, and we ought to confess that youthful crime
is an expression of educational failure. Illiterate criminals are more
likely to be detected, and also to be condemned, than are educated
criminals. Every anthropologist knows that the deepest poverty and
ignorance among primitive people are in nowise incompatible with
honesty, integrity, and virtue. Indeed there is much reason to suspect
that the extremes of wealth and poverty are more productive of crime
than ignorance, or even intemperance. Educators have no doubt vastly
overestimated the moral efficiency of the three R's and forgotten that
character in infancy is all instinct; that in childhood it is slowly
made over into habits; while at adolescence more than at any other
period of life, it can be cultivated through ideals. The dawn of
puberty, although perhaps marked by a certain moral hebetude, is soon
followed by a stormy period of great agitation, when the very worst
and best impulses in the human soul struggle against each other for
its possession, and when there is peculiar proneness to be either very
good or very bad. As the agitation slowly subsides, it is found that
there has been a renaissance of either the best or the worst elements
of the soul, if not indeed of both.
Although pedagogues make vast claims for the moralizing effect of
schooling, I cannot find a single criminologist who is satisfied with
the modern school, while most bring the severest indictments against
it for the blind and ignorant assumption that the three R's or any
merely intellectual training can moralize. By nature, children are
more or less morally blind, and statistics show that between thirteen
and sixteen incorrigibility is between two and three times as great as
at any other age. It is almost impossible for adults to realize the
irresponsibility and even moral neurasthenia incidental to this stage
of development. If we reflect what a girl would do if dressed like a
boy and leading his life and exposed to the same moral contagion, or
what a boy would do if corseted and compelled to live like a girl,
perhaps we can realize that whatever rôle heredity plays, the youth
who go wrong are, in the vast majority of cases, victims of
circumstances or of immaturity, and deserving of both pity and hope.
It was this sentiment that impelled Zarnadelli to reconstruct the
criminal law of Italy, in this respect, and it was this sympathy that
made Rollet a self-constituted advocate, pleading each morning for the
twenty or thirty boys and eight or ten girls arrested every day in
Paris.
Those smitten with the institution craze or with any extreme
correctionalist views will never solve the problem of criminal youths.
First of all, they must be carefully and objectively studied, lived
with, and understood as in this country Gulick, Johnson, Forbush and
Yoder are doing in different ways, but each with success. Criminaloid
youth is more sharply individualized than the common good child, who
is less differentiated. Virtue is more uniform and monotonous than
sin. There is one right but there are many wrong ways, hence they need
to be individually studied by every paidological method, physical and
psychic. Keepers, attendants, and even sponsors who have to do with
these children should be educators with souls full of fatherhood and
motherhood, and they should understand that the darkest criminal
propensities are frequently offset by the very best qualities; that
juvenile murderers are often very tender-hearted to parents, sisters,
children, or pets;[15] they should understand that in the criminal
constitution there are precisely the same ingredients, although
perhaps differently compounded, accentuated, mutually controlled,
etc., by the environment, as in themselves, so that to know all would,
in the great majority of cases, be to pardon all; that the home
sentiments need emphasis; that a little less stress of misery to
overcome the effects of economic malaise and, above all, a friend,
mentor, adviser are needed.
I incline to think that many children would be better and not worse
for reading, provided it can be done in tender years, stories like
those of Captain Kidd, Jack Sheppard, Dick Turpin, and other gory
tales, and perhaps later tales like Eugene Aram, and the ophidian
medicated novel, Elsie Venner, etc., on the principle of the
Aristotelian catharsis to arouse betimes the higher faculties which
develop later, and whose function it is to deplete the bad centers and
suppress or inhibit their activity. Again, I believe that judicious
and incisive scolding is a moral tonic, which is often greatly needed,
and if rightly administered would be extremely effective, because it
shows the instinctive reaction of the sane conscience against evil
deeds and tendencies. Special pedagogic attention should be given to
the sentiment of justice, which is almost the beginning of personal
morals in boys; and plays should be chosen and encouraged that hold
the beam even, regardless of personal wish and interest. Further yet
benevolence and its underlying impulse to do more than justice to our
associates; to do good in the world; to give pleasure to those about,
and not pain, can be directly cultivated. Truth-telling presents a far
harder problem, as we have seen. It is no pedagogical triumph to clip
the wings of fancy, but effort should be directed almost solely
against the cowardly lies, which cover evil; and the heroism of
telling the truth and taking the consequences is another of the
elements of the moral sense, so complex, so late in development, and
so often permanently crippled. The money sense, by all the many means
now used for its development in school, is the surest safeguard
against the most common juvenile crime of theft, and much can be
taught by precept, example, and moral regimen of the sacredness of
property rights. The regularity of school work and its industry is a
valuable moralizing agent, but entirely inadequate and insufficient by
itself. Educators must face the fact that the ultimate verdict
concerning the utility of the school will be determined, as Talleck
well says, by its moral efficiency in saving children from personal
vice and crime.
Wherever any source of pollution of school communities occurs, it must
be at once and effectively detected, and some artificial elements must
be introduced into the environment. In other words, there must be a
system of moral orthopedics. Garofalo's[16] new term and principle of
"temibility" is perhaps of great service. He would thus designate the
quantum of evil feared that is sufficient to restrain criminal
impulsion. We can not measure guilt or culpability, which may be of
all degrees from nothing to infinity perhaps, but we can to some
extent scale the effectiveness of restraint, if criminal impulse is
not absolutely irresistible. Pain then must be so organised as to
follow and measure the offense by as nearly a natural method as
possible, while on the other hand the rewards for good conduct must
also be more or less accentuated. Thus the problem of criminology for
youth can not be based on the principles now recognised for adults.
They can not be protective of society only, but must have marked
reformatory elements. Solitude[17] which tends to make weak, agitated,
and fearful, at this very gregarious age should be enforced with very
great discretion. There must be no personal and unmotivated clemency
or pardon in such scheme, for, according to the old saw, "Mercy but
murders, pardoning those who kill"; nor on the other hand should there
be the excessive disregard of personal adjustments, and the
uniformitarian, who perhaps celebrated his highest triumph in the old
sentence, "Kill all offenders and suspects, for God will know his
own," should have no part nor lot here. The philosopher Hartmann has a
suggestive article advocating that penal colonies made up of
transported criminals should be experimented upon by statesmen in
order to put various theories of self-government to a practical test.
However this may be, the penologist of youth must face some such
problem in the organization of the house of detention, boys' club,
farm, reformatory, etc. We must pass beyond the clumsy apparatus of a
term sentence., or the devices of a jury, clumsier yet, for this
purpose; we must admit the principle of regret, fear, penance,
material restoration of damage, and understand the sense in which, for
both society and for the individual, it makes no practical difference
whether experts think there is some taint of insanity, provided only
that irresponsibility is not hopelessly complete.
In few aspects of this theme do conceptions of and practises in regard
to adolescence need more radical reconstruction. A mere accident of
circumstance often condemns to criminal careers youths capable of the
highest service to society, and for a mere brief season of
temperamental outbreak or obstreperousness exposes them to all the
infamy to which ignorant and cruel public opinion condemns all those
who have once been detected on the wrong side of the invisible and
arbitrary line of rectitude. The heart of criminal psychology is here;
and not only that, but I would conclude with a most earnest personal
protest against the current methods of teaching and studying ethics in
our academic institutions as a speculative, historical, and abstract
thing. Here in the concrete and saliently objective facts of crime it
should have its beginning, and have more blood and body in it by
getting again close to the hot battle line between vice and virtue,
and then only, when balanced and sanified by a rich ballast of facts,
can it with advantage slowly work its way over to the larger and
higher philosophy of conduct, which, when developed from this basis,
will be a radically different thing from the shadowy phantom,
schematic speculations of many contemporary moralists, taught in our
schools and colleges.
[Footnote 1: Problematische Kindesnaturen. Eine Studie für Schule und
Haus. Voigtländer, Leipzig, 1889.]
[Footnote 2: Die pädagogische Pathologie in der Erziehungskunde des 19
Jahrhunderts. Bertelsman, Gütersloh, 1893, p. 494.]
[Footnote 3: Peculiar and Exceptional Children. Pedagogical Seminary,
October, 1896, vol. 4, pp. 3-60.]
[Footnote 4: La Puberté. Schleicher Frères, Paris, 1902, p. 72.]
[Footnote 5: Home and School Punishments. Pedagogical Seminary, March,
1899, vol. 6, pp. 159-187.]
[Footnote 6: A Study of the Faults of Children. Pedagogical Seminary,
June, 1903, vol. 10, p. 200 _et seq._]
[Footnote 7: The Child and the Weather, by Edwin G. Dexter.
Pedagogical Seminary, April, 1898, vol. 5, pp. 512-522.]
[Footnote 8: Psychic Effects of the Weather, by J.S. Lemon. American
Journal of Psychology, January, 1894, vol. 6, pp. 277-279.]
[Footnote 9: Truancy as Related to the Migrating Instinct, by L.W.
Kline. Pedagogical Seminary, January, 1898, vol. 5, pp. 381-420.]
[Footnote 10: Children's Lies. American Journal of Psychology,
January, 1890, vol. 3, pp. 59-70.]
[Footnote 11: Poems. With memoir by his brother, 2 vols., London,
1851.]
[Footnote 12: American Journal of Psychology, July, 1898, vol. 9, pp.
425-448.]
[Footnote 13: How the Other Half Lives. Scribner's Sons, New York,
1890, p. 229.]
[Footnote 14: The Curse in Education, by Rebecca Harding Davis. North
American Review, May, 1899, vol. 168, pp. 609-614.]
[Footnote 15: Holtzendorff: Psychologie des Mordes. C. Pfeiffer,
Berlin, 1875]
[Footnote 16: La Criminologie. Paris, Alcan, 1890, p. 332]
[Footnote 17: See its psychology and dangers well pointed out by M.H.
Small: Psychical Relations of Society and Solitude. Pedagogical
Seminary, April, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 13-69]
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