largely agricultural and industrial. So far as possible the young men
should be put into direct contact with realities and with useful and
practical work. An effort should be made to have all this work mean
something to them and not to be merely make-believe. It is fairly
possible to develop such a property and organization as will put them in
touch with real work rather than to force the necessity of setting tasks
in order to keep them busy.
Aside from the manual labor part of it, the background of the
reformatory should be such as will develop the feeling of responsibility
in the workers. This means that they must come actually in contact with
the raw materials and with things as they grow. When a young man has a
piece of wood or metal given to him in a shop, his whole responsibility
is merely to make something out of this material; he has no
responsibility for the material itself, as he would have if he had been
obliged to mine it or to grow it. One of the greatest advantages of a
farm training is that it develops a man's responsibility toward the
materials with which he works. He is always brought face to face with
the problem of saving the fertility of the land, saving the crops,
saving the forests, and saving the live-stock. The idea of saving and
safeguarding these materials is only incidental to those who do not help
to produce them.
It is important that the farm of this reformatory should be large enough
so that all the young men may do some real pieces of work on it. Such a
farm is not to be commercial in the ordinary farming sense. Its primary
purpose is to aid in a reformative or educational process. You should,
therefore, undertake such types of farming as will best serve those
needs and best meet the abilities of the inmates. A very highly
specialized farming, as the growing of truck-crops, would be quite
impracticable as a commercial enterprise because this kind of farming
demands the greatest skill and also because it requires a property very
easily accessible to our great markets and, therefore, very expensive to
procure and difficult to find in large enough acreage for an institution
of this size; and it is doubtful whether this type of farming would have
the best effect on the inmates. Of course, I should expect that the
institution would try to grow its own vegetables, but it would probably
be unwise to make truck-gardening the backbone of the farming
enterprise. I also feel that it would not be best to make it primarily a
dairy farm or a fruit farm or a poultry farm, although all these things
should be well represented on the place and in sufficient extent to
supply the institution in whole or in part.
There should be such a farming enterprise as would give a very large and
open background, part of it practically wild, and which would allow for
considerable freedom of action on the part of the inmates. You should
have operations perhaps somewhat in the rough and which would appeal to
the manly qualities of the young men. It seems to me that a forestry
enterprise would possibly be the best as the main part of the farming
scheme.
If the reformatory could have one thousand acres of forest, the area
would provide a great variety of conditions that the inmates would have
to meet, it would give work in the building of roads and culverts and
trails, it would provide winter activity at a time when the other
farming enterprises are slack, it would bring the inmates directly in
touch with wild and native life, and it would also place them against
the natural resources in such a way as to make them feel their
responsibility for the objects and the supplies.
Perhaps it will be impossible to secure one thousand acres of good
timber in a more or less continuous area. However, it might be possible
to assemble a good number of contiguous farms in some of the hill
regions so that one thousand acres of timber in various grades of
maturity might be secured. There would be open spaces which ought to be
planted, and this of itself would provide good work and supervision. The
trimming, felling, and other care of this forest would be continuous.
The forest should not be stripped, but merely the merchantable or ready
timber removed from year to year, and the domain kept in a growing and
recuperating condition. One thousand acres of forest, in which timber is
fit to be cut, should produce an annual increase of two hundred thousand
to three hundred thousand board feet, and this increase should not
lessen as the years go on. This timber should be manufactured. I have
not looked into the question as to whether a market could be found for
the materials that would be made from this timber, but I should suppose
that a market could be as readily secured for this kind of manufacture
as for any other. The educational and moral effect of seeing the
material grow, then caring for it, then harvesting it, and then
manufacturing it would be very great. One could follow the process from
beginning to end and feel a responsibility for it in every stage. I
should suppose that the manufacture would be of small work and not
merely the sawing of lumber. It might be well to determine whether there
would be market for chairs, cabinets, and other furniture, whip-stocks,
or small material that could be used in the manufacture of novelties and
other like articles. Possibly the reformatory could supply some of the
stock to the prisons that are manufacturing furniture, although the
educational and moral effects would be better if the inmates could see
the process from beginning to end.
Of course, you would not limit the manufacturing activities of the
reformatory to wood-working. You probably would be obliged to have other
kinds of factories, but the wood-working shops ought to be part of the
plan and I should hope a very important part.
I have not made any careful study of this question, and do not know how
feasible these suggestions may be; but they appeal to me very strongly
on the educational and reformational end. These suggestions are made
only that they may be considered along with other suggestions, and if
they seem to be worth while, to have the question investigated.
If something like one thousand acres of land were secured for a forest,
it would mean that the farm itself would be rather large. There ought to
be probably not less than two or three hundred acres of land that might
be used for grazing, gardens, and the ordinary farm operations that
would contribute to the support of the inmates of the institution. Of
course, this arable land ought to be valley land or at least fairly
level and accessible along good public highways. The forest land could
be more remote, running back on the hills. If the property could be so
located that the forest would control the sources of important streams
and springs, the results would be all the better. The young men should
feel their responsibility for creeks and ponds, and for the protection
of wild life as well as for the crops that they raise.
Where the reformatory should be located is a matter that should receive
very careful attention. It is not alone the problem of finding a site
that is proper for a reformatory, but also the question of so placing it
that it will have some relation to State development and some
connection with the people's interests and desires. State institutions
should be so separated that the greatest number of people may see them
or come into contact with them. I dislike the tendency to group the
State institutions about certain populous centres. In these days of easy
transportation, the carrying problem is really of less importance than
certain less definite but none the less real relations to all the
people. There are certain great areas in the State of considerable
population in which there are no State institutions, and in which the
people know nothing about such affairs beyond the local school and
church. Perhaps at first blush the people of a locality might not relish
the idea of having a reformatory in their midst, but this feeling ought
soon to pass away; and, moreover, the people should be made to feel
their responsibility for reformatories, asylums, and penitentiaries as
well as their responsibility for any other State institutions, and the
feeling should not be encouraged that such institutions should be put
somewhere else merely because one locality does not desire them.
The character of the property that is purchased will determine to a very
large extent the character of the institution, and, therefore, the
nature of the reformatory processes. This is more important than
transportation facilities. It is a more important question even than
that of the proper buildings, for buildings for these purposes have
been studied by many experts and our ideas concerning them have been
more or less standardized and, moreover, buildings can be extended and
modified more easily than can the landed area. It seems to me that
before you think actually of purchasing the land, you should arrive at a
fairly definite conclusion as to what kind of a farming enterprise it is
desired to develop as a background for the institution; you could then
determine as far as possible on principle in what general region the
institution ought to be located; and then set out on a direct
exploration to determine whether the proper kind and quantity of land
can be secured.
_The background spaces.--The open fields_
Here not long ago was the forest primeval. Here the trees sprouted, and
grew their centuries, and returned to the earth. Here the midsummer
brook ran all day long from the far-away places. Here the night-winds
slept. Here havened the beasts and fowls when storms pursued them. Here
the leaves fell in the glory of the autumn, here other leaves burst
forth in the miracle of spring, and here the pewee called in the summer.
Here the Indian tracked his game.
It was not so very long ago. That old man's father remembers it. Then it
was a new and holy land, seemingly fresh from the hand of the creator.
The old man speaks of it as of a golden time, now far away and hallowed;
he speaks of it with an attitude of reverence. "Ah yes," my father told
me; and calmly with bared head he relates it, every incident so sacred
that not one hairbreadth must he deviate. The church and the master's
school and the forest,--these three are strong in his memory.
Yet these are not all. He remembers the homes cut in the dim wall of the
forest. He recalls the farms full of stumps and heaps of logs and the
ox-teams on them, for these were in his boyhood. The ox-team was a
natural part of the slow-moving conquest in those rugged days. Roads
betook themselves into the forest, like great serpents devouring as they
went. And one day, behold! the forest was gone. Farm joined farm, the
village grew, the old folk fell away, new people came whose names had to
be asked.
And I thought me why these fields are not as hallowed as were the old
forests. Here are the same knolls and hills. In this turf there may be
still the fibres of ancient trees. Here are the paths of the midsummer
brooks, but vocal now only in the freshets. Here are the winds. The
autumn goes and the spring comes. The pewee calls in the groves. The
farmer and not the Indian tracks the plow.
Here I look down on a little city. There is a great school in it. There
are spires piercing the trees. In the distance are mills, and I see the
smoke of good accomplishment roll out over the hillside. It is a
self-centred city, full of pride. Every mile-post praises it. Toward it
all the roads lead. It tells itself to all the surrounding country. And
yet I cannot but feel that these quiet fields and others like them have
made this city; but I am glad that the fields are not proud.
One day a boy and one day a girl will go down from these fields, and
out into the thoroughways of life. They will go far, but these hills
they will still call home.
From these uplands the waters flow down into the streams that move the
mills and that float the ships. Loads of timber still go hence for the
construction down below. Here go building-stones and sand and
gravel,--gravel from the glaciers. Here goes the hay for ten thousand
horses. Here go the wheat, and here the apples, and the animals. Here
are the votes that hold the people steady.
Somewhere there is the background. Here is the background. Here things
move slowly. Trees grow slowly. The streams change little from year to
year, and yet they shape the surface of the earth in this hill country.
In yonder fence-row the catbird has built since I was a boy, and yet I
have wandered far and I have seen great changes in yonder city. The
well-sweep has gone but the well is still there: the wells are gone from
the city. The cows have changed in color, but still they are cows and
yield their milk in season. The fields do not perish, but time eats away
the city. I think all these things must be good and very good or they
could not have persisted in all this change.
In the beginning! Yes, I know, it was holy then. The forces of eons
shaped it: still was it holy. The forest came: still holy. Then came the
open fields.
_The background spaces.--The ancestral sea_
The planet is not all land, and the sea is as holy as the soil. We speak
of the "waste of waters," and we still offer prayers for those who go
down to the sea in ships.
Superstition yet clings about the sea. The landsman thinks of the sea as
barren, and he regrets that it is not solid land on which he may grow
grass and cattle. And as one looks over the surface of the waters, with
no visible object on the vast expanse and even the clouds lying
apparently dead and sterile, and when one considers that three-fourths
of the earth's surface is similarly covered, one has the impression of
utter waste and desolation, with no good thing abiding there for the
comfort and cheer of man.
The real inhabitants of the sea are beneath the surface and every part
is tenanted, so completely tenanted that the ocean produces greater bulk
of life, area for area, than does the solid land; and every atom of this
life is as keen to live and follows as completely the law of its
existence as does the life of the interiors of the continents. The vast
meadows of plankton and nekton, albeit largely of organisms microscopic,
form a layer for hundreds of feet beneath the surface and on which the
great herbivora feed; and on these animals the legions of the carnivora
subsist. Every vertical region has its life, peculiar to it, extending
even to the bottoms of the depths in the world-slimes and the darkness;
and in these deeps the falling remains of the upper realms, like gentle
primeval rains, afford a never-failing, never-ending source of food and
maintain the slow life in the bottoms. We think of the huge animals of
the sea when we think of mass, and it is true that the great whales are
the bulkiest creatures we know to have lived; yet it is the bacteria,
the desmids, the minute crustaceans, and many other diminutive forms
that everywhere populate the sea from the equator to the poles and
provide the vast background of the ocean life. In these gulfs of moving
unseen forms nitrification proceeds, and the rounds of life go on
unceasingly. The leviathan whale strains out these minute organisms from
the volumes of waters, and so full of them may be his maw that his
captors remove the accumulation with spades. The rivers bring down their
freight of mud and organic matter, and supply food for the denizens of
the sea. The last remains of all these multitudes are laid down on the
ocean floors as organic oozes; and nobody knows what part the abysmal
soil may play in the economy of the plant in some future epoch.
The rains of the land come from the sea; the clouds come ultimately from
the sea; the trade-winds flow regularly from the sea; the temperatures
of the land surface are controlled largely from the sea; the high lands
are washed into the sea as into a basin; if all the continents were
levelled into the sea still would the sea envelop the planet about two
miles deep. Impurities find their way into the sea and are there
digested into the universal beneficence. We must reckon with the sea.
It is supposed that the first life on the earth came forth where the
land and the waters join, from that eternal interplay of cosmic forces
where the solid and the fluid, the mobile and the immobile, meet and
marry.
Verily, the ancestral sea is the background of the planet. Its very
vastness makes it significant. It shows no age. Its deeps have no doubt
existed from the solidification of the earth and they will probably
remain when all works of man perish utterly.
The sea is the bosom of the earth's mysteries. Because man cannot set
foot on it, the sea remains beyond his power to modify, to handle, and
to control. No breach that man may make but will immediately fill; no
fleets of mighty ships go down but that the sea covers them in silence
and knows them not; man may not hold converse with the monsters in the
deeps. The sea is beyond him, surpassing, elemental, and yet blessing
him with abundant benedictions.
So vast is the sea and so self-recuperating that man cannot sterilize
it. He despoils none of its surface when he sails his ships. He does not
annihilate the realms of plankton, lying layer on layer in its deluging,
consuming soil. It controls him mightily.
The seas and the shores have provided the trading ways of the peoples.
The ocean connects all lands, surrounds all lands. Until recent times
the great marts have been mostly on coasts or within easy water access
of them. The polity of early settlements was largely the polity of the
sea and the strand. The daring of the navigator was one of the first of
the heroic human qualities. Probably all dry land was once under the
sea, and therefrom has it drawn much of its power.
From earliest times the sea has yielded property common to all and free
to whomever would take it,--the fish, the wrack, the drift, the salvage
of ships. Pirates have roamed the sea for spoil and booty. When
government appropriates the wreckage of ships and the stranded derelict
of the sea, the people may think it justifiable protection of their
rights to secrete it. Smuggling is an old sea license. Laws and customs
and old restraints lose their force and vanish on the sea; and freedom
rises out of the sea.
And so the ocean has contributed to the making of the outlook of the
human family. The race would be a very different race had there been no
sea stretching to the unknown, conjuring vague fears and stimulating
hopes, bringing its freight, bearing tidings of far lands, sundering
traditions, rolling the waves of its elemental music, driving its rank
smells into the nostrils, putting its salt into the soul.