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