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.]