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