Economic Conditions.-Poverty, economic pressure, underfeeding, overwork, lack of play and recreationof the opportunity to dwell peacefully in that paradise of childhood which is the birthright of every boy and girl-maltreatment, misunderstanding, bad companions, and the other thousand and one causes of waywardness lead more children along the path which ends at the children's court than any other single cause. Many children are habitually hungry and always tired. They lead a slave life before school in the morning and after school in the evening, with scanty meals, much scolding and buffeting, stuffy sleeping-rooms, filth and disorder around them. Many have no home at all. The author knew of a girl (Case 56), bright, refined, and artistic in taste, ambitious, whom he had occasion to rescue from the police prison in San Francisco; she had been, with her eighteen years, in fourteen different "charitable" or State institutions, being a homeless waif. One midnight in New York he saw on the steps of an elevated station a little chap of perhaps five years (Case 57), fast asleep, dirty, with a bundle of papers tucked under his arms. The tragedies of child life have not been fully told. The cruelty exerted upon the innocents by parents, relatives, employers, exploiters, is hardly understood by the average humane man or woman. Of the subtle sufferings of children in well-to-do homes where there is no spirit of sympathy with real child life nothing need be said here. Many a home of the poorer classes, where otherwise there would be love and care, is poisoned by economic helplessness. Says John D. Barry, in the Los Angeles Express of March 22, 1915: As a result of a single visitation of sickness many a family finds itself overwhelmingly in debt. The paying of this debt may take years. During this time the debt may hang over the family like a cloud. And where it does not hang over the family like a cloud it may result in another kind of demoralization, creating the spirit of graft, of advantage-seeking, of weak acceptance of charity and, finally, the expectation of charity. So, often, the degeneracy of a family may be traced to one sickness. As a result of the sickness the members of the family often find that they cannot meet their debts. They feel a deep sense of injustice. Moreover, a few months after the sickness has disappeared it becomes unreal. To pay for that disagreeable experience gradually begins to seem unnecessary. So they forget to pay. Incidentally they learn how easy it is to impose on others, to escape meeting their obligations. For there is nothing in the world more easy to acquire than the spirit of graft, which is in its nature either dishonesty or the preparation for dishonesty. Again, when it comes to the saving of those juvenile offenders who, for small sins of commission or omission, have landed in the children's court, and who are so little culpable that it would be an injustice to send them to jail, another difficulty arises. Mary R. Fulgate and C. A. Mitchell, of the Social Service Department of the Boys' Court of Chicago, compiled a report submitted by Judge Dolan to Chief Justice Olson a few years ago. This report contains the following significant facts: Idleness is at the root of most of the mischief, and this is particularly true of the boy brought up among sordid surroundings. . . . The problem of finding work for the boys has been one of the most difficult. It is easy to get money for the work of the department, but when it comes to a job for the boy willing and anxious to work it is different. Hundreds of letters have been sent out by this department to the large employers of labor asking for work, but less than 5 per cent have responded. This, the investigators say, is because boys who have been taken to court on any charge whatsoever are con sidered "lazy, incompetent, and perhaps criminally inclined. Instead, the majority are honest and capable, and enforced idleness is the prime cause of their delinquency. Unemployment is responsible, indirectly, for at least 70 per cent of the offenses charged to boys in this court." Another most instructive statement is made by these investigators which runs counter to the conceptions of many, namely, that habitual indulgence in liquor is negligible and chronic alcoholism is practically unknown. "Of 10,000 cases heard by the court not more than 50 had their inception in minds deranged by liquor." On the other hand, cigarette-smoking is so frequent and pronounced that it has "assumed almost the form of a mania." An Interesting Bit of Statistics.-Bearing out these various contentions, Doctor Lillian Merrill's findings in the Seattle Juvenile Court show the following causes of delinquency in the cases studied in 1912: Fifty-two per cent were due to social and economic conditions. Twenty-nine and five-tenths per cent to physical pathology, including neurotic heredity, sex pathology (including phimosis), adenoids, and enlarged tonsils, malnutrition, cardiopathic conditions, sensory defects, etc. Eighteen and five-tenths per cent to mental pathology, including moral deficiency, backwardness, epilepsy, and at the end of the line-feeble-mindedness. The Problem of Truancy.-The reader may remember the mention made of a report on truancy on page 68. It claims that of all the 150 cases studied 43 per cent were actually feeble-minded, and 8 per cent were border-line cases. The author objected at that place to the obviously one-sided method of classification used in that study. In contrast to the report's esti mate is the result of an investigation of 100 typical cases of truancy undertaken by James S. Hiatt, Secretary of the Public Education Association of Philadelphia, and published 1915 by the United States Bureau of Education. Mr. Hiatt found only 6 per cent mentally deficient, against 26 per cent backward and 68 per cent normal. He claims that the real cause of chronic truancy is difficult to ascertain. In any case it is probably a complex of causes, no one of which seems paramount. Some of the contributing causes he found to be: In a number of cases, he says, there seems to be no definite cause except that the child is a "misfit" in the school system. The reader is referred to the initial chapters of this book for an explanation of this really paramount cause. For too many active boys, representing types to which dry book-lore and memory tasks mean little, the ordinary school is a veritable prison-house. Mr. Hiatt finds 26 per cent to have become truants from dislike of school; the 10 per cent who desired to work may be put down, at least in part, to the same motive; this means about one-third of the entire number. Similar conditions may be expected to prevail in most places. Even when the boys do not play truant they will urge their parents to take them out of school before finishing it. Among them are the over-age pupils, those that fail of promotion-because their individual needs are not recognized. It is a significant fact that many of them when placed in a truant school are much better satisfied if that school offers outlets for their real needs, as in manual training, outdoor work, gardening, constructive work of all kinds. This is parallel to the wellknown observation that gang-rule and gang-viciousness are at once checked as soon as public playgrounds and boys' clubs are established in the congested tenement districts which usually harbor juvenile gangs. As soon as the real boy is appealed to, there is little or no truancy or viciousness. To those who believe unduly in the gospel of the three R's, Whittier's beautiful poem on "The Barefoot Boy" should be quoted over and over again:1 1 "Knowledge never learnt of schools- Where the whitest lilies blow, 1 Cf. also the author's "Some Fundamental Verities in Education," pp. 19 f. |