Chapter 7

Under the influence of these sentiments, we pass, if possible, in the work of reformation, from the rigor of the prison to the innocent excitement and rivalry of the school, the comfort, confidence and joys of home. This institution assumes that crime, to some extent at least, is social, local, or hereditary, in its origin; that the career of hardened criminals often takes its rise in poverty, idleness, ignorance, orphanage, desertion, or intemperance of parents, evil example, or the indifference, scorn and neglect of society. It assumes, also, that there is a period of life--childhood and youth--when these, the first indications of moral death, may be eradicated, or their influence for evil controlled. In this land of education, of liberty, of law, of labor and religion, we may not easily imagine how universal the enumerated evils are in many portions of Europe. The existence of these evils is in some degree owing to institutions which favor a few, and oppress the masses; but it is also in a measure due to the fact that Europe is both old and multitudinous. America, though still young, is even now multitudinous. Hence, both here and there, crime is social and local. The truth of this statement is proportionate to the force of the causes in the respective countries.

We are assembled upon a sloping hillside, over-looking a quiet country village. Happy homes are embowered in living groves, whose summer foliage is emblematical of innocence, progress, and peace. We have here a social life, with natural impulses, cultivated worldly interests, moral and religious sentiments, all on the side of virtue. Crime here is not social. If it appear at all, it is segregated; and, as the burning taper expires when placed at the centre of the spirit lamp's coiling sheet of flame, so vice and crime cannot thrive in the genial embrace of virtue.

Circumstances are here unfavorable to crime; it is never social; but sometimes, though not often, it is hereditary. A family for many generations seems to have a criminal tendency. Perhaps the members are not in any generation guilty of great crimes, but often of lesser ones; and are, moreover, in the daily practice of vices that give rise to suspicion, neglect, and reproach. Here together are associated, and made hereditary, poverty, ignorance, idleness, beggary, and vagrancy. Surely these instances are not common, probably not so common as they were in the last generation. But how is the boy or girl of such a family to rise above these circumstances, and throw off these weights? Occasionally one of great energy of character may do so; but, if the children of more fortunate classes can scarcely escape the influence of temporary evil example, how shall they who are born to a heritage of poverty, ignorance, and ever-present evil counsel and conduct under the guise of parental authority, pass to the position of intelligent, industrious, respectable members of society? Some external influence must be applied; by some means from without, the spell must be broken; the fatal succession of vicious homes must be interrupted. The family has here failed to discharge its duty to itself and to the state; and shall not the state do its duty to itself, by assuming the paternal relation under the guidance of that law of kindness, which we have seen effectual to control the insane, and melt the hardened criminal? But in cities we find vice, not only hereditary in families, but local and social; so that streets and squares are given up, as it were, to the idle and vicious, whose numbers and influence produce and perpetuate a public sentiment in support of their daily practices. This phase of life is not due to the fact that cities are wealthy, or that they are engaged in manufactures or commerce; but to the single fact that they are multitudinous, and their inhabitants are, therefore, in daily contact with each other, while, in the country, individuals and families are comparatively isolated. Yet some may very well doubt whether such an institution as this, with all the benign influences of home which we hope to see centred and diffusive here, will save a child of either sex, whose first years shall have been so unfavorable to a life of virtue.

The answer is plain: as in other reformatory institutions, there will be some successes and some failures. The failures will be reckoned as they were; the successes will be a clear gain.

But investigation and trial will show a natural aptitude or instinct in children that will aid in their improvement and reformation. There has been in one of our public schools a lad, who, at the age of fourteen years, could not recall distinctly the circumstances of his life previous to the time when he was a newsboy in the city of New York. He was ignorant of father, mother, kindred, family name, and nation. At an early age, he travelled through the middle, southern and south-western states, engaged in selling papers and trash literature; and, for a time, he was employed by a showman to stand outside the tent and describe and exaggerate the attractions within. When he was in his fourteenth year, he accepted the offer of a permanent home; his chief object being, as he said, to obtain an education. "I have found," said he, "that a man cannot do much in this country unless he has some learning." This truth, simple, and resting upon a low view of education, may yet be of infinite value if accepted by those who, even among us, are advancing to adult life without the preparation which our common schools are well fitted to furnish. And the case of this lad may be yet further useful by showing how compensation is provided for evils and neglects in mental and moral relations, as well as in the physical and natural world. Though ignorant of books, he was thoroughly and extensively acquainted with things, and consequently made rapid progress in the knowledge of signs; for they were immediately applied, and of course remembered. In a few months, he took a respectable position among lads of his age. The world had done for this boy what good schools do not always accomplish,--made him familiar with things before he was troubled with the signs which stand for them. There is an ignorance in manhood; an ignorance under the show of profound learning; an ignorance for which schools, academies and colleges, are often responsible; an ignorance that neither schools, academies nor colleges, can conceal from the humblest intellects; an ignorance of life and things as they are within the sphere of our own observation. From this most deplorable ignorance this boy had escaped; and the light of learning illumined his mind, as the sun in his daily return reveals anew those forms of life, which, even in an ungenial spring and early summer, his rays had warmed into existence, and nourished and cherished in their progress towards perfection.

And, ladies and gentlemen, let us indulge the hope that the events of this day and the faith of this assembly will declare that it is possible to save the children of orphanage, intemperance, neglect, scorn and ignorance, from many of the evils which surround them. Let it not be assumed and believed that the task of training and saving girls is less hopeful than similar labors in behalf of the other sex. It has been found true in Europe, and it is a prevailing opinion in this country, that, among adults, the reformation of females is more difficult than the reformation of males. But an analysis of this fact, assuming it to be true, will unfold qualities of female character that render it peculiarly easy to shield and save girls who are exposed to a life of crime; for, be it remembered, this institution deals with mere children, who are exposed, but not yet lost. It differs, in this respect, from most institutions, although many include this class with others. And it may be well to remark, that every reformatory school in Europe, even those altogether penal,--as Parkhurst in England, and Mettray in France,--have had some measure of success. Eighty-nine per cent. of the colons, or convicts, at Mettray, have become respectable and useful; while, of the youth sent to the ordinary jails and prisons, seventy-five per cent. are totally lost. It is not fair, therefore, to assume that this attempt will fail. The degree of success will depend upon circumstances and causes, to a great extent, within human control. There are, however, three elements of success, so distinct that they may well stand as the appropriate divisions of what remains for consideration. They are the right action of the government; the faithful conduct of superintendent, matrons, and assistants; the sympathy and aid of the people of the state in matters which do not admit of legislative interference.

The act of the Legislature, though voluminous in its details, contemplates only this: A home for girls between seven and sixteen years of age, who are found "in circumstances of want and suffering, or of neglect, exposure, or abandonment, or of beggary." The first idea of _home_ precludes the possibility of the inmates being sent here as a punishment for crime; therefore they are neither adjudged nor actual criminals, but persons exposed to a vicious life. Secondly, the idea of home involves the necessity of reproducing the family relation, as circumstances may permit. Hence, the members of this institution are to be divided into families; and over each a matron will preside, who is to be a kind, affectionate, discreet mother to the children.

And here, for once, in Massachusetts, a public institution has escaped the tyranny of bricks and mortar; and we are permitted to indulge the hope, that any future additions will tend to make this spot a neighborhood of unostentatious cottages, quiet rural homes, rather than the seat of a vast edifice, which may provoke the wonder of the sight-seer, inflame local or state pride, but can never be an effectual, economical agency in the work of reformation. Every public institution has some great object. Architecture should bend itself to that object, and become its servant; and it must ever be deemed a mistake, when utility is sacrificed that art or fancy may have its way.

Reformation, if wrought by external influences, is the result of personal kindness. Personal kindness can exist only where there is intimate personal acquaintance; this acquaintance is impossible in an institution of two, three, or five hundred inmates. But, in a family of ten, twenty, or thirty, this knowledge will exist, and this kindness abound. Warm personal attachments will grow up in the family, and these attachments are likely to become safeguards of virtue.

Nor let the objection prevail that the expense is to be increased. It is not the purpose to set up an establishment and maintain it for a specific sum of money, but to provide thorough mental and moral training for the inmates. Make the work efficient, though it be limited to a small number, rather than inaugurate a magnificent failure.

The state has wisely provided that the "trustees shall cause the girls under their charge to be instructed in piety and morality, and in such branches of useful knowledge as shall be adapted to their age and capacity; they shall also be instructed in some regular course of labor, either mechanical, manufacturing, or horticultural, or a combination of these, and especially in such domestic and household labor and duties as shall be best suited to their age and strength, disposition and capacity; also in such other arts, trades, and employments, as may seem to the trustees best adapted to secure their reformation, amendment, and future benefit."

It is sometimes the bane of the poor that they do not work, and it is often equally the bane of the rich that they have nothing to do. The idle, both rich and poor, carry a weight of reproach that not all ought to bear. The disposition and the ability to labor are both the result of education; and why should the uneducated be better able to labor than to read Greek and Latin? Surely only that there are more teachers in one department than in the others; but a good teacher of labor may be as uncommon as a good teacher of Latin or Greek. There is a false, vicious, unmanly pride, which leads our youth of both sexes to shun labor; and it is the business of the true teacher to extirpate this growth of a diseased civilization. And we could have no faith in this school, if it were not a school of industry as well as of morality,--a school in which the divine law of labor is to be observed equally with the laws of men. Industry is near to all the virtues. In this era every branch of labor is an art, and sometimes it is necessary for the laborer to be both an artist and a scientific person. How great, then, the misfortune of those, whether rich or poor, who are uninstructed in the business of life! We should hardly know what judgment to pass upon a man of wealth who should entirely neglect the education of his children in schools; but the common indifference to industrial learning is not less reprehensible. Labor should be systematic; not constant, indeed, but always to be reckoned as the great business of life, never to be avoided, never to cease.

Labor gives us a better knowledge of the fulness, magnificence and glory, of the divine blessing of creation. This lesson may be learned by the farmer in the wonderful growth of vegetation; by the artist, in the powers of invention and taste of the human mind and soul; by the man of science, in the beauty of an insect or the order of a universe. The vision of the idle is limited. The ability to see may be improved by education as much as the ability to read, remember, or converse. With many people, not seeing is a habit. Near-sighted persons are generally those who declined to look at distant objects; and so nature, true to the most perfect rules of economy, refused to keep in order faculties that were entirely neglected. The laborer's recompense is not money, nor the accumulation of worldly goods chiefly; but it is in his increased ability to observe, appreciate, and enjoy the world, with its beauties and blessings. Nor is labor, the penalty for sin, a punishment merely, but a divine means of reformation. It is, therefore, a moral discipline that all should submit to; and especially is it a means by which the youth here are to be prepared for the duties of life. But industry is not only near to all the virtues; it is itself a virtue, as idleness is a vice. The word _labor_ is, of course, used in the broadest signification. Labor is any honest employment, or use of the head or hands, which brings good to ourselves, and consequently, though indirectly, brings good to our fellow-men.

The state has now furnished a home, reproduced, as far as practicable, the family relation, and provided for a class of neglected and exposed girls the means of mental, industrial, moral, and religious culture. The plan appears well; but its practical value depends upon the fidelity of its execution by the superintendent, matrons and assistants. I venture to predict in advance, that the degree of success is mainly within their control. This is a school, they are the teachers; and they must bend to the rule which all true teachers willingly accept.

The teacher must be what he would have his pupils become. This was the standard of the great Teacher; this is the aim of all who desire to make education a matter of reality and life, and not merely a knowledge of signs and forms. Here will be needed a spirit and principle of devotion which will be fruitful in humility, patience, earnestness, energy, good words and works for all. Here must be strictness, possibly sternness of discipline; but this is not incompatible with the qualities mentioned. It is a principle at Mettray to combine unbounded personal kindness with a rigid exclusion of personal indulgence.

This principle produces good results that are two-fold in their influence. First, personal kindness in the teacher induces a reciprocal quality in the pupils. The habit of personal kindness, proceeding from right feelings, is a potent element of good in the family, the school, and the prison. Indeed, it is an element of good citizenship; and no one destitute of this quality ought to be intrusted with the education of children, or the punishment and reformation of criminals.

Secondly, the rigid exclusion of personal indulgence trains the inmates in the virtue of self-control. And may it not be forgotten that all apparent reformation must be hedged by this cardinal virtue of practical life! Otherwise the best-formed expectations will fail; the highest hopes will be disappointed; and the life of these teachers, and the promise of the youth who may be gathered here, will be like the sun and the winds upon the desert, which bring neither refreshing showers nor fruitful harvests. Every form of labor requires faith. This labor requires faith in yourselves, and faith in others;--faith in yourselves, as teachers here, based upon your own knowledge of what you are and are to do; and faith in others upon the divine declaration that God breathed into man the breath of life, and he became a living soul,--not merely as the previous creations, possessed of animal life; but as a sentient, intellectual, and moral being, capable of a progressive, immortal existence.

"'Tis nature's law That none, the meanest of created things,

* * * * *

Should exist Divorced from good,--a spirit and pulse of good, A life and soul, to every mode of being Inseparably linked.

See, then, your only conflict is with men; And your sole strife is to defend and teach The unillumined, who, without such care, Must dwindle."

And always, as in the beginning, the reliance of this school is upon the people of the commonwealth, whose voice has spoken into existence another instrumentality to give eyes to the blind, ears to the deaf, a heart for the work of this life, and a hope for an hereafter, to those who from neglect and vicious example would soon pass the period of reformation. But may the people always bear in mind the indisputable truth, that schools for the criminal and the exposed yield not their perfect fruits in a day or a year! They must, if they will know whether the seed here planted produces a harvest, wait for the birth and growth of one generation, the decay and death of another. Yet these years of delay will not be years of uncertainty. The public faith will be strengthened continually by cases of reformation, usefulness, and virtue. But, whether these cases be few or many, let no one despond. The career of the criminal is, often in money and always in influence, the heaviest burden which an individual can impose upon society.

This is a school for girls; and we may properly appeal to the women of Massachusetts to do their duty to this institution, and to the cause it represents. We can already see the second stage in the existence of many of those who are to be sent here; and there is good reason to fear that the relation of mistress and servant among us is in some degree destitute of those moral qualities that make the house a home for all who dwell beneath its roof. But, whether this fear be the voice of truth or the suggestion of prejudice, that woman shall not be held blameless, who, under the influence of indolence, pride, fashion, or avarice, shall neglect, abuse, or oppress, the humblest of her sex who goes forth from these walls into the broad and dangerous path of life. But this day shall not leave the impression that they who are most interested in the elevation and refinement of female character are indifferent to the means employed, and the results which are to wait on them.

The greatest delineator of human character in this age says, as the images of neglected children pass before his vision:

"There is not one of them--not one--but sows a harvest mankind _must_ reap. From every seed of evil in this boy a field of ruin is grown that shall be gathered in, and garnered up, and sown again in many places in the world, until regions are over-spread with wickedness enough to raise the waters of another deluge. Open and unpunished murder in a city's streets would be less guilty in its daily toleration than one such spectacle as this. There is not a father, by whose side, in his daily or nightly walk, these creatures pass; there is not a mother among all the ranks of loving mothers in this land; there is no one risen from the state of childhood, but shall be responsible, in his or her degree, for this enormity. There is not a country throughout the earth on which it would not bring a curse. There is no religion upon earth that it would not deny; there is no people on earth that it would not put to shame."

This institution, then, in the true relation of things, is not the glory of the state, but its shame. It speaks of families, of schools, of the church, of the state, not yet educated to the discharge of their respective duties in the right way. But it is the glory of the state as a visible effort to correct evils, atone for neglects, and compensate for wrongs. It comes to do, in part at least, what the family, the school, the press, the library, the Sabbath, have nest yet perfectly accomplished. As these agencies partially failed, so will this; but, as the law of progress exists for all, because perfection with us is unattainable, we may reasonably have faith in human improvement, and trust that the life of each succeeding generation shall unite, in ever-increasing proportions, the innocence of childhood with the wisdom of age.

ELEMENTARY TRAINING IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS.

[Extract from the Twenty-Second Annual Report of the Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education.]

We are still sadly defective in methods of education. Until recently teaching was almost an unknown art; and we are at present struggling against ignorance without any well-defined plan, and attempting to develop and build up the immortal character of children, without a philosophical and generally accepted theory of the nature of the human mind. There are complaints that the duties and exactions of the schools injure the health and impair the constitutions of pupils; that the progress in intellectual attainments is not always what it should be; that the training given is sometimes determined by the wishes of committees against the better judgment of competent teachers; that the text-books are defective; that the studies in the common schools are too numerous; that the elements are consequently neglected; and that, in fine, too much thought is bestowed upon exhibitions and contests for public prizes, to the injury of good learning, and of individual and general character. For these complaints there is some foundation; but care should be exercised lest incidental and necessary evils become, in the public estimation, great wrongs, and exceptional cases the evidence of general facts.