"The state begins too late when it permits the child to enter the public school only when it is six years of age. It is locking the stable door after the horse is stolen."
"Remember that from a single neglected child in a wealthy county in the State of New York there has come a notorious stock of criminals, vagabonds, and paupers, imperilling every dollar's worth of property and every individual in the community. Not less than twelve hundred persons have been traced as the lineage of six children who were born of this perverted and depraved woman, who was once a pure, sweet, dimpled little child, and who, with proper influences thrown about her at a tender age, might have given to the world twelve hundred progeny who would have blest their day and generation."—Sarah B. Cooper, before the National Conference of Charities and Correction.
One of the important things to accomplish in the forming of character in children is to find out what useful occupation is, to each of them, recreation instead of dull work.
No individual of normal mental capacity is born without some useful equipment if opportunity be offered for its discovery and development. It is this which separates man from the rest of creation so distinctly that it seems almost to endow him with god-like attributes.
As children are tireless and persistent in play, even so will men be tireless and persistent in work if the particular useful occupation, that to them is recreative, can be selected by them.
The venerable historian and diplomat, Bancroft, while residing in Washington, and still assiduously pursuing his life-work when he was nearly ninety years of age, was interviewed by an eminent journalist of his acquaintance for the purpose of collecting biographical data. The interviewer expressed amazement at the evidences of hard work on the desk and scattered about the study of the historian, and inquired, "At your time of life do you not find your work something of a burden? Most men aim to retire long before they have reached your age."
Mr. Bancroft's face took on an amused expression and then a broad smile at the question as he replied, "Work is but a comparative term. I never work. That is, I never work in the sense that is usually meant by the use of the word. I was very fortunate in the choice of an occupation. A person is lucky who in his youth selects the occupation that can furnish him with recreation in his old age."
Jacque, the great animal painter of the last generation, once said to the writer, "I am beginning to suffer weakness in my eyes so that I cannot work more than half an hour at a time. I feel it with great sorrow, for I have yet so much that I want to do in this life."
These happen to be examples from men who had earned success and reaped great honor, but they are not unusual. There are many who never tire of helping nature to raise crops useful to man, others who never are weary of cultivating fine breeds of domestic animals, and yet others who are never quite happy when absent from the bench or the lathe.
The contention of pessimists, that there must always be some unskilled and needy units to perform the drudgery of society that would otherwise remain undone, is pernicious falsehood.
There always will be found some means of performing the drudgery of work even if the time should come when there are no longer any misfit occupations and consequent drudgery and discontent among men.
When there are no longer any machine men there will be automata of iron, steel or wood to take their place.
A few years ago a wave spread over the fashionable world whose mandate was that it was not respectable to engage in any useful occupation. Fortunately, that wave has passed on, to be remembered only as one of the curiosities of social evolution, as related to the progressive nations and races, so that now it is not quite respectable not to be useful to society in some active manner.
It is true that many men and women are as tireless as children in doing something under the name of "Sport" that they would not be hired to do under the name of "Work," but such are usually of the nouveau riche class who think to accentuate their new position in the stratum of fortune called "society" by a show of independence and leisure.
The real sentiment of the age, however, is that useful occupation is necessary to respectability, and the most important discovery for any age or for any individual is that true happiness can result only from—is the evidence and fruit of—conscious usefulness.
Nothing else is so important to character-formation as ample facilities for finding out the occupation that each child would rather engage in than do anything else or nothing. The range of the useful occupations is not so great but what preference tests can easily be secured in every community near at hand. Manual-training institutions furnish a very wide range of choice, and parental farms can be located near to urban communities for nature tests, while a taste for the sea will accompany a tendency to wander abroad and will draw as a magnet to the source of its fascination.[4]
There are millions of children born in the city whose yearnings may be for the farm, the sea, or the woods. The pessimistic cry of the present time is that country youth flock to the city and congest labor conditions there while the cultivation of the land is neglected. With a proper appreciation of the value of character-building or useful-habit-forming, and systematic provision of tests for preference of occupation, this unbalance of the proper division of labor need not obtain.
From our own observation and experience we know that there are more city children who would delight in country occupations, if they only had a chance to know something of the possibilities of pleasure in them, than there are country children who can find a preference for city limitations.
The parental farms already established prove this to be true, and a very important discovery in connection with them is that they can be made not only self-sustaining but profitable.
The expression, "Many a good sailor is spoiled by being shut up in a shop when he ought to be on the bridge, or aloft trimming sail," is true and might be changed to adapt itself to many misfit occupations. One thing is certain, and that is, if the occupation is not productive of happiness it is a misfit.
The development of the kindergarten and manual-training schools has revealed the possibilities of cultivating character and habit along the line of useful preference and has been even more important to the evolution of usefulness than has the harnessing of the forces of nature for the use of man in performing the drudgery of work. From a minor branch of education, the character-building and habit-forming schools that are developing out of the success of the kindergarten method will come to be recognized as the basis of government, in that they are the nurseries of good citizenship.
Reiteration of this statement cannot rightly be criticised, for it is the ever-recurring theme on which the development of social harmony is being built.
The restless energy of children often provokes the remark, "Oh! if the energy the little ones expend could only be gathered and stored for useful application, we grown folks might take it easy." True enough! and what we propose, as a means towards a quarantine that will prevent in some degree any misdirection of this God-given and irrepressible energy, can accomplish the wish. Many separate movements have been instituted to take children out of unwholesome surroundings and give them new views of life. The New York Life and The Daily News, of Chicago, have championed fresh air funds for the purpose of giving infants days or weeks of outing at lake or sea side, or on farms, and have built commodious pavilions for their comfort. The Rev. Doctor Gray of the Forward Movement takes many separate squads of little ones into the country each summer for a two weeks' season of camping, while the residents on the shores of beautiful Lake Geneva, Wis., take out over five hundred waifs—ninety at a time—from Chicago and give them a two weeks' summer vacation at the "Holiday Home," located in the midst of their villas.
In this year of 1898 provision has been made by the Board of Education of Chicago for a two months' school session during vacation, where the instruction chiefly includes courses of art and nature-study. Provision was made for two thousand children, but the applications numbered more than four thousand and the disappointment of the rejected ones was pitiful to see.[5] The parental farms established in Massachusetts and elsewhere throughout the land have done a wonderful work and show a crying need for many more of them.[6]
These are but a few of the experiments that are being made which lead to a recognition of the necessity of complete advantages that will effect a perfect social quarantine against the influence of evil suggestions by giving an ample supply of good ones. But the greatest good will come only when these institutions have become systematic instead of spasmodic; complete instead of partial. Then, and only then, will the progress of reform have been relieved of uncivilized obstruction.
Governor Pingree of Michigan and Mayor Jones of Toledo, Ohio, are making experiments in the same direction, but all such spontaneous effort on the part of individual altruists is pioneering and leads the way to systematic warfare, by peaceful means, against the forces of evil and neglect that beset infancy and childhood in their helplessness.
"The beginning and end of all culture must be character, and its outcome is conduct. 'Conduct,' says Matthew Arnold, 'is three-fourths of life.' The state's concern in education is to rear virtuous, law-abiding, self-governing citizens."—Sarah B. Cooper, before the National Conference of Charities and Correction.
The selection of a name is very important, especially to an organization or institution that aims to exert a wide influence among classes of citizens who are absorbed with the affairs of every-day life to the exclusion of new ideas.
A name should, as far as possible, indicate its object without further explanation. The names, "Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals," and "Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children," accomplish their aim by means of rather cumbrous titles but the object justifies the handicap.
We have adopted the name "Quarantine" for our purpose for the reason that it has only one meaning and that meaning is understood by everyone to relate to the keeping out of germs of imported disorder at every gate of possible entry.
The origin of the name "Quarantine" is traced to republican Venice at the time when she was mistress of the Adriatic and of the outside world of commerce as well. It referred to the period of forty days prescribed as a term of probation during which vessels, men or merchandise coming from infected ports should not enter the harbor.
Names of institutions often stimulate the efforts of those employed under the title in the direction of the aims of the institution, and names given to children sometimes seem to determine their occupation or in other ways to influence their character or career.
Students of Child-Life find in the lives of Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and many others who have achieved military glory, a steady inclination to be worthy of the heroic names they bore, and some go so far as to associate the patriarchal qualities of President Lincoln with the subtle suggestion insisted on by the name of Abraham.
It is reasonable to suppose that names in constant use carry strong suggestion with them and for that reason we have adopted the names "Character-Building and Habit-Forming" by which to designate the several schools that are intended to fit children for the independent individual employments of mature life.
For the same reason we have adopted—invented, if you like—the name "Quarantinist," to apply to such as share our sympathy for health and harmony in all branches of social and individual economy, and the name "Neglectist" to apply to all others, not by imposition, but by inference.
Who is there that would like to be known as a neglectist, and who is there, having joined the ranks of the quarantinists, that would not constantly be reminded to apply the suggestion to matters of individual care?
"Kindergarten" is a beautiful name, with fine poetic significance, but unfortunately is not quite sufficiently descriptive of its high purpose. In common acceptance it means a something intended principally to "amuse children and keep them out of mischief until they are old enough to learn something useful."
The method of analysis and training that has ripened out of the wise suggestions of Saint Froebel is the most important acquisition to pedagogy that has ever been discovered and is applicable to any branch of education and also to the use of industrial institutions in improving the condition and status of employees as well as establishing cordial relations between employers and their employees.
A splendid example of the latter application has been carried to success by the National Cash Register Company, of Dayton, Ohio, whose happy and enthusiastic employees number nearly two thousand persons of all ages and both sexes, scattered in every part of the world where commerce reaches, but the subject of this institution and its methods is worthy of a special treatise. It is an "object lesson" which should be known to everyone within the whole range of contact between directors and directed in industrial pursuits.
The first aim of all education should be Character-Building and Habit-Forming in order to prepare a fertile and weedless soil in which to nurture seeds of intellectual attainment, manual skill, and religious intuition, all of which are the certain product of character cultivation. These insure industry and growth which never fail to produce blossoms of religious yearnings.
Intellectual and manual training are themselves most useful instruments in establishing character and habit, but their first and best mission is sometimes overlooked, and intellect and skill are frequently taught to children without reference to poise, honor, order and harmony, in which case the instruction is like building upon sand, without adequate foundation.
Character is really the chief object and recognized mission of the kindergarten and no disrespect is intended by suggesting the names "Character-Building" and "Habit-Forming" to include it in a wider scope of application.
All great world-movements in the evolution of civilization are modestly started. Froebel was undoubtedly unconscious of the tremendous impetus toward reform that his "Mutter Werk" had put in motion. Like all great movements it started in the warmth of a simple and spontaneous love impulse, but has spread a wave of true charity that more nearly satisfies the Christ ideal than any that has before covered the world. In the simplicity of its inception it received the blessed name of "Kindergarten," unconscious of its wide mission in the cause of general reform and harmony.
That the mission of the kindergarten is a very broad one is proven by the fact that more victims of hopeless and hardened criminal mania have been touched and reclaimed through kindness to the children of these unfortunates in kindergartens, as related elsewhere, than by direct effort.
Until the time of Froebel educational methods left character and habit forming to parents and religion. These are not sought to be replaced by the Froebel method, but they are powerfully supplemented by it; and, when character and habit schools for young children, followed by an adequate number of manual-training and parental farm schools to test older children for preference of occupation, have come to be appreciated as the most important functions of government, as well as of education, as they must do to keep up with the present acceleration of progress, the Science of Government will rest on the Science of Child-Care, and will have been simplified to the position of greatest effectiveness.
Herein will woman find the sphere of her greatest usefulness and of her natural inclination.
Wherever a great light appears to enrich literature, or art, or science, or philanthropy, or invention, or discovery, or whatever branch of usefulness it may bless with its potential energy, it is easy to trace much of the excellence acquired to the teachings of a mother. To the mother impulses and instincts we owe much that is good in our treasury of thought, but opportunity for the best mother influence has been, and still is, a matter of chance, with few good models available for the parents of those poor and oppressed innocents, "The Hopelessly Submerged Ten Per Cent" of ignorant and cruel tradition.
The "Mutter Werk" of the kindergarten, pursued anywhere, upon the common, by the wayside, in a wood-shed, or in a shabby but tidy room in the midst of a city slum, carries the opportunity of profitable lessons in life to all, and fulfills the mandate of the Christ in the spirit, as well as in the letter, of His command.
"What shall we do for these children? Good people everywhere should combine to care for them and to teach them. Churches should make it an important part of their work to look after them. The law of self-preservation, if no higher law, demands that they should be looked after. How shall they be looked after? By establishing free kindergartens in every destitute part of large cities."—Sarah B. Cooper, before the National Conference of Charities and Correction.
There was a time when woman had no voice in government, when she could not hold property in her name, and when she was regarded as very much the intellectual inferior of man.
Within a century there has been a growing tendency to admit women to all the civic privileges enjoyed by men, even to vote in political contests. In some advanced communities women now vote for officers of the school department and serve with distinction in school boards.
Women now enjoy complete equality in four, and partial political suffrage in twenty-three of the United (?) States of America.
Since it is recognized that woman has some place in politics, it is well to consider what is her especial sphere within politics.
It is by a wise division of labor that great ends are attained, and the blessings of civilization are only possible through the most economical division of effort which assigns to each unit of a community that duty which it is best fitted to perform.
Woman has always borne more than her share of the burdens of life, and her lot has often been ill apportioned. In primitive conditions of society she was considered merely as the bearer of children and the servant of the stronger sex by the same argument that made slaves of conquered foes or weaker neighbors.
In the division of government, if woman is to participate in it, she should serve with unhampered freedom in the departments where mother intuition, mother wisdom and mother skill are needed.
The development of kindergarten and college-settlement work has demonstrated that women are wonderfully efficient in the establishment, management and development of these character-forming institutions, and if they were sufficiently extended so as to begin a Perfect Social Quarantine the sphere of woman's usefulness would almost be unbounded.
If woman has been the means of establishing the value of public free-character institutions, and they should come to be appreciated as the most important function of government, as they must eventually be appreciated, because they are the nurseries of good citizenship, why should not this be recognized as the special sphere of the gentle sex in administration, and why should there not be a Mother Organization to serve in a special Department of Character Schools?
By this apportionment woman would win all the advantage that could be desired and ample field for her usefulness, for a vigorous and thorough administration of the Mother Branch of Government would insure generations of good citizens to whom administration of all executive branches could be entrusted with confidence.
Apropos of the German Lied, some one has said, "Let me select the songs of a people and I care not who makes the laws."
There is also an axiom of similar import in the Catholic Church, "If we have children under our influence until they are seven years of age we do not fear other influences they may be subjected to for the rest of life."
Both of these assumptions are proven to be wise by the wonderful solidarity of the German race and of the Roman Catholic Church.
"Juvenal it was who said, 'The man's character is made at seven; what he then is, he always will be.' This seems a sweeping assertion; but Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Lycurgus, Bacon, Locke, and Lord Brougham, all emphasize the same idea, while leading educators of a modern day are all united upon this point."[7]
A Mother Organization in politics or administration might safely and appropriately adopt the following assumption and promise for its propaganda:
"Let us manage all of the institutions relative to child care and child training during the period of formation of child habits and character, and whatever means are necessary to maintain a perfect moral and social quarantine to supplement the family institution and furnish the requisite models of profitable suggestion, so that no child shall escape the best care known to the Science of Child-Life, and we will promise to save, within a single generation, one-fourth of the present cost of government, including the cost of our own branch, and add to the taxable effectiveness of production a measure that cannot be estimated. We will also immediately reach cases of shiftlessness and depravity that are a menace to the peace of the community and effect in them reforms that present methods cannot accomplish. We will also promise, through our unofficial Unsectarian Associated Charity Societies, intimately connected with our crèches and kindergartens, to search out cases of silent and modest distress, relieve them without an offensive show of patronage, and at the same time throw a search-light of enquiry upon perverse idleness and beggary that will render them impossible to flourish on the credulity of unorganized charity."
In suggesting a name for an organization to take charge of character institutions the word "Mother" seems to be the only one that suits the purpose and aims. It would escape the imputation of "old-womanishness" by the very wisdom of its purpose and aims, and it might appropriately include in its membership both men and women who approve of the proposed apportionment of woman's sphere in the division of government administration and recognize its civilizing mission, without breaking affiliation with chosen parties in the established lines of political competition or mission work.
And is there not good logic in the suggestion of a mother organization to manage an important branch of government, wherein woman has proven her superior wisdom and efficiency?
What has woman to do with war if not to furnish brave soldiers and an incentive to heroism?
What has woman to do with correction and punishment, if not to make them unnecessary by seeing that children are not bred to idleness and crime?
What has woman to do with vexed economic questions, if not to rear the sons of productive toil and furnish an incentive to civilized living?
What should woman have to do with politics, if not especially with that branch of administration which deals with training the tender shoots of humanity to be chivalrous, honorable, self-respecting and orderly as a foundation of good character on which to build a structure of good citizenship?
And, on the other hand, what has man to do in the sphere of mother efficiency, in keeping with the demands of a rational division of labor, than to furnish the support required, and, in himself, show a worthy example of the potency of mother influence?
"In the great seaport city of Hamburg—of all sorts of cities the one likeliest to prove an omnium gatherum of the human refuse brought by ships from all over the world, I lived a whole week without seeing a beggar, a tramp, or a drunkard; and what is true of Germany is more true of Japan."—Julian Ralph.
During the preparation of this appeal for organized effort to establish Perfect Social Quarantine, the writer has enjoyed the advice and example of numerous workers in the field of child-saving and child-training, both in Chicago, where the incident which led to the appeal occurred, and in other sections of the country, representing various and extreme conditions of opportunity, need and experiment. Among them we wish especially to mention Mr. Hastings H. Hart, general secretary, National Conference of Charities and Correction, with headquarters at Chicago; Miss Julia G. Fox, director of the West Division Kindergarten, Chicago; Miss Eva B. Whitmore, general superintendent, and Miss Estelle Taylor, secretary, Chicago Free Kindergarten Association and Kindergarten Normal Department, Armour Institute of Technology, Chicago; Mr. Michel Heymann, superintendent, Jewish Orphan Asylum, New Orleans, La.; Mrs. Mollie E. Moore Davis, New Orleans; Miss Mary F. Ledyard, supervisor of Kindergartens, Los Angeles, Cal.; Colonel George McC. Derby, United States Engineer Corps, in charge of Lower Mississippi Levee District (now, August, 1898, at Santiago de Cuba), New Orleans; Mr. William S. Harbert, president Forward Movement, and Mrs. Harbert, Lake Geneva, Wis., and Evanston, Ill.; Rev. Dr. George W. Gray, in charge of the Forward Movement schools and charities, Chicago; Mr. Hugh K. Wagner, attorney-at-law, St. Louis, Mo.; Mr. and Mrs. Charles S. McCoy, actively interested in the rescue and cure of crippled waifs, Chicago; Mr. Myron M. Marsh, Chicago; the examples of the National Cash Register Company, Dayton, Ohio, and of the N. O. Nelson Manufacturing Company, St. Louis, Mo.; Miss Amalie Hofer, editor of Kindergarten Magazine, official organ of the Kindergarten Department of the National Education Association, Chicago; Mrs. Lucretia Williard Treat, Grand Rapids, Mich.; Colin A. Scott, Ph.D., professor of psychology and child-study, Cook County Normal School, Chicago; teachers of classes at Hull House, Chicago, whose Mæcenas, guardian and manager is Miss Jane Addams; Hon. William J. Van Patten, Burlington, Vt.; Mr. Clarence A. Hough, Indianapolis, Ind.; Mr. Clarence F. Low, president of the Charity Organization Society, New Orleans, La.; General Roeliff Brinkerhoff, Mansfield, Ohio; and Hon. C. C. Bonney, organizer and president of the Auxiliary Congress of the World's Columbian Exposition, in charge of the World's Parliament of Religions.
We wish also to acknowledge valuable assistance on the part of Mynheer J. Drost, president of the Board of Education, Rotterdam, Holland; Sydney Whitman, Esq., author of Imperial Germany, London, England; Julian Ralph, Esq., traveler and author; and R. W. Rogers, Esq., Yarmouthport, Mass., and New Orleans, La., whose combined stores of information, supplementing that obtained from the workers mentioned above, and that in possession of the author as the result of personal observation, seem to fairly represent the field of practical suggestion.
As encouragement to those who may be interested in the cause represented in this appeal, from either the religious, humanitarian or economic point of view, and who may desire to organize local bodies to supplement the family, existing public institutions and the National Quarantine Organization, which is now under consideration, in putting a cordon of care about childhood, it is pertinent to state that all of these workers and observers endorse our position without reservation. In fact, we have failed to receive a shadow of denial or lack of sympathy from any of them.
Full-grown questions, relative to full-grown subjects of competition, will always elicit argument in discussion, but care of children during the formative period of character and before the money-earning age finds no opposition, so that Perfect Social Quarantine is only a question of organized effort to accomplish the complete aim.
In further encouragement of organization and effort, sadly deplorable though it be, it is valuable to know that the average career of criminals or peace disturbers, when they have come under the ban of ostracism, and are become social "outcasts," such as burglars, thieves, prostitutes and others, most of whom lead dissipated lives as an accompaniment to their evil doing, is not more than three or four years. This estimate of the average life of crime in an individual is from the best authorities. Criminals either die or reform after three or four years of strain, and frequently earlier, so that the average is maintained.
All of the trouble that Society suffers comes from spasmodic crime which is fed from the ranks of neglected childhood, and which would disappear from among us if the gaps of neglect were closed by means of a Strict Social Quarantine; and, within five years from the closing of the last gap, for a popular wave of prevention would effect such impetus to correction that disorder and crime would be impossible in all communities as they already are in some communities; while the general dissemination of proof of the infamous falsehood of the necessity of a Have-To-Be-Bad class would open the eyes of all citizens to the criminality of neglect and thereby effect a speedy cure.
SUGGESTIONS FOR LOCAL ORGANIZATION.
The best work is secured through committees whose aim has been defined by an executive committee, composed of the officers, ex-officio, and the chairmen or chairwomen of the separate committees.
SUGGESTED LIST OF COMMITTEES.
Committee on Districts or Wards and Census of Children Needing Care, and also on available rentable rooms to accommodate the neglected in groups of not more than fifteen or twenty in each class. There may be several classes in each school, all under the supervision of one director, and assistants.
Committee on Estimates and Finance.
Committee on Securing the Services of Scientifically Trained Teachers, to serve as directors, and on Securing Volunteer Teachers, in process of training, to serve as assistants.
Committee on Securing Initial Support until government shall take over the schools which have proved to be efficient nurseries of good citizenship on demand of the people. Experience teaches that this method of introduction and progress towards proper public establishment and support is natural and speedy, as the result of the merit of the process of citizen culture suggested.
Committee on Suitable Nourishment and Clothing for destitute children.
Committee on Parallel Sanitary and Cleanliness Requirements, which must claim attention in connection with the reclamation of children from unsanitary and uncleanly surroundings.
Committee on Emulation for individual or sectional neighborhood cleanliness and for home or neighborhood decoration; this outside of the schools, where no prizes should be given.
Committee on Crèches.
Committee on Kindergartens.
Committee on Manual Training Equipments.
Committee on Domestic Science Equipments.
Committee on Vacant Lots to Be Used as Vegetable Patches, by which to teach nature study, and through means of which to offer prizes for the best results of growth obtained.
Committee on General Amusements of character-building or habit-forming suggestiveness.
Committee on Circulating and Traveling Libraries, aiming to reach remote country districts, tributary to the urban community.
Committee on Stereopticon View Circulation, in connection with other organizations so as to bring the world to the children and to their parents.
Committee on Associated Charities to co-operate with the character schools.
Committee on Transportation of Children from their homes, or from farms, or from designated rendezvous, by means of wagons or otherwise, to the character schools; an important consideration.
Committee on Statistics and Laws; following the careers of children to note effect and permanency of cultivation; to be used in legislation when needed.
Committee on Waste for the Waif.
The latter committee may well study the history of sacrifice in times of war and other emergencies and learn that these seasons of deep and common interest have often inspired the putting away of useless ornament and luxury, and the saving of careless waste in the interest of a patriotic cause, and that the sacrifice has been a means of positive pleasure that indifference or neglect cannot carry with them.
For instance: The most careful persons, in times of relaxed attention, waste not less than one cent in every dollar expended, and think nothing of it. One cent in one dollar is one one-hundreth of one's income, an inconsiderable amount, a trifle indeed! and yet, one one-hundreth of the incomes of half the people would support a Perfect Social Quarantine; cut off the supply of material for criminals; add largely to the productive efficiency of the community; decrease taxes; give more pleasure to the contributors and active workers than any other pursuit; lead to sanitary and filth eradication; do away with the constant terror of burglars that every sound in the dark now creates; take away the discomfort of that typically American disease called catarrh, by cleaning up the dust-producing quarters of neglect; and create a rational and civilized environment to take the place of one which now produces much worry, snuffling and unhappiness; and, within a brief season of time whose days would pass with pleasant acceleration in the joyous consciousness of usefulness, efficiency, progress, hope and happiness.
Efficiency lies chiefly—necessarily—in the aim, and if the aim be definite and complete, it will be found easier of accomplishment than any number or any strength of partial and detached efforts.
Of course, the first and last aim of our proposition is Strict and Perfect Social and Sanitary Quarantine, but the separate aims of committees should be to get one-half of each community, at least, to register as quarantinists, and volunteer to save, at least, a sum equal to one one-hundredth of their income from some inconsequential waste, and devote it to the consequential use of prevention of the propagation of the various seeds of unhappiness.
The movement would aim to arraign people under the head of quarantinists, by approval, or under the head of neglectists, by inference of indifference.
By pledging one one-hundredth of one's income, at least, the contribution would in no wise be a revelation of the amount of one's income, while all subscriptions would be equalized according to the means of each; little children not being debarred from helping their less fortunate fellows who are come from the same Source of Life, but who have been less lucky in their introduction into the world.
The aim should be to locate the cases of worst need first, and work back towards the avenues and boulevards. By this means the work would begin at the base of neglect; and it is proven by experience that much of the intermediate indifference corrects itself, as a result of a good example being set on the social terrace next below.
There is only one stratum of abject depravity and hopelessness, and that is a very thin stratum, with only detached specimens visible. Begin with that, and the strata above it, in which there must be some admixture of self-respect, if you excite it by example, will begin to do for themselves what you wish to do for them.
It is the same relative to conditions of cleanliness. Dirt does not originate in the avenues or in the boulevards, but it blows there, or is dragged there from the slums, through the intermediate sections, making cleanliness helpless, and hopeless to each quarter except by beginning to clean the deepest slums first.[8]
Moral and physical carelessness beget and stimulate each other. You cannot correct one without favorably affecting the other. Social Quarantine embodies both Moral and Sanitary Quarantine.
Present methods of conveying clean suggestion into the body of Society may well be illustrated by trying to introduce the quality of purity into a tree, by forcing it into the leaves against the current of the sap, in order to reach the branches, trunk, and roots. The method proposed contemplates placing drops of suggestion, like aniline, at the roots of the tender shoots, in order that they may course freely with the sap by natural process of growth. The old method meets with constant protest and opposition. The proposed method meets with no opposition at all.
The progressive nations can produce sufficient means to furnish the world with teachers and missionaries, and to wage foreign wars against inhumanity and neglect, in addition to supporting home quarantine, but the natural and easy method of procedure is to work from within and extend outward.
"'Do the materialistic tendencies of the times weaken your church in America?' I asked a noble Paulist father whom I met once on a railroad train.
"'Oh, no,' said he, 'we Catholics catch our people young and they never get away from us. We hold that if we can have the care and guidance of a child under seven years of age it will always come back to the church in after years, in every important crisis of grief or joy in life. That is why our great church is unaffected by the godlessness that alarms others. We make Catholics of little children and they never cease to grow as the twig was bent.'"—Julian Ralph.
My theme is one in which bright-eyed Hope must clasp the hand of blind Despair, and lead the way to better things.
I am to talk about what can be done for little waifs after they are born. By what process of education and development are they to be made valuable members of society? The doctrine that the hereditary defectiveness of the masses can be corrected by education and hereditary culture is the true doctrine. Any system of education that does not contemplate these results does not deserve the name of education. What the world most needs to-day is character—genuine character. In order to secure this, we must get hold of the little waifs that now grow up to form the criminal element just as early in life as possible. Hunt up the children of poverty, of crime, and of brutality, just as soon as they can be reached—the children that flock in the tenement houses, on the narrow, dirty streets; the children that have no one to call them by dear names; children that are buffeted hither and thither,—"flotsam and jetsam on the wild, mad sea of life." This is the element out of which criminals are made.
It was Juvenal who said, "The man's character is made at seven: what he is then he will always be." This seems a sweeping assertion; but Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Lycurgus, Bacon, Locke, and Lord Brougham, all emphasize the same idea. Leading educators of a modern day are all united upon this point. The pliable period of early childhood is the time most favorable to the eradication of vicious tendencies, and to the development of the latent possibilities for good. The foundations for national prosperity and perpetuity are to be laid deep down in our infant schools. And the infant school, to be most successful, must be organized and carried forward on the kindergarten plan. The kindergarten has rightfully been termed the "paradise of childhood." It is the gate through which many a little outcast has re-entered Eden.
Froebel, that great and beloved apostle of childhood, founded a system that is destined to revolutionize all former methods of developing little children. His battle-cry was, "Come! let us live with our children!"
The simple, salient fact is, we do not get hold of the little children of vice and of crime soon enough. An unfortunate childhood is the sure prophecy of an unfortunate life. "Implant lessons of virtue and well-doing in earliest childhood," says Plato. "Give me the child," says Lord Bacon, "and the State shall have the man." "Let the very playthings of your children have a bearing upon the life and work of the coming man," says Aristotle. "It is early training that makes the master," says the great German poet. "Train up a child in the way he should go, and, when he is old, he will not depart from it," says the Revealed Word. Let us take heed to these entreaties, and work with the children. Work with little children will always pay handsome dividends to the family, to the community, to the State, and to the world.
It is Ruskin who says, "The true history of a nation is not of its wars, but of its households;" and he holds it to be the duty of a State to see that every child born therein shall be well housed, clothed, fed and educated, till it attain years of discretion. But he admits that, in order to accomplish this, the government must have an authority over the welfare of children of which we do not now so much as dream.
Whether such a view be practical or not, one thing is certain: nothing but virtue and intelligence can save a republic from ending in despotism, corruption, and anarchy. There must be genuine character.
And, since virtue is secured by early training and habit, the children of a republic must be trained in ways of honesty, industry and self-control. It matters not who they are nor where they are, the State cannot afford to allow them to grow up in ignorance and crime. The great conspirator, when he aimed to overthrow Rome, corrupted the young men. When our fathers would conserve liberty for their children and for mankind, they "fed the lambs": they looked to the proper training of the young. We have a vast number of humane institutions for the reclamation and recovery of the wayward and the erring. We have reformatory institutions, asylums, prisons, jails, and houses of correction; but all these are only repair shops. Their work is secondary, not primal. It is vastly more economical to build new structures than to overhaul and remodel old ones.
The prevention of crime is the duty of society. But society has little right to punish crime at one end, if it does nothing to prevent it at the other end. Society's chief concern should be to remove the causes from which crime springs. It is much more a duty to prevent crime than it is to punish crime.
Parents should try to be what they would have their children to be. Parents and society are very clumsy in their management of children. We have our duties to one another; and we may be sure of one thing: that any one, however flippant or however scornful, who asks, like Cain, "Am I my brother's keeper?" like Cain, has somehow lost his brother; like Cain, has somehow slain him. It seems to me that two great ministrant forces engird this universe—love and law. We need them both in the education and development of human beings—of little children. The mother love should bind the child to home and duty: the father power should construct order and administer government. Society should have both these elements in its government.
As factors in society, what are we doing to prevent crime? We may be very eloquent in pleading that punishments may be quick, sharp, and decisive, that the gallows may have every victim that it claims by law, and that eternal vigilance may be kept on evil-doers. But all this will not avail. As has truly been said: "Crime cannot be prevented by punishment. Crime can only be hindered by letting no child grow up a criminal. Crime can only be stayed by education—not education of the intellect only, but education of the heart, which is alike good and necessary for all." We want that sort of education which has in it more of the aim of character-building.
The end of all culture must be character, and its outcome in conduct. "Conduct," says Matthew Arnold, "is three-fourths of life." The State's concern in education is to rear virtuous, law-abiding, self-governing citizens.
I repeat it, the doctrine that the hereditary defectiveness of the masses can be corrected, both by culture and by education, is the true doctrine. Virtue, integrity, and well-doing are not sufficiently aimed at in earliest childhood. The head, and not the heart, comes in for the maximum of training. And yet right action is far more important than rare scholarship. The foundations of national prosperity and perpetuity are laid deep down in the bed-rock of individual character. Let the plodding, the thriftless, and the unaspiring of any country have the monopoly of peopling that country, and the race will gradually deteriorate, until finally the whole social fabric gives way, and the nation reverts back to barbarism or is blotted from the earth. When a nation exceeds more in quantity than in quality, it is in a bad plight. Ignorance and lack of character in the masses will never breed wisdom so long as ignorance and lack of character in the individual breed folly. The intelligent tradesman, the thrifty mechanic, and the sturdy yeomanry constitute the foundation of a nation—the proud assurance of her perpetuity, her prosperity, and her strength.