CRIME AND INTEMPERANCE
While it is generally admitted that feeble-mindedness lies at the foundation of most crime, we must also recognize that failure on the part of parents to teach their children self-control is also responsible for many otherwise fairly normal youths falling into crime and intemperance. The parents of a nervous child must recognize that they will in all probability be subject to special danger along these lines as they grow up. The nervous child, as it grows up, is quite likely to be erratic, emotional, indecisive, and otherwise easily influenced by his associates and environment.
Nervous children are more highly suggestible than others, and if they have not been taught to control their appetites and desires, their wants and passions, they are going to form an especially susceptible class of society from which may be recruited high-class criminals, dipsomaniacs, and other unfortunates.
It is true that any spoiled child, however normal its heredity, may turn out bad in these respects if it is not properly trained; but what we are trying to accomplish here is to emphasize to parents that the nervous child is doubly prone to go wrong and suffer much sorrow in after life if he is not early and effectively taught self-control.