Sixty were habitual thieves who spent on the average twelve years each in lawless depredations.
There were 130 criminals who were convicted more or less often of crime.
What a picture this presents! Some slight improvement was apparent when Mr. Dugdale closed his studies. This resulted from evening schools, from manual training schools, from improved conditions of labor, from the later methods of treating prisoners.
CHAPTER II
A STUDY OF JONATHAN EDWARDS
The story of the Jukes as published by Mr. Dugdale has been the text of a multitude of sermons, the theme of numberless addresses, the inspiration of no end of editorials and essays. For twenty years there was a call for a companion picture. Every preacher, orator, and editor who presented the story of the Jukes, with its abhorrent features, wanted the facts for a cheery, comforting, convincing contrast. This was not to be had for the asking. Several attempts had been made to find the key to such a study without discovering a person of the required prominence, born sufficiently long ago, with the necessary vigor of intellect and strength of character who established the habit of having large families.
In 1897 a professional scholarly organization—to which the author has the honor to belong—assigned to him, without his knowledge or consent, the duty of preparing an essay upon Jonathan Edwards for the May meeting of 1898. The study then begun led to a search for the facts regarding his family, and when it came to light that one of Jonathan Edwards' descendants presided over the New York Prison Commission when it employed Mr. Dugdale to make a study of the Jukes, the appropriateness of the contrast was more than ever apparent.
In this study the sources of information are the various genealogies of families in which the descendants of Mr. Edwards play a part, various town histories and church and college publications, but chiefly the biographical dictionaries and encyclopaedias in which the records of the men of the family are chronicled. It would be impossible to follow out the positions occupied by the various members but for the pride they all feel in recording the fact that they are descendants of Jonathan Edwards. A good illustration of this may be had in the current announcements of the marvelously popular novel, "Richard Carvel," in which it is always emphasized that Mr. Winston Churchill, the author, is a descendant of Jonathan Edwards.
Only two Americans established a considerable and permanent reputation in the world of European thought prior to the present century,—Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Edwards. In 1736, Dr. Isaac Watts published in England Mr. Edwards' account of the beginning of the great awakening in the Connecticut valley. Here more than a century and a half ago, when the colonies were small, their future unsuspected and the ability of their leaders unrecognized, Jonathan Edwards "erected the standard of Orthodoxy for enlightened Protestant Europe." Who can estimate the eloquence of that simple fact? Almost everything of his which was published in the colonies was speedily republished in England. Of what other American philosopher and theologian has this been true? Here are a few of the tributes to Mr. Edwards: