Even after the fault seems to have been eradicated, the patient is for some time subjected to various tests and temptations before he is pronounced cured. We do not trust to superficial appearances.
Similar precautions were taken in the cure of adult offenders against the laws, but as soon as my plans had time to operate, offences by adults were of rare occurrence.
When a child gives evidence of remarkable genius, he is watched with more than jealous care, with a view to his superior refinement, and other qualities which we like to see in harmony. We do not like to see, as it were, a garment made partly of rich brocade and partly of common material.
The character-divers, too, are greatly assisted in their observations by an establishment attached to each school called "The Amusement Gallery," in which after a certain time the bent of the child, his versatility, capriciousness, constancy of purpose, and other qualities and defects are shown in his selection and continued or interrupted pursuit of any particular occupation or amusement.
It is scarcely possible to overrate the importance of acting with judgment towards children.
From the smallest beginnings, incurable defects of mind and permanent disease of body will gather strength, grow and obtain the mastery, till they carry off the sufferer, or implant vices that, like evil spirits, will torture the victim during his life's career.
Nothing is spared in the education of the future man and mother of men. In the child is seen the parent of other generations, one who, as he is well or ill-directed, will strengthen or weaken the great work of human happiness, bearing with him a blessing or a curse for the community. Therefore whatever may be the pains or expenditure required in the cure of incipient faults, as of incipient disease, we know that society will be repaid more than a thousand-fold in the happiness of its members, in evil prevented and good propagated, in the numbers of men of talent and genius whose works, teeming with great results, will be thus saved to the State.
But for the character-divers the services of numbers of men of extraordinary genius would have been lost to the State, and our world's progress in science, inventions, and happiness retarded for centuries. Nay, perhaps the then comparative civilization would have been thrown back into barbarism, through the destructive play of bad passions and disappointed hopes.
Numbers who, if their early faults had grown into confirmed vices, would later have led a life of crime, and become inhabitants of dungeons and emissaries of evil, now grew into men of great eminence. The germ of evil propensities was destroyed, the exuberant motive power of their nature regulated and turned to good, by means which the character-divers thoroughly understood.
Amongst faults, the germs of which occupied the attention of the Djarke, are the following: