Mr. Sears[5] reports in percentages statistics of the punishments received by a thousand children for the following offenses: Disorder, 17-1/3; disobedience, 16; carelessness, 13-1/3; running away, 12-2/3; quarreling, 10; tardiness, 6-2/3; rudeness, 6; fighting, 5-1/3; lying, 4; stealing, 1; miscellaneous, 7-1/3. He names a long list of punishable offenses, such as malice, swearing, obscenity, bullying, lying, cheating, untidiness, insolence, insult, conspiracy, disobedience, obstinacy, rudeness, noisiness, ridicule; injury to books, building, or other property; and analyzes at length the kinds of punishment, modes of making it fit the offense and the nature of the child, the discipline of consequences, lapse of time between the offense and its punishment, the principle of slight but sure tasks as penalties, etc.
Triplett[6] attempted a census of faults and defeats named by the teacher. Here inattention by far led all others. Defects of sense and speech, carelessness, indifference, lack of honor and of self-restraint, laziness, dreamy listlessness, nervousness, mental incapacity, lack of consideration for others, vanity, affectation, disobedience, untruthfulness, grumbling, etc., follow. Inattention to a degree that makes some children at the mercy of their environment and all its changes, and their mental life one perpetual distraction, is a fault which teachers, of course, naturally observe. Children's views of their own faults and those of other children lay a very different emphasis. Here fighting, bullying, and teasing lead all others; then come stealing, bad manners, lying, disobedience, truancy, cruelty to animals, untidiness, selfishness, etc. Parents' view of this subject Triplett found still different. Here wilfulness and obstinacy led all others with teasing, quarreling, dislike of application and effort, and many others following. The vast number of faults mentioned contrasts very strikingly with the seven deadly sins.
In a suggestive statistical study on the relations of the conduct of children to the weather, Dexter[7] found that excessive humidity was most productive of misdemeanors; that when the temperature was between 90 and 100 the probability of bad conduct was increased 300 per cent, when between 80 and 90 it was increased 104 per cent. Abnormal barometric pressure, whether great or small, was found to increase misconduct 50 per cent; abnormal movements of the wind increased it from 20 to 66 per cent; while the time of year and precipitation seemed to have almost no effect. While the effect of weather has been generally recognized by superintendents and teachers and directors of prisons and asylums, and even by banks, which in London do not permit clerks to do the more important bookkeeping during very foggy days, the statistical estimates of its effect in general need larger numbers for more valuable determinations. Temperature is known to have a very distinct effect upon crime, especially suicide and truancy. Workmen do less in bad weather, blood pressure is modified, etc.[8]
In his study of truancy, Kline[9] starts with the assumption that the maximum metabolism is always consciously or unconsciously sought, and that migrations are generally away from the extremes of hot and cold toward an optimum temperature. The curve of truancies and runaways increases in a marked ratio at puberty, which probably represents the age of natural majority among primitive people. Dislike of school, the passion for out-of-door life, and more universal interests in man and nature now arise, so that runaways may be interpreted as an instinctive rebellion against limitations of freedom and unnatural methods of education as well as against poor homes. Hunger is one of its most potent, although often unconscious causes. The habitual environment now begins to seem dull and there is a great increase in impatience at restraint. Sometimes there is a mania for simply going away and enjoying the liberty of nomadic life. Just as good people in foreign parts sometimes allow themselves unwonted liberties, so vagrancy increases crime. The passion to get to and play at or in the water is often strangely dominant. It seems so fine out of doors, especially in the spring, and the woods and fields make it so hard to voluntarily incarcerate oneself in the schoolroom, that pubescent boys and even girls often feel like animals in captivity. They long intensely for the utter abandon of a wilder life, and very characteristic is the frequent discarding of foot and head dress and even garments in the blind instinct to realise again the conditions of primitive man. The manifestations of this impulse, if read aright, are grave arraignments of the lack of adaptability of the child's environment to his disposition and nature, and with home restraints once broken, the liabilities to every crime, especially theft, are enormously increased. The truant, although a cording to Kline's measurements slightly smaller than the average child, is more energetic and is generally capable of the greatest activity and usefulness in more out-of-door vocations. Truancy is augmented, too, just in proportion as legitimate and interesting physical exercise is denied.
The vagrant, itinerant, vagabond, gadabout, hobo, and tramp, that Riis has made so interesting, is an arrested, degenerate, or perverted being who abhors work; feels that the world owes him a living; and generally has his first real nomad experience in the teens or earlier. It is a chronic illusion of youth that gives "elsewhere" a special charm. In the immediate present things are mean, dulled by wont, and perhaps even nauseating because of familiarity. There must be a change of scene to see the world; man is not sessile but locomotor; and the moment his life becomes migratory all the restraints and responsibilities of settled life vanish. It is possible to steal and pass on undiscovered and unsuspected, and to steal again. The vagabond escapes the control of public sentiment, which normally is an external conscience, and having none of his own within him thus lapses to a feral state. The constraint of city, home, and school is especially irksome, and if to this repulsion is added the attraction of a love of nature and of perpetual change, we have the diathesis of the roadsman already developed. Adolescence is the normal time of emancipation from the parental roof, when youth seeks to set up a home of its own, but the apprentice to life must wander far and long enough to find the best habitat in which to set up for himself. This is the spring season of emigration; and it should be an indispensable part of every life curriculum, just before settlement, to travel far and wide, if resources and inclination permit. But this stage should end in wisely chosen settlement where the young life can be independently developed, and that with more complacency and satisfaction because the place has been wisely chosen on the basis of a wide comparison. The chronic vagrant has simply failed to develop the reductives of this normal stage.
Crime is cryptogamous and flourishes in concealment, so that not only does falsehood facilitate it, but certain types of lies often cause and are caused by it. The beginning of wisdom in treatment is to discriminate between good and bad lies. My own study[10] of the lies of 300 normal children, by a method carefully devised in order to avoid all indelicacy to the childish consciousness, suggested the following distinct species of lies. It is often a well-marked epoch when the young child first learns that it can imagine and state things that have no objective counterpart in its life, and there is often a weird intoxication when some absurd and monstrous statement is made, while the first sensation of a deliberate break with truth causes a real excitement which is often the birth pang of the imagination. More commonly this is seen in childish play, which owes a part of its charm to self-deception. Children make believe they are animals, doctors, ogres, play school, that they are dead, mimic all they see and hear. Idealising temperaments sometimes prompt children of three or four suddenly to assert that they saw a pig with five ears, apples on a cherry tree, and other Munchausen wonders, which really means merely that they have had a new mental combination independently of experience. Sometimes their fancy is almost visualisation and develops into a kind of mythopeic faculty which spins clever yarns and suggests in a sense, quite as pregnant as Froschmer asserts of all mental activity and of the universe itself, that all their life is imagination. Its control and not its elimination in a Gradgrind age of crass facts is what should be sought in the interests of the highest truthfulness and of the evolution of thought as something above reality, which prepares the way for imaginative literature. The life of Hartley Coleridge,[11] by his brother, is one of many illustrations. He fancied cataract of what he named "jug-force" would burst out in a certain field and flow between populous banks, where an ideal government, long wars, and even a reform in spelling, would prevail, illustrated in a journal devoted to the affairs of this realm—all these developed in his imagination, where they existed with great reality for years. The vividness of this fancy resembles the pseudo-hallucinations of Kandinsky. Two sisters used to say, "Let us play we are sisters," as if this made the relation more real. Cagliostro found adolescent boys particularly apt for training for his exhibition of phrenological impostures, illustrating his thirty-five faculties. "He lied when he confessed he had lied," said a young Sancho Panza, who had believed the wild tales of another boy who later admitted their falsity. Sir James Mackintosh, near puberty, after reading Roman history, used to fancy himself the Emperor of Constantinople, and carried on the administration of the realm for hours at a time. His fancies never quite became convictions, but adolescence is the golden age of this kind of dreamery and reverie which supplements reality and totalizes our faculties, and often gives a special charm to dramatic activities and in morbid cases to simulation and dissimulation. It is a state from which some of the bad, but far more of the good qualities of life and mind arise. These are the noble lies of poetry, art, and idealism, but their pedagogic regime must be wise.
Again with children as with savages, truth depends largely upon personal likes and dislikes. Truth is for friends, and lies are felt to be quite right for enemies. The young often see no wrong in lies their friends wish told, but may collapse and confess when asked if they would have told their mother thus. Boys best keep up complotted lies and are surer to own up if caught than girls. It is harder to cheat in school with a teacher who is liked. Friendships are cemented by confidences and secrets, and when they wane, promises not to tell weaken in their validity. Lies to the priest, and above all to God, are the worst. All this makes special attention to friendships, leaders, and favorites important, and suggests the high value of science for general veracity.
The worst lies, perhaps, are those of selfishness. They ease children over many hard places in life, and are convenient covers for weakness and vice. These lies are, on the whole, judging from our census, most prevalent. They are also most corrupting and hard to correct. All bad habits particularly predispose to the lie of concealment; for those who do wrong are almost certain to have recourse to falsehood, and the sense of meanness thus slowly bred, which may be met by appeals to honor, for so much of which school life is responsible, is often mitigated by the fact that falsehoods are frequently resorted to in moments of danger and excitement, are easily forgotten when it is over, and rarely rankle. These, even more than the pseudomaniac cases mentioned later, grow rankly in those with criminal predispositions.
The lie heroic is often justified as a means of noble ends. Youth has an instinct which is wholesome for viewing moral situations as wholes. Callow casualists are fond of declaring that it would be a duty to state that their mother was out when she was in, if it would save her life, although they perhaps would not lie to save their own. A doctor, many suggested, might tell an overanxious patient or friend that there was hope, saving his conscience perhaps by reflecting that there was hope, although they had it while he had none. The end at first in such cases may be very noble and the fib or quibble very petty, but worse lies for meaner objects may follow. Youth often describes such situations with exhilaration as if there were a feeling of easement from the monotonous and tedious obligation of rigorous literal veracity, and here mentors are liable to become nervous and err. The youth who really gets interested in the conflict of duties may reverently be referred to the inner lie of his own conscience, the need of keeping which as a private tribunal is now apparent.
Many adolescents become craven literalists and distinctly morbid and pseudophobiac, regarding every deviation from scrupulously literal truth as alike heinous; and many systematized palliatives and casuistic word-splittings, methods of whispering or silently interpolating the words "not," "perhaps," or "I think," sometimes said over hundreds of times to neutralize the guilt of intended or unintended falsehoods, appear in our records as a sad product of bad methods.