"No; we wasn't taught it at the school wot I used to go to."
"But you didn't go to school."
"The boy wot did go told me."
"Well, we'll see to it that you do go to school now."
Another new-comer excused himself more ingeniously:—"Me and my mate we found a donkey and barrer at Covent Garden. We saw a man's name on the barrer, and fought if we went off wif the donkey we would git a shilling the next day for taking it back to him. But a copper stopped us as we was leading the donkey over Waterloo Bridge. So we hadn't a chance to take it back, as we was going to."
"Very well, you must stay with us until you learn that donkeys in barrows are not necessarily lost."
Crooks believed in giving the boys plenty of play and plenty of work. Nearly all their offences he believed to be due to excess of vitality. They had never had a chance of working it off in a proper way before. Besides, many of the lads needed mothering. It was always his regret that he could not persuade his colleagues on the Committee to adopt a system he found in vogue in the Moss Hill industrial school in Glasgow. When visiting that institution he was agreeably surprised to find about a dozen "mothers" on the staff. If a lad tore his coat or pulled off a button, he knew which particular "mother" to run to in order to be patched up.
"I have always said, and shall always continue to say," he states, "that reformatory schools ought to be made a State charge entirely. If there is any part of the community that can be called a national debt, it is this class of poor, misguided lads who, if they were properly cared for, would soon become a valuable national asset."