A still more remarkable case that has recently come to my knowledge concerns a Cleveland youth who, up to the age of sixteen, had been a model of good conduct. Then, having gone through high school and begun work with a business firm, he suddenly developed thieving tendencies, finally breaking into a post-office, an exploit which earned for him a term in a reformatory. This was so far from curing him that soon after his release he adventured into highway robbery, was caught, and was sent to jail.

So sudden and startling had been the change in his behaviour that the Cleveland police authorities were convinced he was not responsible for his actions, and advised his mother to have him committed to an asylum for the insane. Before taking this extreme step she had him examined by a neurologist, Doctor Henry S. Upson, whose careful testing of the boy failed to disclose any signs of organic brain trouble. Dr. Upson noticed, however, that his teeth were badly decayed, and this led him to suggest an X-ray examination, as a result of which it was discovered that the youthful criminal was suffering from several abscessed and impacted teeth.

Following an operation for their removal, there was a steady improvement in his moral as well as his physical health. When his term of imprisonment was at an end he found work in a printing-shop, and at last accounts, a year after the operation, had won for himself the reputation of being “quiet and industrious, self-controlled, and without any indication of either moral or mental aberration.” (The Psychological Clinic, vol. iv, pp. 150–153.)

In a single institution—the New York Juvenile Asylum—it was found that the degeneracy of 20 per cent. of a group of fifty “bad boys,” who were mentally as well as morally backward, was due in great measure to similar trivial physical defects, adenoids, enlarged glands, eye and ear troubles, etc. Not so very long ago these boys, like the boys in the individual instances mentioned, would have been deemed the hopeless victims of a bad heredity. It is therefore fair to assume that in time to come other remediable, but as yet unsuspected, physical causes of imperfect mental and moral functioning will be discovered.

This is not to say that in such cases medication or the surgeon’s knife will prove all-sufficient to prevent the transition from “naughtiness” into outright vice and crime. To this end good moral training will still be the indispensable safeguard, and particularly the moral training to be had through the subtle influence of a good home and good associates. Surely as, for example, the results of the activities of the New York Children’s Aid Society strongly suggest, the home and the companions of youth are the great determinants of character. As has been so well said by Doctor Paul Dubois, the eminent Swiss physician and philosopher (“Reason and Sentiment,” pp. 69–71):

“If you have the happiness to be a well-living man, take care not to attribute the credit of it to yourself. Remember the favourable conditions in which you have lived, surrounded by relatives who loved you and set you a good example; do not forget the close friends who have taken you by the hand and led you away from the quagmires of evil; keep a grateful remembrance for all the teachers who have influenced you, the kind and intelligent schoolmaster, the devoted pastor; realise all these multiple influences which have made of you what you are. Then you will remember that such and such a culprit has not in his sad life met with these favourable conditions, that he had a drunken father or a foolish mother, and that he has lived without affection, exposed to all kinds of temptation. You will then take pity upon this disinherited man, whose mind has been nourished upon malformed mental images, begetting evil sentiments such as immoderate desire or social hatred.”

And it is not only the homeless, deserted, or neglected child, allowed to run wild in the streets, drifting or forced into occupations which bring him more or less closely into touch with the ways and haunts of wrong-doing—it is not only this child who is likely in time to become a wrong-doer himself. No less than the neglected child is the “spoiled” one, however good his heredity, apt to degenerate into delinquency, perhaps into criminality of the worst description. In short, to borrow Pascal’s pregnant phrase, every child at the outset of his life is a little impulsive being, pushed indifferently toward good or evil according to the influences which surround him.

The blame, then, for the boy who “goes wrong” does not rest with the boy himself, or yet with his remote ancestors. It rests squarely with the parents who, through ignorance or neglect, have failed to mould him aright in the plastic days of childhood. What is needed, especially in this complex civilisation of ours, with its myriad incitements and temptations, is a livelier appreciation of the responsibilities as well as the privileges of parenthood. Most of all, perhaps, from the point of view of coping with the problem of wrong-doing, do parents need to appreciate that it is in the very first years of their children’s lives that the work of character-building should be begun.

In this connection a curious story is told of a father and mother, who, full of that sublime eagerness for the welfare of their young which every parent ought to have, took their only child, a handsome boy of three, to an old Greek philosopher.

“We want you,” said they, “to take full charge of our child’s education, and do the best you can for him.”