That this efficiency is due to the merit of the inspiring motive and the kindergarten method is proven by the fact that the same earnestness and happiness in results obtains in all lands where the system is in use and is not confined to isolated places. We have personally seen it illustrated in the kindergartens of Holland and Germany as well as in the United States.
But there is no longer intelligent controversy about the efficiency of present methods in use in Character-Forming schools where habit and character are the first aims, leaving special intellectual attainment and religion to follow as natural results in due course.
What these little immigrants become in character must be the result of the conditions we prepare for them, and with which we surround them after arrival. We are responsible for the conditions to which they are condemned or by which they are favored, and hence all criminality or enforced idleness is part of the responsibility of each member of a community and in proportion to his intelligence or wealth. Society has heretofore neglected and persecuted the parents, but let us not perpetuate a barbarous inheritance for their children.
It is therefore proper to place social quarantine first in respect of importance.
No one form of quarantine can replace other forms, for there is need of protection at every gate by which evil may enter. The function of social quarantine is to teach moral or individual quarantine. Evil finds its way into the mind and becomes a bad habit-of-thought through fear in some of its many forms of expression. It is an easy matter to teach a child the difference between fearthought and forethought and to guard the mind against a tendency to fear. Social quarantine itself would eliminate the chief cause for fear and at the same time stimulate energy for useful accomplishment of some kind.
The old idea that necessity is the only mother of effort was operative only in primeval times when man was yet very much of an animal, when might was the recognized title to right, and before mankind had passed "over the center," as it were, in evolution, and before he came within the atmosphere of the dominant influence of attraction towards the highest ideals.
It is only necessary to refer to the cases around one in every community to note that the spirit of work in normal man is never satisfied, any more than the spirit of play is ever satisfied in children before they are warped out of shape by unwholesome surroundings.
Society has placed its quarantine against the germs of idleness and disorder at only one gate, and it begins to fight them only when they have established entrenched camps within the borders, and have already begun their depredations.
Between the outer gate of Birth and the inner gate of Individual Responsibility it has not only left open fields of temptation, but it has permitted the digging and maintaining of masked pitfalls of vice that the youth of the slums or of careless parents can scarcely escape. It is true that there is a theoretical protection offered through laws forbidding the entertainment of minors in saloons and other nurseries of vice, but many children roam at will among these pitfalls and cannot escape the influence, while all children, lads especially, no matter how isolated or protected, are sometimes drawn into these maelstroms by accident, or the allurements of the depraved ones already engulfed within them, who are eager for company to share their misfortune and disgrace.