Reform and Politics / Part 2 from The Works of John Greenleaf Whittier, Volume VII

by John Greenleaf Whittier

In the case of another boy, aged twelve years, the improvement has been equally remarkable. The gentleman who first called attention to him, in a recent note to Dr. Howe, published in the report, thus speaks of his present condition: "When I remember his former wild and almost frantic demeanor when approached by any one, and the apparent impossibility of communicating with him, and now see him standing in his class, playing with his fellows, and willingly and familiarly approaching me, examining what I gave him,—and when I see him already selecting articles named by his teacher, and even correctly pronouncing words printed on cards,— improvement does not convey the idea presented to my mind; it is creation; it is making him anew."

All the pupils have more or less advanced. Their health and habits have improved; and there is no reason to doubt that the experiment, at the close of its three years, will be found to have been quite as successful as its most sanguine projectors could have anticipated. Dr. Howe has been ably seconded by an accomplished teacher, James B. Richards, who has devoted his whole time to the pupils. Of the nature and magnitude of their task, an idea may be formed only by considering the utter listlessness of idiocy, the incapability of the poor pupil to fix his attention upon anything, and his general want of susceptibility to impressions. All his senses are dulled and perverted. Touch, hearing, sight, smell, are all more or less defective. His gluttony is unaccompanied with the gratification of taste,—the most savory viands and the offal which he shares with the pigs equally satisfy him. His mental state is still worse than his physical. Thought is painful and irksome to him.

His teacher can only engage his attention by strenuous efforts, loud, earnest tones, gesticulations and signs, and a constant presentation of some visible object of bright color and striking form. The eye wanders, and the spark of consciousness and intelligence which has been fanned into momentary brightness darkens at the slightest relaxation of the teacher's exertions. The names of objects presented to him must sometimes be repeated hundreds of times before he can learn them. Yet the patience and enthusiasm of the teacher are rewarded by a progress, slow and unequal, but still marked and manifest. Step by step, often compelled to turn back and go over the inch of ground he had gained, the idiot is still creeping forward; and by almost imperceptible degrees his sick, cramped, and prisoned spirit casts off the burden of its body of death, breath as from the Almighty—is breathed into him, and he becomes a living soul.

After the senses of the idiot are trained to take note of their appropriate objects, the various perceptive faculties are next to be exercised. The greatest possible number of facts are to be gathered up through the medium of these faculties into the storehouse of memory, from whence eventually the higher faculties of mind may draw the material of general ideas. It has been found difficult, if not impossible, to teach the idiot to read by the letters first, as in the ordinary method; but while the varied powers of the three letters, h, a, t, could not be understood by him, he could be made to comprehend the complex sign of the word hat, made by uniting the three.

The moral nature of the idiot needs training and development as well as his physical and mental. All that can be said of him is, that he has the latent capacity for moral development and culture. Uninstructed and left to himself, he has no ideas of regulated appetites and propensities, of decency and delicacy of affection and social relations. The germs of these ideas, which constitute the glory and beauty of humanity, undoubtedly exist in him; but there can be no growth without patient and persevering culture. Where this is afforded, to use the language of the report, "the idiot may learn what love is, though he may not know the word which expresses it; he may feel kindly affections while unable to understand the simplest virtuous principle; and he may begin to live acceptably to God before he has learned the name by which men call him."

In the facts and statistics presented in the report, light is shed upon some of the dark pages of God's providence, and it is seen that the suffering and shame of idiocy are the result of sin, of a violation of the merciful laws of God and of the harmonies of His benign order. The penalties which are ordained for the violators of natural laws are inexorable and certain. For the transgressor of the laws of life there is, as in the case of Esau, "no place for repentance, though he seek it earnestly and with tears." The curse cleaves to him and his children. In this view, how important becomes the subject of the hereditary transmission of moral and physical disease and debility! and how necessary it is that there should be a clearer understanding of, and a willing obedience, at any cost, to the eternal law which makes the parent the blessing or the curse of the child, giving strength and beauty, and the capacity to know and do the will of God, or bequeathing loathsomeness, deformity, and animal appetite, incapable of the restraints of the moral faculties! Even if the labors of Dr. Howe and his benevolent associates do not materially lessen the amount of present actual evil and suffering in this respect, they will not be put forth in vain if they have the effect of calling public attention to the great laws of our being, the violation of which has made this goodly earth a vast lazarhouse of pain and sorrow.

The late annual message of the Governor of Massachusetts invites our attention to a kindred institution of charity. The chief magistrate congratulates the legislature, in language creditable to his mind and heart, on the opening of the Reform School for Juvenile Criminals, established by an act of a previous legislature. The act provides that, when any boy under sixteen years of age shall be convicted of crime punishable by imprisonment other than such an offence as is punished by imprisonment for life, he may be, at the discretion of the court or justice, sent to the State Reform School, or sentenced to such imprisonment as the law now provides for his offence. The school is placed under the care of trustees, who may either refuse to receive a boy thus sent there, or, after he has been received, for reasons set forth in the act, may order him to be committed to prison under the previous penal law of the state. They are also authorized to apprentice the boys, at their discretion, to inhabitants of the Commonwealth. And whenever any boy shall be discharged, either as reformed or as having reached the age of twenty-one years, his discharge is a full release from his sentence.

It is made the duty of the trustees to cause the boys to be instructed in piety and morality, and in branches of useful knowledge, in some regular course of labor, mechanical, agricultural, or horticultural, and such other trades and arts as may be best adapted to secure the amendment, reformation, and future benefit of the boys. The class of offenders for whom this act provides are generally the offspring of parents depraved by crime or suffering from poverty and want,—the victims often of circumstances of evil which almost constitute a necessity,—issuing from homes polluted and miserable, from the sight and hearing of loathsome impurities and hideous discords, to avenge upon society the ignorance, and destitution, and neglect with which it is too often justly chargeable. In 1846 three hundred of these youthful violators of law were sentenced to jails and other places of punishment in Massachusetts, where they incurred the fearful liability of being still more thoroughly corrupted by contact with older criminals, familiar with atrocity, and rolling their loathsome vices "as a sweet morsel under the tongue." In view of this state of things the Reform School has been established, twenty-two thousand dollars having been contributed to the state for that purpose by an unknown benefactor of his race. The school is located in Westboro', on a fine farm of two hundred acres. The buildings are in the form of a square, with a court in the centre, three stories in front, with wings. They are constructed with a degree of architectural taste, and their site is happily chosen,—a gentle eminence, overlooking one of the loveliest of the small lakes which form a pleasing feature in New England scenery. From this place the atmosphere and associations of the prison are excluded. The discipline is strict, as a matter of course; but it is that of a well-regulated home or school-room,—order, neatness, and harmony within doors; and without, the beautiful 'sights and sounds and healthful influences of Nature. One would almost suppose that the poetical dream of Coleridge, in his tragedy of Remorse, had found its realization in the Westboro' School, and that, weary of the hopelessness and cruelty of the old penal system, our legislators had embodied in their statutes the idea of the poet:—

"With other ministrations thou, O Nature,
Healest thy wandering and distempered child
Thou pourest on him thy soft influences,
Thy sunny hues, fair forms, and breathing sweets,
Thy melodies of woods, and winds, and waters,
Till he relent, and can no more endure
To be a jarring and a dissonant thing
Amidst this general dance and minstrelsy."

Thus it is that the Christian idea of reformation, rather than revenge, is slowly but surely incorporating itself in our statute books. We have only to look back but a single century to be able to appreciate the immense gain for humanity in the treatment of criminals which has been secured in that space of time. Then the use of torture was common throughout Europe. Inability to comprehend and believe certain religious dogmas was a crime to be expiated by death, or confiscation of estate, or lingering imprisonment. Petty offences against property furnished subjects for the hangman. The stocks and the whipping-post stood by the side of the meeting-house. Tongues were bored with redhot irons and ears shorn off. The jails were loathsome dungeons, swarming with vermin, unventilated, unwarmed. A century and a half ago the populace of Massachusetts were convulsed with grim merriment at the writhings of a miserable woman scourged at the cart-tail or strangling in the ducking- stool; crowds hastened to enjoy the spectacle of an old man enduring the unutterable torment of the 'peine forte et dare,'—pressed slowly to death under planks,—for refusing to plead to an indictment for witchcraft. What a change from all this to the opening of the State Reform School, to the humane regulations of prisons and penitentiaries, to keen-eyed benevolence watching over the administration of justice, which, in securing society from lawless aggression, is not suffered to overlook the true interest and reformation of the criminal, nor to forget that the magistrate, in the words of the Apostle, is to be indeed "the minister of God to man for good!"