Shall the meat packing and producing business be destroyed because great abuses have recently been unearthed, or shall it be reformed and corrected?
Shall the oil industry be wiped out because an undue share of the benefits are absorbed by a few, or shall the conditions be changed, the wrongs be righted?
Just think of the consistency of the people who rail at the contract system in prisons, but view with complacency the spectacle, in the East Side of New York, of almost countless thousands of children of four years of age, and sometimes younger, working in basements fourteen hours a day, making paper bags at four cents per thousand; or three-and-a-half-year-old children making artificial flowers on Mott Street, at eight cents per gross! Twenty-three thousand licensed, not to speak of the unknown thousands of unlicensed, tenement houses (home) factories in the city of New York, of the State of New York, which sternly forbids any form of contract labor in prison!
Far be it from me to criticise the State account system, ideal, utopian; but the superintendent who can combine the business qualities necessary to run successfully and economically the factories with the executive qualifications requisite for the other duties of prison governments, is certainly a prodigy, and cannot often be found.
THE REFORMATORY
Neither have I anything to say against the reformatory system of manual training, so called, which builds only to destroy again, except to regret that the only way the State provides manual training for its young men is through the passport and credentials of crime.
THE HABIT OF LABOR
It is not so necessary that a convict shall know a trade, in these days of machinery and constant and continual changes in the methods of manufacture, as it is that he shall have developed in him habits of industry and the willingness to work at what he can do. The great trouble with the average convict is, that he not only does not know a trade, but that he has not been drilled in any kind of labor, and prefers to obtain his substance from the labor of others, by surreptitious, unlawful and unjust means. The habit of labor is what he needs more than the specific kind of work.
As Superintendent Brockway said many years ago: “Only motivelessness is the seat of incorrigibility. To discover or create a want is to find a motive. Given a motive, you may direct a habit. To form a habit is to create character. Habit is the school of conscience. Conscience and habit reinforce one another.”
Let us have the habit of labor rather than the expensive training in trades, which in countless thousands of great industrial establishments will be of no additional value.