“Power must be given,” says our report, “to send to school all neglected children—all found loitering in streets and lanes—whose parents take no charge of them, but leave them to grow up as they may, untutored and untaught, save in the practice of crime. If the parents neglect to perform their bounden duty, then the State may properly step in, loco parentis, and do the needful work; and surely this is no unjustifiable interference with the parental authority—it is only saying to the parent, ‘if you will not discharge the duty you owe to your child, both in the sight of God and of man, we, the public, will do it for you; we will not suffer your child to grow up a torment to himself and to all around him; we would much rather you did your duty yourself, but if you will not, then we must.’
“By law, the burden of uncared-for pauper children falls at present on the workhouse, but the poor-law authorities are not entitled to expend their money, unless under their own immediate control; and power must be given to them to do so, through the medium of industrial school managers. This will be as advantageous as it is economical. Better for the public, who must eventually pay in one form or other, to maintain the child in an industrial school at 4l. a year, than in a poor house at 10l. or 12l., especially as the smaller expenditure gives every prospect of making him a useful member of the community, and the larger gives little hope of ever raising him above the pauper class.
“A good education,” says one of the inspectors of the English National Schools, “so infallibly dispauperises, and raises its recipient above the necessity of ever again applying for relief, that except under gross mismanagement of the guardians in other points, we may be tolerably certain that vicious habits, easily eradicable by sound early training, have brought the great majority of those who burden the parochial rates to their state of dependence. Could this truth be more universally impressed on the managers of the poor, the difficulties in the way of forming industrial schools would vanish!
“It was said by the late stipendiary magistrate at Liverpool, that he had ascertained that ten such children, under fourteen years of age had cost, in apprehension and imprisonment, upwards of six hundred pounds; and, with so little effect, that all of them were then in prison, and one, only about ten years of age, lay under sentence of transportation for seven years.
“The remedy for these enormous evils appears simple and obvious. Let the committee or the magistrate be empowered to send all such mendicant children to the schools of industry at the expense of the parent or the parish, and let the worthless parent be punished if he neglects the sacred duty of maintaining his child, which at present he is allowed to do with impunity.”
We think the friends of our Houses of Refuge could scarcely ask a more sensible and cogent argument in support of such establishments, than is furnished in these brief extracts; and yet cogent and sensible as it may be, it fails to convince gainsayers, or at least, to constrain them to prompt and liberal action. Within a twelvemonth a project for such an establishment was lost in a neighboring State, (as it was alleged,) in some political whirlpool; and the public prints tell us, that a like wholesome measure was lately defeated in St. Louis by the jealousy or arrogance of a religious party. We do not vouch for the truth of either of these statements, but we hazard nothing in saying, that the problem, how to restrain and suppress crime, will never be solved, till politicians and religionists lose their selfishness and their bigotry in an earnest and efficient effort to provide for vicious and neglected children.
The following good old Saxon principle is adverted to in a report on Parochial Union Schools for 1851.
“Guardians are not always so open to considerations of ultimate as of immediate economy; and many a pauper who now, before his death, costs his parish one or two hundred pounds, might have lived without relief, had a different education, represented perhaps by the additional expense of a single pound, been bestowed upon him in his youth! This is strictly retributive justice; and I think it would be good policy to increase its effect, and it would give a prodigious stimulus to the diffusion of education, if the expense of every criminal, while in prison, were reimbursed to the country by the parish in which he had a settlement. What a stir would be created in any parish by the receipt of a demand from the Secretary of State for the Home Department for 80l. for the support of two criminals during the past year! I cannot but think that the locality where they had been brought up would be immediately investigated, perhaps some wretched hovels, before unregarded, made known, and means taken to educate and civilize families that had brought such grievous taxation on the parish. The expense of keeping criminals, as of paupers, must be borne somewhere; and it seems more just that it should fall on those parishes whose neglect has probably caused the crime than on the general purse.”
We would gladly pursue the discussion of these interesting topics did our limits allow, but we have indicated one important, and as it seems to us indispensable preliminary inquiry, viz.: Can we effectually carry out any general scheme of reform, except we withdraw neglected and vicious children from the associations and habits of their miserable and degraded homes, and put them upon a course of involuntary moral and industrial training, before they become what are technically called juvenile delinquents? Is not a compulsory process (much earlier in its application than the discipline of a House of Refuge) essential to the accomplishment of any general or comprehensive reform? Will such a process be authorized by any popular legislature in our country? If the question implies an answer, is the answer true?