As applies to either prison or public school instruction, the crucial points are: (1) Technical marks of stigmata are much too frequently and much too loosely attached to budding youth, the inevitable effect of which is to depress and discourage them, particularly out of the gibes of unthinking comrades. (2) More often than not, the marks initiate in the fallible brains of those tricked into overdetermination, through predisposition amounting to near obsession to make the technical case. (3) The marks, as arrived at under present conception of rational “follow-up” processes, do not carry to comprehensive measures. (4) The scholastic or reform curriculum that is not pregnant with influences fundamentally germane to the mental, moral and physical uplift of the last unit of the mass, is either falsely prescribed or prosecuted.
Because of his reasoning faculty, the child, more quickly than any other youngling of the animal kingdom, unfolds by imitation to good suggestion and good example. Hence, if solely because segregated-group treatment practically cold-blankets those two, capital influences, as exerted by the mass upon the individual, it should be relegated to the domain where veiled minds are wedded either to fantasies, or to the useless function.
Wheresoever mental dullards are schooled, the atmosphere should be surcharged with hope. There, the word “can’t” should be held taboo, and “you can if you will” issue commonly with the force of an unquestionable slogan. No matter how apparently hopeless the case, no suggestion of character whatsoever, to that effect, should be carried to the subject.
Related tests for physical reactions may be taken at very close to their face value, since the responses thereto are mostly involuntary, and, in any instance, the subject can’t just figure it out how to beat them. However, acquired ability, plus somewhat of natural gift of the psycho-analyst to trace signs to their source and intertwining, must be beyond question.
The phrase “plus somewhat of natural gift” is inserted, because the burden is at once upon the examiner to pick apart the mosaic of motive, and to uncover the counter motives of the examined. That he will not do reliably short of an intuitive faculty naturally keen, backed by a heap of horse sense, and a broad culture; a culture so broad that he can vibrate alike with such as the cheap paddock tout, the crass, ego-centric, oversexed hyperesthenic with a chip on his shoulder, the plain plumb bum and crowded-out derelict, the congenital victim of hebetude with ox-like mind and the sensibilities of the mullet, and the bald criminal cheat, out all of the time to bring the crime-tainted-bacon home over the subterranean route.
Actually to grade human souls and sound human hearts, is a heaping order that calls for catholic understanding of comparative sociology, retroactive as to transmitted traits of character for at least one-hundred-and-eighty years. Back of that, man has not yet probed to impulse for human action of the present; but he can not be sure that reasons in part for present given courses of human conduct, may not strike backward centuries farther than nine-score years.
Not so long ago, as world time goes, natural selection was the vogue. Under Lycurgus, a little later on, Spartan youth who were not expert foragers from the common hoard, were subject to the heaviest hand of the State. Another short bridge of years, and Germans who grilled the legions of Varus boasted that they “didn’t go to war but to annihilation.” Shortly thereafter the doom of the Roman Empire was adumbrated partly by the “lounge-lizard” given over to various forms of indefensible conquest, not the least of which led to vitiating sexual excess; and partly by establishing barbarous letting of human blood in the national consciousness as a form of amusement.
From then on, most of social upheavals carried the germs of future social chaos in thousands of killings, the bulk of which were born of hectic, heartless bestiality, and very few, if any, of which wrought for whole-seeing man.
Through all, war over religious creeds is chargeable, more than any other one influence, with retardation of human progress. Therefore, to trace the backward trail of the purblind bigot, is ofttimes the primary chore of the psycho-analyst.
Instinctive, habitual thievery lashed into lads, even unto death, 323 B. C. would necessarily carry with tremendous pertinacity; probably not unto this year of our Lord, but possibly so. It is given to no man to declare unequivocally that an intrinsic Greek thief of to-day is not, as to natural tendency to thieve, more or less the product of certain lads whom the authorities of ancient Sparta sped on their thieving ways.