Throughout the United States there is being manifested a general tendency to accept the theory that our human stock is relatively sound. While there are seemingly large numbers of the criminal, delinquent, and dependent classes, they are in reality comparatively few in proportion to the entire population. And when we accept the estimate of the experts that about ninety per cent of the cases included in the classes just named are preventable through wise foresight and training, the outlook for a better race of human beings becomes most cheering.
“The proper study of mankind is man,” says the poet. But for many generations we have regarded this statement as mere poetry and not necessarily truth. Our policy up to the recent past has been rather this: The proper study of mankind is everything except man, leaving the all-important problems of child-rearing to the decisions of wise old grand-mothers and debating societies. But a radical change has come, and that within this present generation. Men and women highly trained in the colleges and universities are now applying their scientific methods to the study of man with no less zeal and earnestness than that which has characterized the student of the non-human problems for many generations of time.
Plate. XXXII.
Fig. 39.—Sowing the seed, all by herself.
Fig. 40.—Thinning the vegetables.
New York Scenes.
Through the able conclusions of the painstaking expert the so-called institutional life has been especially improved. The industrial (reform) schools are now practicing a system of balanced activities—of study, work, play, and the like—such as the findings of these investigators have warranted. The method of paroling the delinquent child, after he has spent a term of preparation, was proved most helpful through the careful tests of a large number of cases. Recently the parole system has been effectively applied to certain classes of penitentiary convicts. A most productive agency for good now in use in many of the prisons and all the industrial schools is that of building up the waste places in the individual life through specific training and instruction. The first question raised in such cases is, What is the particular moral defect of the individual? second, What are the causes? third, What will reconstruct his character and give permanent relief? That is, the expert psychologist and the expert sociologist are being called into service with the expert alienist and physician. The purpose is to save and reconstruct the whole man. Compulsory education and trade schooling are now very common in state prisons.