Art. III.—SOURCES AND CHECKS OF JUVENILE DELINQUENCY.

When the farmer finds his fruit trees exposed to the ravages of the caterpillar, he makes but slow and unsatisfactory work, if he takes the worms one by one as they are feasting on the leaf, or crawling along the stem, or dangling in the air. There is a period of the day, however, when they are all in their nest, and if he can apply a torch to their curious fabric and consume it, or riddle it with shot, or wind it and its wriggling population upon a brush or broom well besmeared with pitch or tar, to be forthwith put into the fire or under the foot, the work is thorough and the tree safe.

Not inaptly does this illustrate, or serve to point out the true process for the diminution of crime. The arrest, conviction and punishment of here and there a rogue, is scarcely felt. It is but a unit subtracted from the appalling aggregate of crime. If we would have the ratio of our criminal population palpably and permanently lessened, we must lay hold of the young ones in the nest, and whatever the trouble or cost, we may rest assured it is by all odds the cheapest and only effectual way of dealing with the pest.

Among the prominent causes of, or excitements to a criminal life which are operative upon childhood, especially in cities and populous towns, have been reckoned 1, and chiefly drunkenness. 2. The absence of education and industrial training. 3. The inadequacy of home-accommodation to secure the ordinary decencies of life. 4. The demoralizing influences of cheap theatres, and other low places of amusement, association with fire companies, and the liberty to dispose of the whole or a considerable portion of their own earnings. 5. The example, instruction or orders of parents constraining them to vicious acts, and 6, the connivance or co-operation of receivers of stolen goods to prompt them. We might indefinitely enlarge this catalogue, but these causes are adequate to account for the greater part of juvenile crime.

The readers of our Journal cannot fail to be aware of the unusual interest which has recently been awakened on this subject. Our present number contains sundry evidences of it, and by referring to the cover, a notice will be found, the design of which is to provoke inquiry and discussion, with a view to reformatory measures. As human nature is substantially the same all the world over, and as like causes produce like effects, we have transferred to our pages several interesting and important passages from the last report of the inspector general of English prisons, bearing particularly on this subject.

In respect to the first cause of juvenile depravity, which we just commented on, drunkenness—

“Statistical returns show that the amount of money expended in intoxicating drinks of one kind or another in Great Britain, is between fifty and sixty millions of pounds sterling per annum,—a sum fully equal to the whole national revenue.

“Now such an enormous expenditure on any one object must produce a noticeable effect upon our social condition. Were such a sum annually expended on the reclaiming of waste land and the improvement of what is but partially cultivated, and the erection of comfortable dwellings, in a few years our whole island would be a garden of beauty and fertility.

“But what are the results produced?

“The physicians of our lunatic asylums tell us that intemperance is the cause of a large proportion of the cases of insanity.

“The medical officers of our infirmaries and dispensaries tell us that many diseases are caused, and more are made fatal, by habits of intemperance.

“The masters of our poor houses tell us that they can trace the pauperism of most of their inmates to their own intemperance, or to that of their parents.

“The governors and chaplains of our prisons tell us that most of the crime in our gaols is directly or indirectly caused by strong drink.

“If the offences to which habitual drinking has ultimately led could be ascertained, I believe we should find that four-fifths of the recorded offences have sprung from it.”

Although the remedy for this enormous evil is justly regarded as lying to a considerable degree in the hands of educators, it is maintained that “much may be done to abate the evil by reducing the number of licensed public houses both in town and country, and by greatly raising the expense of strong drink.”

As an evidence of the effects of cheapening strong drink, it is stated that in 1825, the duty on whiskey was greatly reduced in Scotland, and that as a consequence, intemperance began to increase, so that “in the twenty-seven years which have since elapsed, the consumption has become nearly five-fold greater; crime, disease, and death have increased in similar proportion; and the sober, religious Scotland of other days is now proved, by its consumption of spirits, to be, without exception, the most drunken nation in Europe.”

As to the connection between intemperance and the other causes of juvenile depravity, “the records of the prison-house, if fully analyzed, would show that the first penny or the first pound taken by a son from his parents, or abstracted by the young man from his master’s desk, is for the theatre, not for the public-house. But youth, being corrupted by the pleasures of sin, drunkenness follows, and becomes the associate or the substitute of licentiousness, and completes the ruin. Money becomes indispensable, and it is gotten by some desperate and wicked means, at the possibility of which a few months before, the mind would have recoiled with indignation, like that of Hazael, when reproached by the prophet: ‘Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this great thing?’”

In the great majority of instances, it is believed, the only means by which the reformation of such can be rationally expected is by their thorough and permanent severance from those scenes and associations in which their evil habits were formed. Although suffering from hunger and misery, it must not be supposed that the lives led by these delinquent children are void of pleasurable sensations; “the very alternation from one extreme to another keeps the mind in a state of feverish excitement; the want of a penny to buy food on one day, is more than compensated by the reckless profusion of the next; and the despondency created by privation and long suffering is speedily supplanted by exultation on the success of some criminal feat of daring and dexterity.”

None will deny another position of the report, viz.:

“That it is impossible for children to be brought up as Christian children ought to be, when huddled together, male and female, old and young, like pigs in a stye; and yet this revolting expression is not too strong to designate the dwellings of tens of thousands in our land.

“How many of our honest industrious artisans have only one apartment, or, at most, a room and a closet for father and mother, and grown up sons and daughters!

“The physical condition of the poor cannot be viewed as separated from the moral. The want of a proper dwelling place for the working man is one of his greatest trials, and is as injurious to his spiritual as to his bodily health. The crowding together of a whole family in one room weakens domestic virtue, destroys all self-respect, modesty, and delicacy of feeling, and utterly removes all opportunities for self-improvement. A home which is miserable from physical or moral causes is the half-way house to the gin-palace or beer-shop.”

The inquiry might be opportunely raised, whether the habits of life which constitute such a social state as is here described, are not formed long before the state itself is entered. A girl or boy accustomed to street-associations either in the pursuit of some trading employment, as selling papers, matches, &c., &c., or from mere neglect and idleness, will soon fall into habits which no degree of loathsome infamy or social degradation will shock. The origin of the evil, in such cases, lies far back of its present stage and locality. It dates from the childhood of those who now act as the head of this filthy and brutalized little community.

Of the penny theatres, it is truly remarked, that “they present almost irresistible attractions;” and the annals of juvenile delinquents are full of cases of petty thefts committed in order to procure the penny or twopence required for admission.

Even if the price of admission be honestly obtained, as one of the reports says, the scenes to which the youthful spectator is there introduced are understood to be of the most flagitious and depraving nature, calculated only to inflame the passions, and deaden every virtuous feeling.

Singing-rooms and dancing-rooms, too, are represented as training up boys and girls to familiarity with vice in every shape. A magistrate sent two of his officers to visit one of them. Their report describes seven hundred boys and girls collected together to have their bodies poisoned with smoke and drink, and their minds with ribaldry and obscenity! Can any one have a doubt that the evil wrought in such a singing-room in a single night, outweighs all the good that can be effected by a dozen Sunday-schools in a whole year?

And finally the part played by the receivers of stolen goods is described as a profession.

So much for causes, and now as to remedies. These are emphatically preventive in their nature, “lying at the very foundation of our social arrangements, and until very recently, wholly disregarded and uncared for, viz., ‘organized and adequate means for education and industrial training.’”

It is remarkable how many of the prominent features of some of our modern schemes of juvenile reform here, have been long ago presented to the public eye. More than half a century ago, (1796) the renowned Earl of Chatham introduced to the British Parliament a bill, which had for its object the establishment of a school for work in every parish or incorporated district, for the purpose of instructing the children in different trades and manufactures. The parishes were to be at liberty to maintain their poor children in the working schools, or to lodge them there or keep them only during the hours of labor, and then feed them there or give them work to do at home. The overseers were to be charged with the direction of these schools, and were required to supply them with materials and utensils, &c. Parents burdened with infant children, and in the receipt of out-door relief, were required to send their children to the working school as soon as they were five years old, to be instructed and maintained there. It was provided that those fathers who might prefer to keep their children at home, should bring them up and employ them, receiving some direction and assistance from the local authorities until the children were in a condition to gain their livelihood. Upon leaving the working school, those children who could not return to their families were to have been apprenticed at the expense of the parishes, or provided with some means of service.

It has long been our conviction, as the volumes of this Journal will show, that no very radical reform of the vicious children and youth of the land will be accomplished, so long as the government is so reluctant to enforce parental obligations, or to take upon itself all due attention to such obligations in those points where the welfare and safety of society are put in jeopardy by the disregard of them. Though our institutions are based on a principle of the utmost liberty, they are, for that very reason, peculiarly dependent on the proper education and training of children for their preservation. No country on the face of the globe has so much staked on the intelligence, industry and virtue of each succeeding generation as ours. We are fully satisfied that the timidity which our government manifests in laying fast and earnest hold of this great evil, parental neglect, exposes us to the loss of all that is worth preserving.

“Society has surely the right to guard itself against the evil practices of those neglected children; and, having the right, it ought also to have the power; but if such power exist, it seems very difficult to tell in whose hands it is vested. The child convicted of theft is whipped or imprisoned, but if he stole to appease the cravings of hunger which his worthless parent failed to satisfy, it is clear that chastisement has not fallen upon the proper party, and that the really guilty has profited by the vices prompted by his culpable neglect, while the whole cost has been defrayed by the public.”

“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?