these employments may be carried, how much they may, at a future time, contribute to the support of indigent pupils at the asylum, and how far the complete knowledge of some useful art or trade may be imparted, while the intellectual [the italics are ours] and religious instruction is going on, are subjects on which the directors do not feel able at present to decide." In the eighth report we come upon a familiar expression," "preparation for the active duties of life." The shops have been completed "at a considerable pecuniary sacrifice on the part of the institution." This was made, however, "in hopes that the way might thus be prepared for meeting the wishes of the public and of the friends of the deaf and dumb [the italics are ours] with regard to this very interesting and important part of their education and preparation for the active duties of life."

Now it would be interesting to know what idea the directors and the public had in those days of a "preparation for the active duties of life." This would be shown by the instruction they provided for the pupil. Fortunately for our inquiry the report contains several "specimens of original composition" by the pupils, one of which is "a description of the workshops of the asylum," and although this falls between a letter from Marcus Tullius Cicero to a "friend in Greece," and another from Napoleon Bonaparte from his retirement at St. Helena to "Maria Louisa, his wife," the description of the workshops contains internal evidence of genuineness not possessed by the other two. This original composition runs as follows:

"The two workshops, which are northwest of the asylum, are about 200 feet from it. They are built of brick. I think that they are both about forty by sixteen. They have one story and a garret. When strangers and visitors come to those shops, they are, I think, interested to see things which are made by the male pupils. The cabinetmaker, who can speak and hear, saw in the newspaper last February that the directors of the American Asylum wished to have a suitable person to oversee the workshops and to instruct several pupils who wished to be cabinetmakers. He came here this month and is employed to overlook and aid in business. Six male pupils in the left shop make new family furniture to sell in the city. A cooper in that same shop makes barrels, pails, tubs, and keelers [a shallow tub]. A deaf and dumb mature gentlemen, who is from Maine, is a very skillful and ingenious blacksmith and cutler in the right-hand shop. Having made a great many new blades from cast steel, he puts them in the old handles. One blade costs fifteen cents, and the people are very much astonished to see that it is very cheap. His apprentices are employed to learn the business of a blacksmith and cutler. A deaf and dumb shoemaker, who was from the State of New York, makes elegant shoes for the ladies from morocco, kid, prunello, seal, and Denmark satin."

In 1827 we are told that increased attention is being bestowed upon the mechanical department of the institution, most of the pupils having employed four or five hours daily in learning a trade. Experience, however, had by that time fully demonstrated that such work could not be made to pay for its expenses.

Turning now to the institutions for the blind we find the trustees of the Perkins Institution in their third annual report (1835) speaking of the department of "mechanical labor or handieraft work" as follows:

*

"None of the articles have yet been brought into the public market; nor was it perhaps desirable, for the pupils have by no means attained that degree of skill of which they are capable. The advantages to be derived from these occupations are not, however, merely in the product of the labor, but in the tact and confidence which are acquired by the exercise of the physical powers. Indeed, the same may be said of intellectual pursuits; the learner comes to feel and know his powers, and whether he used them or not, has always the confident feeling of a 'well-appointed

man.'

In regard to the industrial departments of institutions for the blind it need only be said that the loss of sight has greatly circumscribed the number of mechanical employments in which they can engage with profit. Music is, where there is no positive inaptitude, highly adapted to them as a trade. This instruction was put upon a thoroughly scientific or technological basis in the Perkins Institution about 1859.

The present condition of the industrial departments in schools for the special classes has been so fully dealt with on pages 787-790 of our 1886-87 Report, and on pages 912-921 of the Report for 1887-88, that the subject may now be dismissed with this reference, for our object is to show the different phases of the manual-labor theory, not the statistics of the schools having the manual-labor feature.

TRADE OR HANDICRAFT Schools.

The trade school pure and simple is not yet an American institution. It is true, as has been already noted, that with the establishment of special schools for the deaf, blind, and juvenile delinquents, trade teaching in a humble way was made a part of the instruction given in such schools, but beyond this and the manual-labor move

ment of the third decade of the century, no general efforts were made to provide technical schools until the great movement inaugurated by the act for the establishment of colleges of agriculture and the mechanic arts in 1862, a movement intensified by the introduction of drawing into the schools of Massachusetts, and the stimulating effect of the industrial exhibition at the Centennial by merely showing what had been done in the industrial line in Europe. The act of 1862 reads as follows: "The leading object shall be to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions of life."

It is not necessary to discuss the manner in which the provisions of this act have been carried out, but it is eminently proper to call attention to the judgments of two investigators who have visited this country in behalf of their respective Governments, as to our neglect of lower technical or trade teaching. In 1883, Mr. William Mather, in reporting to the Royal (English) Commission on Technical Education, remarks that the class of young people of each sex who seek employment which does not require manual labor is far too large in America, and thinks that this is especially undesirable in a new and unexplored country where nature is waiting for willing and skilled hands.1

In his report on "Public Instruction at the World's Exposition at New Orleans," Monsieur Buisson observes:

"Notwithstanding her resources, America has not yet developed her system of State schools, elementary, secondary, or higher, so much in the line of technical and manual instruction as in the literary and intellectual way."

On the other hand it has been remarked-the writer viewing the matter of unskilled labor in its relations to skilled work rather than the aversion to labor-that "in America there are entirely too many people living directly off the land-more than a due proportion of agriculturists, considering the producing power of the land and the increased use of machinery. Hence there is a continual pressure of the agricultural population upon the mechanic and manufacturing trades. This tendency to increase the number of artisans constantly works against the efforts of skilled labor to increase wages."3

Now it is a very interesting question to determine whether there is a demand for trade schools for these untrained persons, in which they could be professionally trained as an apprentice was trained to become a journeyman; and also whether establishing trade schools would remove the prejudice against manual labor which is more frequently attributed to public-school education than to an infirmity of human nature or to the American motto of "Excelsior." But it is manifest that it is a question that can not be discussed here.

We have repeatedly referred, in our reports, to the New York Trade Schools, but beside this institution and that at the Pratt Institute of Brooklyn we know of no other real trade school in the country except it be the weaving school of the Philadelphia School of Design. The lately established Rindge School of Cambridge, Mass., we have not heard from, and the Williamson School has not yet gotten under way, nor the Towne School of Maryland, nor the Drexel School. The Miller Manual Labor School and the McDonogh School, however, classed with the manual-training schools, may be looked upon as trade schools.

The condition of this subject in Europe has been well portrayed by the Royal (English) Commission, whose conclusions were published in extenso in our report for 1882-83, and again in Circular of Information No. 3, 1885, as an appendix to the late Prof. Charles Ŏ. Thompson's review of the English report. In addition, the avidity with which the French have lately developed the idea of national industrial instruction is well shown by the monograph on the subject by Consul Schoenhof, published by the United States State Department, entitled "Industrial Education in France." It is, therefore, not necessary to crowd this sketch with quoted or translated matter.

MORALITY AND MANUAL LABOR.

In the autumn of 1865 the Rev. Charles F. Barnard, representing a "regular meeting of the ministers at large" of Boston, who had found themselves impelled by a sense of their responsibilities to call the attention of the public authorities to "exposed and neglected little children," petitioned the city government to give its attention to five classes of children:

1. Juvenile criminals.

2. Beggars, vagabonds, and petty thieves.

3. Truants from school.

1 Report of Royal Commission on Technical Education, p. 47, of Mr. Mather's report in vol. 2.

2 Rapport sur l'instruction publique à l'exposition universelle de la Nouvelle-Orléans presenté à M. le ministre de l'instruction publique, p. 180.

The Right of Property and the Ownership of Land, by W. T. Harris, LL. D., p. 26.

4. Children under five years of age.

5. Children over nine years of age who have left, or been taken from the public schools, to aid in the support of themselves or their respective families.

The reading public, the educating part of it at least, need not be reminded of the discussion concerning the connection of illiteracy and crime, actively carried on some ten or fifteen years ago. In the Bureau's Reports for 1871, 1872, and 1874, are articles on the relation of crime and illiteracy (which we would suggest is not synonymous with ignorance but merely indicates the absence of one and perhaps the most powerful means of removing ignorance); while in 1881 a pamphlet was issued under the .title "Education and Crime." It is not necessary to enter into this discussion, which still survives, nor is the object of the earlier articles apropos to the purpose of this. The writer of one of those articles, however, seizing upon Quetelet's deliverance that "society prepares the crime which the criminal commits," proclaims its truth and argues thence the necessity for universal education "because education is a force restraining vice and crime." Now, to insure universal education, that is to say, to prevent illiteracy, compulsion has been found necessary; and compulsion, when a social mandate, is useless unless provided with a punishment for noncompliance. Those against whom this sanction may be enforced are called truants, and to apply the sanction officers are appointed called truant officers.

But whatever may be the value of the "philosophic statistician's " impeachment of society as an accomplice before the fact in the child's guilt, it was the unanimons opinion of the truant officers of Boston that, in the great majority of cases, truancy was caused by drunkenness of the truant's parents. It may be inferred from this that, as in England, the parents of such children are of a low, uneducated class of persons; in a word, the class which furnishes the beggars and pilferers also furnishes the truants, and in either case the decensus Averni offers no impediments in the shape of early moral associations to the feet of the youthful traveler of this unfortunate class when once he is well started on this easily traveled road.

Although the principle be admitted that illiteracy breeds crime, particularly beastly crime, yet it is, from a theoretical standpoint, very easy to suppose that an otherwise respectable parent might "permit so much barbarism" as to allow the child to grow up illiterate. This would be an extremely grave offense in posse, so to speak, though a very minor one from a purely legal standpoint in esse, for the absence of the child from a school does not necessarily mean his enforced presence at a jail in after days. This kind of truancy, then, may be looked upon from the standpoint of the immediate present as a very mild offense, if an offense at all, on the part of the child. But when the child is homeless or a wanderer, eking out his subsistence by associating with every description of villany or moving in localities where such associations may be formed, the possibility of criminality has become something that the law may take cognizance of. The connection between crime and vagabondism is more immediate than between crime and neglect of the parent to have his child taught the elements of learning. Should the child have escaped the truant officer or the policeman and become a juvenile offender, that is to say, a petty thief, or worse, he may indeed be considered as a criminal; but as one entitled to consideration, on account, as Monsieur Quetelet might say, of society having "prepared the crime that he has committed;" because, as others might prefer to say, he has not had the associations that would give him proper moral ideas. Such are the classes to which the correcting influences of care, education, and regular hours spent in manual labor are applied.

Whether statistics can support such extraordinary statements as "Society prepares the crimes that the criminal commits," and whether by "crime" the ninth century meant the same thing as the nineteenth, is not germane to the far more modest purpose of this sketch; but it is highly essential to its object that the statistics it presents should embrace an area sufficiently large to give those statistics value. We think that the island of Great Britain affords such statistics, for not only is it separated from the rest of Europe by language and geographical position, but, above all other European nations, it has the most continuously, comprehensively, and determinedly and, we may add, successfully attacked the source from which its juvenile criminal class has been fed. It is sometimes said that the English workman is the more unruly than the workmen of other nationalities; if this be true for the workman it may be assumed that it is true of the children of the lower orders of Englishmen. The English experiment, then, has been made under the very worst conditions.

In 1854 reform schools were established for the correction of juvenile lawbreakers, and to supply the means of reducing the attendance at these institutions "industrial schools" were established in 1857, and the relation of the two defined in 1866.

In the following table some comparisons have been attempted, the purpose of which a mere inspection of the headings will show, to say nothing of the remarks which follow the table by way of bringing out its value. To keep our article within bounds, we shall confine our attention to England and Wales.

umn 2.

a The value of these percentages depends on whether the figures of column 3 are included in colb For six months only.

The candid reader will readily admit that if the whole population of England increased during the period of time covered by the table, the population under sixteen would form the same per cent. of the whole population in 1881 as it did in 1861. The population under sixteen, then, forming the same per cent. of the whole population year after year, it should furnish the same per cent. of the whole number of persons sentenced year after year, and it is therefore perfectly legitimate to compare the per cent. of the population under sixteen sentenced in 1861 with that of any subsequent year. Let us apply this to the three categories of statistics before us, thus for every 100 persons of each category in 1861 there were in—

It is very plain that the number of adults sentenced have increased 58 per cent. while the boys under sixteen sentenced have decreased 35 per cent., or recurring to column 5 of the large table, which says the same thing in another way, the boys under sixteen sentenced were 9 per cent. of the whole body of men and boys committed in 1861 and only 4 per cent. in 1881. But during this time the increase in the attendance at industrial schools has been 1,140 per cent. It is true that the education act of 1871 has a decided tendency to increase the number sent to the industrial schools, but we have the testimony of the assistant inspector of reformatory and industrial schools that practically the same class of children were sent to the industrial school as truants by the enforcement of the act as has had before attended them. It must also be stated that in the number of children contained in column 2 may be included the number given in column 3; even if such be the case the percentages of column 5 are of value inasmuch as the industrial schools are reserved for vagrant and neglected children under fourteen, which would go to show improvement in the character of the criminality.

We are inclined to think, however, that the number of children given in column 3 is not contained in column 4. If such is the case the connection between an "industrial" or preventative school for every young children and the shrinkage in youthful criminality is pretty closely established by the figures. Nor are the figures unsupported. "All seem to agree," says Lord Norton, who has been conversant with these schools for a number of years, "that the utterly vicious and criminal class of children, the fruit of national neglect [the reader will be reminded of Quetelet's

dictum], which called first for reformatories no longer exists as a class, and individually there are fewer and fewer such children in any locality; so that a call of them from all reformatories would not furnish enough for separate treatment in two or three schools." In a word, the experience of England seems to show that if you can pick up the vagabond and beggar at an early age and instruct him in an "industrial school you have cut off the supply of half-grown but thorough-going scoundrels.” 1 On the adult population of law-breakers it seems to have exerted no effect; perhaps when Elmira-like reformatories for men shall have become general these figures, too, will decline.

Now an essential, some would say the essential, feature of the industrial and of the reform school is manual labor, especially the learning of a trade. "For," says Superintendent Brockway of the great Elmira, N. Y., reformatory for men under thirty, "no reformatory system is complete that does not train each subject for a specific industry for which he has a natural adaptation, and actually induct him into it, maintaining supervisory control long enough to insure a good degree of permanence and success. There is a most intimate connection between the conduct of reformed criminals and the readiness with which they can suitably support themselves."

As Mr. Brockway is talking about reformed criminals his remarks may be thought irrelevant to juvenile delinquents and vagabonds; but it would not be difficult to fill our pages with quotations going to show that a trade is very intimately connected with permanent respectability.

Yet, as the statistics for England and Wales have been used, we should refer to them alone. The Royal (English) Commission in their report of 1884 use the following language: 3

Both in reformatory and in industrial schools an essential feature of the work is the industrial training. The trade or occupation to which children are put should be suited to their age and physical strength; it should be adapted to the main purpose of developing their industrial faculties and training them to industrious habits, and should be such as to give the individual boy or girl the means of earning a livelihood at as early an age as possible. It is not absolutely essential that the trade should be one which the child will afterwards pursue, although this is very desirable. If the occupation taught and the skill and habits acquired enable him to compete on equal terms in the labor market with others, and to earn an honest livelihood, the main object has been attained."

Perhaps this subject may best be closed by giving the testimony of Col. William Inglis, inspector of certified reformatories and industrial schools, when examined by the commission:

Question 462. How long have you held your office?

Answer. Six years.

Question 656. What are the trades which are generally taught in reformatory schools?

Answer. They are very various; agricultural training is one of the best for a reformatory, and we find it in nearly all of them whose situation permits it; then there are shoemaking and tailoring shops in nearly all schools; besides those there are carpentry, joinering, bookbinding, basket making, and cask making at one place. You will find them all in the report on each school, which mentions what industrial occupations are carried on there. In the report which is before me, I find that the Stoke Farm Reformatory has a large farm, and market gardening is largely carried on, and it has effective tailors' and shoemakers' shops also. Wood chopping is a great employment for the smaller boys, and firewood making, and in some places they make large quantities of match boxes; in fact there are a great variety of trades.

Question 657. I see that in your evidence on the former occasion you rather suggested that it takes two or three years to learn some of the trades taught in those schools; what trade is there within your experience of which a knowledge would be sufficiently attained in three years?

Answer. Not a complete knowledge but sufficient knowledge to get boys employment on leaving the school and for them to get enough money to keep themselves. I do not mean to say as much as a practiced workman when they leave the school, but at all events they know as much as an apprentice in his second or third year would know.

Question 658. In that case when he left the school a boy would be fit for an advanced position in an apprenticeship rather than obtaining his own living by the trade?

Answer. That depends a good deal upon whether he is to follow such a trade as carpentry or joinery; that would be the correct view to take of it. *

Question 664. So that practically we are left without any reliable evidence as to the advantages derived by the boys from this smattering of a trade which is taught them in these schools?

Though speaking of London only, Mr. Buxton, chairman of the school board of that city observes, "Since 1870, 7,566 children * * have been sent to industrial schools. The convictions for juvenile offences are now only half what they were in 1870. The obvious connection between these figures justifies me in putting them together.'

See U. S. Ed. Rept. 1886-87, pp. 857-858.

The commission was made up of fourteen members, as follows: Henry Austin Baron Aberdare, John William Earl of Dalhousie, Charles Bowyer Baron Norton, the honorable Edward Stanhope, Sir Michael Edward Hicks-Beach, bart., the honorable Charles Owen O'Conor, Sir Ughtred James Kay. Shuttleworth, bart., David La Touche Colthurst, esq., George Woodyatt-Hastings, esq., Francis Henry Newland Glassop, esq., Charles Dalrymple, esq., Henry Broadhurst, esq., William Ewart, esq., William Egerton Hubbard, jr., esq. Three of the members were barristers-at-law and one late a lieu. tenant-colonel in the army; the majority were men of State.

See Note B to this chapter.