638 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



As might be expected, children are continually being received into 

 the school who are unclean and accustomed to uncleanly habits. These 

 are washed and taught to keep themselves clean. Those come, too, 

 into whose young lives no spark of happiness has ever entered, who 

 are sad and do not smile, and it requires no little skill to induce them 

 to forget their childish woes, and take part in the games and occupa- 

 tions of their comrades. 



But it is in dealing with character in its various phases that the 

 managers would seem to have scored the most marked success. 



There are those who, like Henry George, believe that human- 

 ity is much the same ; that a cruel instinct may be traced to a child- 

 hood which no spark of kindly solicitude ever served to brighten, and 

 sullenness and obstinacy to a novitiate of injustice and ill-treatment. 

 Others there are who insist that, as the father, so is the child, and 

 these may be set down as agreeing with Hesiod, who distributed man- 

 kind into three orders : The first, he says, belongs to him who can by 

 his own powers discern what is right and fit, and penetrate to the re- 

 moter motives of action ; the second belongs to him that is willing to 

 hear instruction and can perceive right and wrong when they are shown 

 him by another ; but he who has neither acuteness nor docility, who 

 can neither find the way by himself, nor will be led by others, is a 

 wretch without use or value. 



"If any one denies," says Herbert Spencer, "that children bear 

 likenesses to their progenitors in character and capacity, if he holds 

 that those whose parents and grandparents were habitual criminals, 

 have tendencies as good as those whose parents and grandparents were 

 industrious and upright, he may consistently hold that it matters not 

 from what families in a society the successive generations descend. He 

 may think it just as well if the most active, and capable, and prudent, 

 and conscientious people die without issue, while many children are 

 left by the reckless and dishonest. But whoever does not espouse so 

 insane a proposition must admit that social arrangements which retard 

 the multiplication of the mentally-best and facilitate the multiplica- 

 tion of the mentally-worst must be extremely injurious." 



Now, with no desire to affirm the proposition of the one, nor to 

 point out the fallacy of the other, let us see what has been the ex- 

 perience of the managers of the Workingman's School in this regard ; 

 let us see how much heredity of temperament and inclination has there 

 been exhibited by juvenile humanity while under treatment. 



As may readily be seen, if only the promising children could be 

 permitted to enjoy the benefits of the school, and the vicious and 

 stupid children were excluded, the work of the projectors, if it did not 

 fail utterly, would, at least, be greatly restricted in its scope, and want- 

 ing in that particular attribute whence the most important results were 

 looked for. 



It is, perhaps, not immediately obvious how it can affect a scheme 



