640 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



those who would do them a service, as if, unaccustomed to kindly 

 treatment, they felt these advances only concealed new projects for 

 their discomfiture. A supply of new clothes and a few comfortable 

 and palatable meals do much, it has been found, to dispel this feeling, 

 and the round of interesting tasks set before them, in which the hands 

 as well as the mind are called into action, has a still more powerful 

 effect in awakening the better instincts of childhood. 



The experience of the Workingman's School tends to verify the 

 conclusion of an eminent writer, that the theorem relative to the moral 

 and intellectual debasement of societies would, when pushed too far, 

 have consequences even more inadmissible than that relative to their 

 physical debasement, and that the principle of mental and moral de- 

 basement is by no means so much to be relied upon as the law of 

 physical heredity. 



This conclusion has not been reached by a course of reasoning but 

 by actual observation, and though, of course, it does not go far enough 

 to be conclusive, furnishes, nevertheless, valuable data ; data which 

 may yet do much toward refuting, at least in part, the arguments 

 which have from time to time been put forward by learned rea- 

 soners. 



The children of what might be called professional mendicants have 

 shown, when their intellects were polished up and dusted off, as we 

 might say, not a whit less intelligence nor more uncanny characteris- 

 tics than their fellows ; the children of intelligent workingmen ; and 

 he would be a bold man who, after observing the present condition of 

 these children, should predict that, when cast loose with an artisan's 

 education, both practical and theoretical, they will fall back upon the 

 charitable institutions instead of earning their own bread and butter ; 

 and he would be no less bold who should prophesy an ultimate career 

 of crime for those children who were gathered, while very young, from 

 the haunts of the criminal and the outcast. 



This is no scheme of indiscriminate charity in which those who are 

 the most importunate get the most relief, nor is it an institution where 

 the children of the well-to-do may get an artisan's education gratis. 

 There always has been plenty of encouragement for the workers in the 

 great human hive, but here is a project to stimulate those who might 

 not unreasonably be expected, on account of their surroundings, to be 

 the drones and the criminals of the future, into honest activity, and 

 enable them to obtain by their own industry more wealth or comfort 

 than could be hoped for in a career of crime or indolence. 



