594 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



plest trade are put into a manual-training school, in the hope that 

 their brains can be sufficiently developed to enable them to keep 

 out of the prison or the asylum. Those who are so stupid that 

 they have difficulty in learning the alphabet or in counting their 

 fingers are put into a kindergarten, where they practice on letter 

 blocks and sticks and straws. 



Those who are too stupid to learn a trade are the ones of inter- 

 est here. Three main lines of defect are recognized in Superin- 

 tendent Brockway's classification of them. Those who are intel- 

 lectually weak, but of fair power of self-control, are classed as 

 Group I; those who are reasonably bright, but are unable to get 

 along because they can not control their impulses, are classed as 

 Group II; those who fail on both sides are classed as Group III. 



Group II is composed of those who are for the most part devoid 

 of moral sense — those who fight, swear, assault officers, are licen- 

 tious, and generally unresponsive to the usual reformatory meas- 

 ures. To this class belong some of the most intellectual inmates 

 of the reformatory, but this intellectuality runs riot on account 

 of weakness of character. How are their characters to be built 

 up? They are required to devote most of their waking hours to 

 athletics and calisthenics, wood-turning, making wooden patterns 

 for castings, mechanical drawing, sloyd, clay modeling, and chip- 

 ping and filing metal. These exercises have been selected on ac- 

 count of their character-building qualities. 



The work is a great success. ISTearly all inmates subjected to 

 this building-up process finally graduate with sufficient self-control 

 from the manual-training department into the trades school. A 

 concrete example will give an idea of the change produced in the 

 pupil. The record of No. 6,361 is instructive. The account is 

 taken from a report by the manual-training instructor, R. C. Bates: 



" The pupil, previous to his assignment to manual training, had 

 earned for himself the sobriquet of ' dangerous man ' among the 

 officers and inmates. His offenses have been mostly threatening 

 language, lying, contraband articles, talking, fooling, assaulting 

 officers, and institutional crimes of that nature. 



" We begin his record in September, 1895, when he was reduced 

 to the second grade for fighting. October and November he lost 

 three marks each for lying and threatening language, and, by the 

 influence of September markings, caused his reduction to the third 

 grade, or incorrigibles, a closely defined group. He was in the third 

 grade two months and three days, when he was placed in the foun- 

 dry, where, amid blinding smoke, stifling air, and the task system, 

 it was thought he would tone down, upon the theory that the mus- 

 cular demands of such a place on a 124-pound body would vitiate 



