62 THE JUKES. 



of being left vacant of everything except a memorizing of words. 

 With the use of the faculties will gradually be developed varieties 

 of emotion and intelligence, which, tending to activities in their own 

 direction, will reorganize the career of the individual so that criminal 

 or vicious courses can be supplanted by automatic virtue. Every 

 reformatory should take for its model of school training, either the 

 kindergarten education or the method of object lessons, or some 

 modification of these which is practicable, for the potential thief, if 

 not a moral imbecile, is a moral infant. The advantage of the kind- 

 ergarten instruction rests in this, that it coherently trains the 

 senses and quickens the spirit of moral accountability, building 

 them into cerebral tissue. It thus organizes new channels of ac- 

 tivity through which vitality may spread itself for the advantage 

 of the individual and the benefit of society, concurrently endowing 

 each individual with a governing will. Such an energetic, judicious 

 and thorough training of the children of our criminal population 

 would, in fifteen years, show itself by the great decrease in the 

 number of commitments, and at a less cost in money than their 

 adult depredations. Such training is not to be found in our reform- 

 atories conducted upon the congregate system, and still less in 

 our prisons, penitentiaries and jails. 



Indeed, so conspicuous is the failure of the entire machinery of 

 the punitive and reformatory institutions of our State, that we 

 cannot call these establishments the results of the wisdom of our 

 generation, but rather the cumulative accidents of popular negligence, 

 indifference and incapacity. A survey of the field of reform, and of 

 those to be saved, has profoundly shaken my faith in the sufficiency 

 of any mere institution, as an agent to reform the erring, without 

 the active co-operation of the public. 



Tentative Inductions in Reform. 



1. The formation of character depends upon an orderly and well- 

 defined development of faculty from youth to maturity. 



2. This development is a spontaneous force capable of facilitating 

 reform. 



3. This metamorphosis operates most powerfully in the moral 

 field from the twenty-third to the thirty-first year. 



