512 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Since the removal of his last physical handicap I have examined him 

 again and he is to-day about normal in his mental ability, having 

 apparently advanced almost two years in type of intellectual activity in 

 less than a year, largely because relieved of these physical drains on his 

 vitality. The physical defects, we may say, are to-day practically cor- 

 rected and he is quite a healthy boy. But the result of all these past 

 handicaps has been serious for Harold and he has carried over to his 

 present age of twelve years the childish propensities and childish lack 

 of control which he acquired during those long years of childish mental 

 existence, while he was associating with boys much younger than him- 

 self and amusing himself almost like a child in the kindergarten. One 

 of these childish impulses, while it was little more than mischievous, 

 has become so firmly established that society must be protected from 

 the boy until he can learn to correct it and control himself. His par- 

 ticular passion is for horses. "When the whim strikes him to take a 

 ride, all of the restraints which his parents, his teachers, the probation 

 officers, the court and a term at the detention home are able to pile up 

 for him have apparently so little effect that he will not think twice 

 before driving off the nearest and most convenient horse in his vicinity. 

 Longer training at the detention home, which all desired, he has made 

 impossible by running away almost as quickly as he is taken there, 

 another manifestation of his childish lack of control. Five times he 

 has come to his home in Minneapolis, 15 miles away, in spite of the 

 warning that boys were sent to the State Training School for this. 

 On the last of these visits at home he went to a neighbor's barn, har- 

 nessed up the horse and drove off with another boy for an evening's 

 ride. After this lark they returned the animal unharmed to the stable. 

 Having repeatedly tried and finally exhausted the entire list of milder 

 forms of restraint, it was necessary for the good of the boy and the 

 protection of delivery wagons to see what the more severe discipline of 

 some months of life at the State Training School would do to break up 

 this childish habit which has been carried over into youth, to teach the 

 boy the self-control that must belong to young men and which he would 

 probably have normally attained had he not been handicapped by the 

 ill health which kept him for years in the stage of early childhood. 



Harold was trained under favorable conditions at home and in 

 school. There is an excellent prospect for him to turn out well; but 

 how much more diflficult is the problem when the home is a nest of 

 filth and corruption, as it sometimes is. The probation officers have 

 discovered homes of delinquents where literally the pigs are brought 

 up in the parlor; others where children do not know what it is to sit 

 down to a table for their meals, but walk about helping themselves to 

 the family bowl of mush or loaf of bread. Worse than this are the 

 examples of theft and vileness set by others in the house or neighbor- 



