AN EXPERIMENT IN CITIZEN TRAINING. 115 



bates on the innumerable subjects in connection with club govern- 

 ment are far more useful in moral development than debates on 

 outside subjects political or literary. After a decision in a debate 

 on club affairs, the boys will see " how it works " in a week or two; 

 they will also know the exact circumstances that led to the necessity 

 for a decision. 



It is also because of the value of seeing the natural consequences 

 that it is better for a club of this kind to be governed by the laws 

 which all have taken part in making, rather than by the director, 

 who is apt to get mixed as to what are natural consequences and what 

 are her own nerves. 



It is a curious fact that the untrained boy, like the untrained 

 man, when given the chance of self-government, falls at once into 

 the way of devising the most ingenious and complicated bad gov- 

 ernment possible. Junior Good Government Club Na 1, and all 

 the other clubs this writer knows, have lived through their Tam- 

 many Hall periods. When a year comes in which the majority of 

 members have had two or three years' training in the club, charges 

 of bribery and corruption are few, but when the older members 

 move out, and their places are filled from below by more youthful 

 " politicians/' then the Tammany-Piatt situation is inevitable sooner 

 or later. 



It is often asked if clubs of this kind are distinctly reformatory. 

 The writer of this article once visited a criminal lunatic asylum, 

 and after making a tour of the wards and having noticed the striking 

 malformation of the heads and bodies of the patients, she asked one 

 of the doctors if he knew how many of them owed their condition 

 to lack of nourishment before and after birth. " Roughly speaking, 

 fifty per cent," he answered. If lack of nourishment can cause 

 criminal insanity, it can cause simple criminal tendencies, and un- 

 fortunately insufficient and improper nourishment is the common 

 condition among even those people whom we are wont to con- 

 sider not " desperately poor." To answer the question asked at 

 the beginning of this paragraph, it is very doubtful if abnormal 

 criminal children would be greatly benefited by Junior Good Gov- 

 ernment Clubs. Reformatory these clubs certainly are for those 

 who have become criminal through environment only; but re- 

 form is not the chief object to be attained. Growth in character 

 and reasoning power comes to a child after a few years in such a 

 club, and many latent gifts are developed in his nature through the 

 freedom to use all of himself. Such clubs are just as important for 

 the children of rich and intelligent parents as for those of the poor 

 and ignorant. Whether the former, with their many opportunities 

 for enjoyment, would find clubs amusing is another question. 



