ns
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 CONSIDER 
 
 THE 
 
 CHILDREN 
 
 HonnoF 
 Morten
 
 J\/lichael Ernest Sadler' 
 
 ^mversitu Colleae-^ 
 
 Oxford
 
 CONSIDER THE CHILDREN
 
 SlTMAA 
 
 
 htAxr 
 
 
 
 
 
 VRKRE, LEARNT AT SCHOOL AND WRITTEN OUT AT HOME, BY A GIRL, AGE 13. 
 
 See page 15.
 
 Consider the Children 
 
 A Plea for Better Physical and Moral 
 Education 
 
 By 
 Honnor Morten 
 
 Formerly Member of the London School Board, 
 and formerly Health Lecturer under the London County Council. 
 
 Author of 
 "The Nurse's Dictionary," "From a Nurse's Note-book," 
 Etc., Etc. 
 
 London 
 
 R. Brimley Johnson 
 
 4 Adam Street, Adelphi 
 
 1904
 
 ? 7«^ 
 
 C' 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAF. PAGE 
 
 Prkface ...... vii 
 
 I. The Making of Infantile Machines . . 1 
 
 II. Mental Repletion and Bodily Starvation . 14 
 
 III, Compulsory Contagion . . . .25 
 
 IV. School Discipline . . . . .35 
 V. The Making of the Criminal . . .50 
 
 VI. The Attitude of the Teacher . .67 
 
 VII. The Religious Wrangle . . . .77 
 
 824773
 
 PREFACE 
 
 There are seven main contentions brought forward 
 in this little book, the first three dealing with the 
 physical aspect of elementary education and the last 
 four with the development of the child's moral and 
 mental faculties. These points are : — 
 
 (1.) That infants should not attend school under 
 
 five years of age. 
 (2.) That all children who need it should be 
 
 fed. 
 (3.) That there should be medical inspection of 
 
 all elementary schools. 
 (4.) That corporal punishment should be abolished. 
 (5.) That greater caution should be exercised in 
 
 sending young children to Truant and 
 
 Industrial Schools. 
 (6.) That teachers should receive a broader 
 
 training. 
 (7.) That only secular teaching should be given 
 
 under the Education Authority. 
 
 There is nothing very new about any of these 
 points ; their merit rather lies in the fact that they
 
 viii PREFACE 
 
 are of immediate importance and could all be easily 
 carried out. On commencing to compile the statistics 
 with regard to the bodily neglect of the children, it 
 looked as though the time for medical inspection and 
 free meals in the schools was hardly ripe ; but since 
 then an outcry has been raised with regard to the 
 degeneration of the national physique, and it seems 
 probable that the inquiry into this subject will 
 result in recommendations in favour of these two 
 steps. For, as the Talmud says, " The World 
 stands on the Breath of the School Children." 
 
 Richmond, August 1903.
 
 Consider the Children 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE MAKING OF INFANTILE MACHINES 
 
 "Our citizens must not be allowed to grow up amongst 
 images of evil, lest their souls assimilate the ugliness of their 
 surroundings. Rather, from everything that they see and hear, 
 loveliness, like a breeze, should pass into their souls and teach 
 them, without their knowing it, the truth of which beauty is a 
 manifestation." — Plato's Eepublic. 
 
 In England a child must attend school from five 
 to fourteen years of age, and may attend as young as 
 three years of age. The Report of the Board of 
 Education for 1901 states that the number of scholars 
 in the registers of infant schools and classes was 
 2,023,319, and that of these 3137 were under three 
 years of age. 
 
 The point for consideration in this chapter is 
 whether it is beneficial for babies to attend school, 
 and the opinion of educational authorities in other 
 countries should be considered. 
 
 I know of no other country except Jamaica which 
 allows children to attend school as young as three
 
 2 CONSIDER THE CHILDREN 
 
 years of age ; in Tasmania children may attend from 
 four ; in Ontario there are optional kindergartens for 
 children four to seven, but the age of compulsory 
 attendance is eight to fourteen. In Zurich again 
 attendance is optional from four to six, and com- 
 pulsory from six to twelve. In South Australia and 
 New Zealand children may attend from five. In 
 France from five if there is no J^cole Maternelle (a 
 cross between a creche and a kindergarten) in the 
 district, otherwise they may not attend till six ; in 
 Portugal, Hungary, Servia, Prussia, Queensland and 
 West Australia from six ; in Norway and Sweden 
 from seven years of age. When I was in New York 
 in 1897 the compulsory school age was from eight 
 to fourteen, but where there was room scholars be- 
 tween the ages of five and eight were permitted to 
 attend the elementary schools, and there were a few 
 kindergartens for children from four to five. It is 
 only fair to state that Mr Maxwell, the Superin- 
 tendent of Public Instruction, who kindly showed 
 me round some of the schools, said he considered it 
 highly desirable that all children above six years of 
 age who were physically fit should be forced to 
 attend school, and that moral suasion should be used 
 to get more children into the kindergartens at the 
 age of five. At that time there were 42,000 children 
 in Brooklyn alone, who being under eight years of 
 age were not attending school. But the New York 
 kindergardens have short hours, no books and small
 
 THE MAKING OF INFANTILE MACHINES 3 
 
 classes : there is no effort to cram the children or 
 make them too mechanical. They are very different 
 indeed from the infant schools of London. 
 
 It is obvious that, in overcrowded neighbourhoods, 
 the mothers are glad to be rid of their babies for 
 some hours daily, while the "attendance" officer 
 makes them believe it is their duty to do so, and the 
 teacher encourages his persecution, to earn the praise 
 and promotion awarded a full school with regular 
 attendance. 
 
 The " systematic efforts of the headmistress and 
 her staff" for enforcing regularity and punctuality 
 are openly commended in an Inspector's Report ; 
 and the attendances in a favourite infant school 
 have been proudly recorded as 95 per cent. Having 
 a knowledge of the percentage of illness and stunted 
 development among city children, I do not believe 
 that such attendance can be secured without mental 
 and physical harm of an abiding nature, because (1) 
 it over-stimulates the undeveloped brain ; (2) it dulls 
 the senses of sight and hearing ; (3) it spreads in- 
 fectious disease and dirty contagions ; (4) it makes 
 infants mechanical. 
 
 Over-Stimulation 
 
 The hours of school attendance for infants in 
 London and most other places are from nine to noon,
 
 4 CONSIDER THE CHILDREN 
 
 and from two to four ; five hours a day in all, and 
 three of these hours consecutive. 
 
 Yet the consensus of educational and medical 
 authority is entirely against continuous exercise of 
 the brain in early years. Herbert Spencer points 
 out that " precocious children and youths who up to 
 a certain time were carrying all before them so 
 often stop short and disappoint the hopes of their 
 parents." The experience of John Henry Aldridge, 
 M.D., for twenty years a member of the South- 
 ampton School Board, declares that " the proper 
 age at which children should be first subject to 
 scholastic education is from five to seven years. 
 That up to this time the education should be 
 Nature's." And, speaking only of well-nourished 
 and well-clothed children, Dr Clements Dukes, of 
 Rugby, has written in his Hygiene of Youth that no 
 children should attend school under five, those 
 between five and six for not more than six hours a 
 week, and those between six and seven for not more 
 than nine. 
 
 Though I have often met elementary school 
 teachers who believed in teaching babies because it 
 made them "good" and "obedient" and moro, fitted 
 to " pass standards," I have never met a single medical 
 man, educational expert or social reformer, who did 
 not agree that the lack of steady application and 
 the irritable excitability of our city youths was due 
 chiefly to over brain - stimulation in infancv, and
 
 THE MAKING OF INFANTILE MACHINES 5 
 
 only in part to the endless noise and hurry of town 
 life. 
 
 And though the old spelling lesson is now called 
 " word-building," the change is merely one of nomen- 
 clature. The infant schools maintain the large 
 classes, dreary lessons, long forms and unintelligent 
 teaching of our non-progressive days. The code of 
 1901 suggests no less than fifteen "varied occupa- 
 tions " by which the babies between three and five 
 shall be daily galvanised into mechanical movement 
 and brain-wakefulness. 
 
 In many cases, undoubtedly, we have here an 
 explanation of the recent great increase in insanity, 
 especially in London. This has been observed 
 amongst the elementary school class only, and it 
 grows with the greater pressure of school attendance. 
 Forster's Education Act was passed in 1871, when 
 69,019 persons became insane. The numbers have 
 since grown in 1881 to 84,503, in 1891 to 97,383, 
 in 1901 to 132,654, though between 1891 and 1901 
 the number of cases in private asylums decreased 
 from 4595 to 3741. The most marked increase, 
 however, was in 1902, when the total for one year 
 reached 22,581, or nearly 500 a week! 
 
 Dulled Senses 
 
 The injuries to sight and hearing, on which 
 rest — as I shall show later — a countless tale of
 
 6 CONSIDER THE CHILDREN 
 
 evils in school life — are admittedly common among 
 the infants. Dr Newsholme refers to "the strong 
 hygienic objections to putting children of such 
 tender years to any occupation involving trained 
 movements of the muscles of the eye and hand." 
 Dr Kerr, of the London School Board, says that 
 "needles, pens, pencils and paper are all out of 
 place in an infant's school where a great deal of 
 unnecessary strain is extracted from children." The 
 Chicago "Child Study Report, No. 2," found that 
 the "number of eye and ear defects increases during 
 the first years of school life." 
 
 The medical profession have supplied startling 
 statistics of the percentage of children found defective 
 in sight and hearing in the elementary schools of our 
 large towns ; which defects, as Dr Aldridge declares, 
 are considered "to be in a great measure due to over- 
 exercise in early life." 
 
 Spread of Infection 
 The general carelessness of Board School officials 
 
 o 
 
 to the dangers of infection is dealt with elsewhere ; 
 but such dangers are manifestly increased by the 
 mere admission of babies, who take and give 
 infection more easily than older children. 
 
 The increase in diphtheria, measles, etc. , observed 
 since the passing of Forster's Education Act is 
 most marked for children between three and five.
 
 THE MAKING OF INFANTILE MACHINES 7 
 
 Dr Newsholme, Medical Officer for Brighton, ad- 
 vocates their exclusion frora school " because of the 
 large loss of human life due to the spread of 
 infectious disease at the age when it is most fatal 
 to the children " ; and calculates that we waste 
 £900,000 a year on the unhealthy crowding of 
 infants. The managers of the Winstanley Road 
 School, Battersea, in 1900 lost 2368 attendances in 
 the boys' department and over 7000 in the infants' 
 from measles and other infectious diseases. 
 
 The small contagions, again, such as "sore 
 mouths," "blight," and "dirty heads," are most 
 common, and the London School Nurses' Society 
 report that nearly half their cases come from the 
 infants' departments. The " Personal Cleanliness 
 Sub-Committee of the London School Board " re- 
 ported in 1898 that as many as 90 per cent, of 
 the children in some schools were found to be 
 suffering from head lice. 
 
 It is also maintained by Dr Hewett, of Cheshire, 
 that children under five merely interfere with the 
 education of older children ; while Dr Louis 
 Parkes, Medical Ofiicer of Chelsea, has written : — 
 "I would wish to supplement my evidence of 
 yesterday by asking the Committee to take into 
 consideration the question of whether the educa- 
 tional advantages bestowed upon children under the 
 age of five years are not more than counterbalanced 
 by the risks of infection and dangers to health
 
 8 CONSIDER THE CHILDREN 
 
 necessarily incurred by the crowding together of 
 these infants in a very limited space at the schools ; 
 and whether, if it were possible to refuse to receive 
 children under five years into the schools, the space 
 thus made available for the older children would 
 not tend very greatly to prevent overcrowding of 
 children who are at an age when education is 
 valuable." 
 
 Mechanical Training 
 
 Anyone who has passed an infant school and 
 listened to the monotonous sing-song within, or has 
 watched a class drawing a cow, line by line, after a 
 teacher, and picking up their pencils and putting 
 them to paper at the word of command, must be 
 aware how the unfortunate babies are over-drilled. 
 The one proud boast of the teacher to whom the 
 scientist has demonstrated the evil mental effects 
 of too early education is, " Ah ! but we teach them 
 to obey ! " Let us listen to a mother on this 
 question : — 
 
 "What is to obey? It is to act under the 
 impulse of another will. It involves the surrender 
 of both judgment and will. A child feels — a child 
 thinks — a child is about to do. Here comes in our 
 error, we concern ourselves almost wholly with what 
 a child does, and ignore what he feels and thinks." * 
 ^ Concerning Children, by Mrs Stetson.
 
 THE MAKING OF INFANTILE MACHINES 9 
 
 And it is this kind of mechanical obedience, born of 
 sharp command and sudden punishment, that pre- 
 vails in our infant schools, in which the cane and 
 the strap and the hand-slap are the teaching 
 methods. 
 
 Mr Allen Bromen, at the International Congress 
 of Hygiene in 1891, said : — 
 
 "Depriving the children of the opportunities for 
 free movement is, therefore, a direct violation of 
 Nature's laws, and cannot be done without harm to 
 their organisms. 
 
 "When the child begins school its conditions of 
 life are at once considerably altered. From freedom 
 it is brought under restraint ; from the perpetual 
 motion which its body requires, it is placed on the 
 school bench and told to 'keep still,' an order 
 which, as every teacher knows, is obeyed with 
 great difficulty. This alone would be sufficient to 
 impede and prevent the natural growth and develop- 
 ment of the child." 
 
 Now take the following from the Daily News 
 of 15th June 1903 with regard to a child in the 
 Raywood Street Infant School who was punished 
 by the headmistress : — 
 
 "When application was made for the summons 
 the child's body was examined in Court, and stated 
 to be extensively bruised. 
 
 "The mother described the circumstances. She 
 met the boy as he returned from school one day,
 
 10 CONSIDER THE CHILDREN 
 
 and he complained of having been beaten. She 
 took him to the defendant and asked for an ex* 
 planation, to which she replied, *I gave him a 
 good beating because he would not stand in line 
 and kicked out his feet.' " 
 
 Another headmistress was fined for beating and 
 bruising a little girl of six because she found her 
 " jumping about (dancing) at the end of the hall." 
 
 Probably hundreds of infants are beaten every 
 day in our schools for those natural movements of 
 their limbs which are necessary to the proper 
 development of their bodies. Certainly in the 
 Billinghay Infant School punishment book there 
 are 378 entries between November 1900 and 
 February 1901, which, with an average attendance 
 of 78, shows that about 10 per cent, of the infants 
 were caned daily. That this " education " is purely 
 mechanical and with no trace of reason is demon- 
 strated by a case in the Kent Messenger of 
 8th August 1903, when a Miss Cook caned an 
 infant of six for staying away for a chapel treat 
 and bringing no note from her father. 
 
 The schoolmistress was defended by counsel, 
 instructed on behalf of the National Union of 
 Teachers, and the defence was an attempt to justify 
 the punishment. The following is a quotation 
 from the cross-examination of the schoolmistress : — 
 
 " Do you seriously think you were justified in 
 striking that little girl of six? — Yes.
 
 THE MAKING OF INFANTILE MACHINES ii 
 
 "Don't you see that you have punished a child 
 for the fault — if it is a fault — of the father in not 
 writing a letter ? — No. 
 
 " Do you expect a little mite of six, then, to 
 write a letter and get her father to sign it? — No. 
 
 "What do you expect then? — I expect her to 
 bring a note. 
 
 "And you punish the child if the father does 
 not write it? — If she does not bring a note. 
 
 " Do you punish the child although the fault 
 may be the father's? — It may be." 
 
 The Justices dismissed the case. 
 
 No wonder these children become mere routine 
 machines. Judgment, individuality and will must 
 be lost under such a system. 
 
 There is only one argument that can be adduced 
 in favour of the infant schools, and that is that 
 the children are better there than in the streets. 
 This is the same argument that Lord Shaftesbury 
 had to fight when "the cry of the children" rang 
 through the land many years ago and factory 
 legislation was introduced to try and rescue the 
 little child-slaves. It was not the manufacturers, 
 nor the legislators, nor the public who obstructed 
 Lord Shaftesbury most, but a certain Dr Ure, who 
 insisted that the children would be "thrown out 
 of warm spinning-rooms upon the cold world to 
 exist by beggary or plunder, in idleness and vice." 
 
 If the evidence brought forward in this chapter
 
 12 CONSIDER THE CHILDREN 
 
 with regard to the spread of infections and the 
 dulled senses is worth anything, then truly the 
 children's physical and mental health would benefit 
 rather by the life of the streets. And as for the 
 atmosphere of these infants' schools, the following 
 is from a speech lately made by Sir John Gorst in 
 the House of Commons : — 
 
 " He had visited an enormous number of schools, 
 and the general impression left in his mind was 
 that the air in the schools was a great deal fouler 
 than the air outside, and wholly unfit for the 
 children to breathe. Some years ago a scientific 
 inquiry was conducted into the condition of schools 
 in this respect by Dr Bayley, of Owens College, 
 Manchester. He examined four Manchester schools 
 and a higher grade school. The air in the schools 
 was tested for carbonic acid gas. The standard 
 accepted in hospitals was that if there were more 
 than 6 parts in 10,000 of carbonic acid gas the 
 air was adjudged polluted. There was not one of 
 these schools which was within the unpolluted zone ; 
 the lowest school had 7 parts, and in the class- 
 rooms 10 parts in 10,000, and the highest had no 
 less than 12*8 parts, and 14*5 parts in 10,000 in 
 the class-rooms. The schools were also tested for 
 micro-organisms, and, whereas pure mountain air 
 was quite free from micro-organisms and Paris streets 
 contained 25 per cubic foot, it was found in the 
 Granby Row School that in the infant school there
 
 THE MAKING OF INFANTILE MACHINES 13 
 
 were 213, in the boys' school 236, and in the girls' 
 school 286 micro-organisms per cubic foot." 
 
 The vast majority of the children would be far 
 better at home or in the increasing playgrounds of 
 the cities. And as for the minority they should 
 be in creches, where a motherly nurse would feed 
 and wash them, and they could roll about on the 
 floor, or be taken out in perambulators. But most 
 certainly children under five should not be grouped 
 in large classes in dingy schools, or placed in the 
 sole care of teachers armed with certificates and 
 canes, and supposed to force '' information " into 
 the undeveloped brains.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 MENTAL REPLETION AND BODILY STARVATION 
 
 " Hark ! I hear them ; they are crying ; 
 'Tis of hunger they are dying — 
 See this hollow cheek and weary, sunken head ! 
 Lo, they perish of starvation, 
 And you give them — education ! 
 Ah ! before you teach for God's sake give them bread ! " 
 
 From Punch. 
 
 In the boys' and girls' schools the attendance is 
 generally from seven to fourteen years of age, and 
 the hours five and a half daily, or six in the higher 
 grade schools. The lower standards are often very 
 large — some fifty or sixty children to each teacher, 
 but in the upper standards an effort is made to keep 
 the classes down at least to forty. 
 
 The subjects taught are numerous — far too 
 numerous for any of them to be learned thoroughly, 
 and the children are hurried from their French to 
 their cookery, from their algebra to their swimming, 
 and the poor old-fashioned ** three R's " only get an 
 occasional spare half-hour. The children understand 
 very little of what they are taught in the poorer
 
 MENTAL REPLETION 15 
 
 schools ; inevitably so from the limitations of their 
 own view of life and language. Some settlement 
 workers once took a group of biggish Hoxton 
 children a walk over London Bridge. They asked 
 what the Thames was, and when told it was a river 
 remarked, " Oh my ! " Asked what a river was, one 
 big girl replied glibly, " A large stream of water 
 flowing towards the sea, but I didn't think it was 
 like that ! " 
 
 A few intelligent questions on what the children 
 have lately learnt, or even on their last lesson, will 
 produce a stream of nonsense that shows how little 
 such teaching is suited at least to the duller scholars. 
 Our frontispiece is only a specimen of what girls in 
 the fifth standard, just leaving school, can make of 
 a song in which they have been no doubt thoroughly 
 trained : — 
 
 " They scour the coin blossams 
 And boiled them away " 
 
 is a cruelly suggestive paraphrase for — 
 
 " I culled the coy blossoms 
 And bore them away." 
 
 In April 1902 we find a mother complaining of 
 spite in one of the teachers against a child who " had 
 to learn French when she could not read or write 
 properly." I myself have never seen French well 
 taught in a Board School. Yet, only twenty-four 
 hours in the year are needed to secure a Government
 
 1900. 
 
 1901. 
 
 18,553 
 
 28,010 
 
 4,767 
 
 5,212 
 
 36,435 
 
 43,263 
 
 2,194 
 
 7,088 
 
 i6 CONSIDER THE CHILDREN 
 
 grant for any "specific" subjects, and naturally the 
 applications are rapidly increasing. 
 In London : — 
 
 French . 
 Chemistry 
 Algebra . 
 Physics . 
 
 But we find that all educational luxuries, all scientific 
 instruments or art models that a school needs in 
 order to make a " show " are readily supplied. 
 Economy is only practised with regard to the one 
 great common necessary. 
 
 Of what use is the enormous expense of building 
 and equipping schools, and all the costly machinery 
 for compelling a child to attend school, if that child 
 through insufficient food is in such a state of starva- 
 tion it cannot learn ? You can force a child to 
 attend school, but you cannot teach that child if 
 it is physically unfit. Teachers in our poorer schools 
 found this out years ago, and in many cases tried 
 to organise free meals. Society after society was 
 formed to feed the starving child, and funds came 
 in freely, and yet the child is not fed. The London 
 School Board has appointed three special Committees 
 to inquire into the subject — one in 1889, another in 
 1895, and another in 1899, they all admitted the 
 evil, and they all ended in talk. The teachers re- 
 ported to the last Committee that there were 55,000
 
 MENTAL REPLETION 17 
 
 children attending the schools who were ** habitually 
 underfed," but the London Board members, puffed 
 up with childish pride in the machine they were 
 running, and without comprehension of child life, 
 refused to accept the teachers' statements, and the 
 report was "referred back." 
 
 Now there are 968,002 (or practically one million) 
 children of School Board age in London alone. Are 
 not the race of citizens we are rearing in London 
 of vital import to humanity ? The conditions in 
 which the children are living have surely the first 
 claim on our care and attention. 
 
 According to the last census returns for London, 
 there are over 11,000 one-room tenements, each 
 occupied by four persons. There are over 14,000 
 tenements of two rooms which are occupied by six 
 persons each ; there are over 3000 that are occupied 
 by eight persons ; there are over 1000 that are occu- 
 pied by nine persons. And so on — there are actually 
 six tenements of one room occupied each by "twelve 
 or more " persons. In fact, there are hundreds and 
 thousands of our children who are living in a state 
 of *' over-crowding " — sleeping some five or six to 
 a room, with the windows never or seldom opened ; 
 sleeping probably in the same clothes they wear 
 by day. 
 
 After a night in such a fetid atmosphere, with- 
 out even the refreshment of a morning bath, the 
 child is given a hunch of bread dabbed with "farthen'
 
 i8 CONSIDER THE CHILDREN 
 
 jam," and sent to school. He feels tired and sick, 
 cannot eat his food, and throws it away before 
 crawling into the noisy, heated class-room. The 
 child cannot live by bread alone. 
 
 The Educational Authorities, however, cannot 
 fairly be asked to solve the housing problem. Yet 
 adverse conditions only make the question of food 
 more imperative, and that question can be very 
 properly dealt with in the schools. 
 
 Everyone is aware, in a general way, that poor 
 children seldom have enough to eat ; but the 
 appalling detail of actual facts can only be realised 
 by studying documents of which, perhaps, the most 
 convincing and the most authoritative are Mr 
 Seebohm Rowntree's Poverty; a Study of Town 
 Life in York^ and the Report of the Royal Com- 
 mission on Physical Education in Scotland. 
 
 From the former we learn that the average work- 
 ing man's wage does not enable him to keep his 
 family at the level of workhouse or prison dietry, 
 the minimum of physical efficiency. Nearly 30 per 
 cent, of the population are living in poverty, and 
 are ill-housed, ill-clothed, and underfed. It is a 
 natural consequence that large percentages of the 
 children are weak, feebly developed, and mentally 
 defective. The Report of the Royal Commission 
 deals chiefly with Edinburgh, and discloses a very 
 similar state of things. 
 
 The Bishop of Ripon referred to the latter at
 
 MENTAL REPLETION 19 
 
 the York Convention in May 1903 in these striking 
 words : — -" These children of the towns are being 
 rushed by adverse circumstances into a precocious 
 maturity that is one of the very bad signs of a 
 decaying and decadent race." Sir John Gorst 
 told the House of Commons on 18th June 1903, 
 "These are the most appalling reports I have ever 
 read, and if anything like that state of things exists 
 in London and throughout England, the rising 
 generation of children is rotten." 
 
 Now, as Mrs Annie Besant told the " Inter- 
 national Congress of Hygiene," in 1892: — 
 
 " We cannot teach a half-starved child. We 
 may force it to sit and listen to the instruction, 
 but it will be just as wise after it as before ; and 
 it is quite certain that children come to our schools 
 in a physical condition which makes their reception 
 of the subjects dealt with an impossibility. It is 
 starvation which makes them so restless that they 
 cannot keep still on the benches. If the child is 
 to be a fit recipient for instruction, it must have 
 its body in a fairly healthy condition ; a child that 
 is half-starving is stupid, or is blamed for that 
 fault, when the so-called stupidity is merely a 
 physical condition of its brain which makes it unable 
 to understand. If we take the schools in which 
 the children have been supplied with proper food 
 for one or two years, the same children having 
 been left to starve before, we shall find that the
 
 20 CONSIDER THE CHILDREN 
 
 results of a Government examination will have 
 undergone a remarkable change. In Sir Henry 
 Peek's schools in one year, during which a daily 
 dinner had been supplied to the children, every 
 child passed the Government examination." 
 
 Yet the Board desires to teach the children, 
 and the report, which it "referred back," has shown 
 in what manner they may be fitted to learn : — 
 
 " (1.) It should be deemed to be part of the duty 
 of any authority by law responsible for the compul- 
 sory attendance of children at school to ascertain 
 what children, if any, come to school in a state unfit 
 to get normal profit by the school work — whether 
 by reason of underfeeding, physical disability, or 
 otherwise — and that there should be the necessary 
 inspection for that purpose. 
 
 "(2.) That where it is ascertained that children 
 are sent to school underfed (in the sense defined 
 above), it should be part of the duty of the authority 
 to see that they are provided, under proper condi- 
 tions, with the necessary food, subject to the provi- 
 sions contained in Clause 6. 
 
 "(3.) That the authority should co-operate in 
 any existing or future voluntary efi'orts to that 
 end. 
 
 ** (4.) That, in so far as such voluntary efi'orts 
 fail to cover the ground, the authority should have 
 the power and the duty to supplement them. 
 
 " (5.) That where dinners are provided it is
 
 MENTAL REPLETION 21 
 
 desirable that they should be open to all children, 
 and should be paid for by tickets, previously ob- 
 tained, which parents should pay for, unless they 
 are reported by the Board's officers to be unable by 
 misfortune to find the money ; but in no case should 
 any visible distinction be made between paying and 
 non-paying children. 
 
 "(6.) That where the officers report that the 
 underfed condition of any child is due to the 
 culpable neglect of a parent, the Board shall have 
 power to prosecute, and if necessary to deal with 
 the child under the Industrial Schools Act." 
 
 A great many kindly people believe that such 
 suggestions are superfluous, because so much is done 
 already by charity. But our statistics were gathered 
 long after charity had been at work and, in fact, the 
 charity meals of London are in most cases unsuit- 
 able, irregular, and badly organised. 
 
 Civilised countries on the Continent have under- 
 taken the feeding of school children in large towns. 
 The Rev. Russell Wakefield reports on the Parisian 
 method : — 
 
 "(a) The educating body does not collect the 
 funds, and only shares in the administration. The 
 work is primarily municipal. 
 
 " (h) Private gifts and grants from the rates and 
 taxes are pooled for the purpose of helping the 
 children. A rich district even takes a pride in 
 doing all its work by means of donations and
 
 22 CONSIDER THE CHILDREN 
 
 subscriptions, without coming on the public ex- 
 chequer. 
 
 " (c) There is no feeling of pauperising. The 
 combining of those who are aided by public gifts 
 and those who can pay for themselves does not cause 
 any unsatisfactory feeling. As one of the Secretaries 
 of the Caisse des ^coles said to me, ' We compel the 
 children to go to school. We must then see that 
 they can learn with advantage, so that they may 
 really benefit' " 
 
 Le Havre of 23rd November 1898 contains an 
 article on the methods adopted for feeding children 
 in primary schools in the town. Cantines are 
 opened at centres, at which food is prepared for 
 mid-day meals in poor quarters of the town for such 
 children as may avail themselves of the privilege 
 offered. The meals are changed daily, and include 
 bread, soup, haricot mutton, beef a la mode, rice 
 with meat, sausage and potatoes, beans, carrots, 
 potatoes, various legumes. 
 
 The municipality make a grant of £500 (English 
 money) to be spent in meals for the school children 
 (boys and girls) in the poorer quarters of the town. 
 Counters or tickets for admission to these dinners 
 are sold at one penny each to poor scholars ; in the 
 case of more extreme poverty the dinners are given 
 without a charge being made. The selection of the 
 food-material is left to the head teachers of schools, 
 who place the conduct of the dinners at various
 
 MENTAL REPLETION 23 
 
 centres in the charge of assistant masters and 
 mistresses, the assistants thus appointed receiving 
 10 francs a month during their regular attendance at 
 the cantine. The cookery is in the care of the 
 concierge and the service-women from ^cole Mater- 
 nelles, who are paid according to the number of 
 children attended to. 
 
 The statistics for the second quarter of the year 
 1898 showed that the various centres were regularly 
 frequented by 800 children, of which number 495 
 paid a penny, and 305 were fed gratuitously. 
 
 The cantine is open daily during the school- 
 year ; and the plan is found to encourage school 
 attendance, as well as to benefit the children 
 physically, mentally and morally. 
 
 It is neither possible nor necessary to give full 
 details from all countries ; but systems of the kind 
 may be easily observed throughout France, Germany, 
 Austria and Belgium. In Switzerland the justice 
 that feeds children from alcohol, by devoting one- 
 tenth of the spirit dues to free meals (and clothes) 
 for necessitous school children, is a grim jest that 
 calls for notice. 
 
 Therefore should we too be wise to spend less on 
 elaborate apparatus and more on free meals. The 
 system adopted in Brussels, which spends only £l 
 a head on feeding and clothing, would make the 
 full charge in London not more than £50,000, or 
 considerably less than we now give for enforcing
 
 24 CONSIDER THE CHILDREN 
 
 attendance and maintaining truant schools. Child- 
 ren between three and fourteen should rather grow- 
 strong than learned. They should stand straight 
 and firm. They are the foundation on which a more 
 healthy race might be built up. 
 It would be well worth doing !
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 COMPULSORY CONTAGION 
 
 "The primary schools have always been among the most 
 important factors in the spread of contagious diseases. Here 
 the children, at the most susceptible age, are brought into the 
 closest relations. The schoolrooms are usually over-crowded 
 and often poorly ventilated ; the children's outer garments are 
 hung so closely together that they touch those of other children ; 
 they often use the same cups in drinking, and sometimes the 
 same towels." — Charles G. Dewey, M.D. 
 
 Though feeding is undeniably the most necessary 
 reform for improving the physique of the children, 
 there is no doubt that the co-operation of medical 
 science, from its preventive side, is in pressing 
 demand for poorer schools. In large towns the 
 schools are the centres from which those diseases are 
 spread that fill our large and expensive fever 
 hospitals, and any efi"orts towards the arrest of this 
 infection would be repaid a thousand-fold by the 
 emptying of the wards. Yet the London School 
 Board had for many years but one medical officer, 
 a man who was much occupied in other matters ; and 
 it was not until 1903 — at the end of Dr Kerr's first 
 year in office — that it issued a " First Medical 
 
 Report"! 
 
 25
 
 26 CONSIDER THE CHILDREN 
 
 Elsewhere the " influence of schools in disseminat- 
 ing infectious diseases " had been recognised as long 
 ago as 1876 by W. H. Power, while in 1895 Dr 
 Shirley Murphy, of the London County Council, issued 
 a report which proved the matter beyond cavil : — 
 
 " It appears not only that the incidence of diph- 
 theria is greatest in children at school age, ^.e., 
 between three years old and ten, but that when the 
 general diphtheria mortality varies, that of the 
 school children lags behind when there is improve- 
 ment and takes the lead when things are getting 
 worse. Thus between 1871-1880 the general mortality 
 was less than in the preceding ten years, but this fall 
 in mortality did not equally benefit all the age groups. 
 For some reason, children from three to ten years 
 of age shared less in this improvement than those 
 under three, or persons above ten. In the next ten 
 years the mortality at all ages had increased. Not 
 equally, however, for the increase among children 
 from three to ten was greater than that among those 
 either below or above that time of life. 
 
 Then, taking the years 1891 to 1893, during 
 which diphtheria had been specially prevalent, and 
 comparing them with periods before 1870, we find 
 that the increase was chiefly due to a greater pre- 
 valence among the children, and especially among 
 those of school age." 
 
 The same statistician was able to point out that 
 infection was arrested by school holidays, a conclu-
 
 COMPULSORY CONTAGION 27 
 
 sion which has received a somewhat remarkable con- 
 firmation from Dr Whitelegge, in Nottingham, who 
 observed that the number of cases of scarlet fever 
 reported on Wednesdays was always less than on 
 other days of the week ; and he rightly attributed 
 this to the fact that the children were absent from 
 school on Saturday and Sunday, the average incuba- 
 tion of scarlet fever being three days. 
 
 Similar testimony might be quoted from numerous 
 authorities, among whom it is only necessary to 
 mention Dr Niven in his Report on the Health of 
 the City of Manchester, 1897, p. 26, Sir Richard 
 Thorne, K.C.B., M.D., Dr Windle in 1898, Dr R. J. 
 Neece in 1895, Dr 0. W. Wheaton in 1897, Dr 
 Theodore Thomson in 1898. 
 
 Every report of the Local Government Board 
 repeats the formula, which prepares us for the 
 following figures, showing the mean annual rate of 
 mortality per 1000 (England and Wales being taken 
 as 100) in London : — 
 
 
 1871-1880. 
 
 1881-1890. 
 
 1891-1898. 
 
 Diphtheria 
 
 . 101 
 
 160 
 
 207 
 
 Measles 
 
 . 134 
 
 143 
 
 143 
 
 Scarlet Fever . 
 
 83 
 
 100 
 
 115 
 
 Forster's Education Act was passed in 1871. 
 
 Minor Infections 
 Seriously as we are bound to regard the spread
 
 28 CONSIDER THE CHILDREN 
 
 of infectious fevers in schools, there are considera- 
 tions which may tempt us to regard with even more 
 anxiety the prevalence of the little dirty contagions 
 such as lice in the hair, sores about the mouth 
 (generally syphilitic), ophthalmia, and ringworm. 
 
 Inasmuch as few teachers are competent to detect 
 the early stages of fever when contact is so dangerous, 
 they are scarcely better fitted for the crusade against 
 dirt, which is an integral part of education. And 
 so the crowds in our slums grow up in their vermin- 
 haunted abodes till they will scarcely believe in 
 freedom from bugs and lice as a possibility. The 
 bodies of the poorer children are often covered with 
 bites, their clothing and their hair are literally alive. 
 
 Dr Arnold Lea, in his paper before the Blackpool 
 Health Congress of 1899, reported to finding over 
 70 per cent, of school children infected. The 
 Stepney Committee of the Children's Country Holi- 
 day Fund found that 113 of the girls sent from six 
 London schools had unclean heads and only two 
 were perfectly clean. In 1897 the Postmaster- 
 General complained that nearly every girl applying 
 for Post Ofiice work from the Board Schools was 
 found to be sufi'ering from vermin. 
 
 From New York it is possible to quote from a 
 table drawn up for the medical department actual 
 statistics for the cases of disease found in the schools 
 in one week : —
 
 COMPULSORY CONTAGION 
 
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 American Female 
 
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 Children's Aid Society 
 
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 -1-3 
 
 
 H
 
 30 CONSIDER THE CHILDREN 
 
 It may be noticed that while the major infections 
 account for only 60 exclusions, 200 are due to the 
 minor. The figures are probably typical. 
 
 Contagious Eye Disease 
 
 Finally a few words may perhaps be added on 
 the increasing prevalence of ophthalmia. The facts 
 have forced upon us the establishment of expensive 
 schools for the blind ; while the simpler, and far 
 more helpful, measures for prevention are deemed 
 unworthy of serious attention. 
 
 The conditions are apparently often ignored or 
 misunderstood by teachers ; since the inspectors 
 report that they not infrequently find a child sup- 
 posed to be dull or stupid is in reality almost 
 blind. 
 
 Dr Colm, of Breslau, and Priestly Smith, of 
 Birmingham, and others pointed out years ago that 
 from 16 to 30 per cent, of school children suffered 
 from defective vision. Dr Bronner, of Bradford, 
 read a paper on the subject at the International 
 Congress in 1891, and pleaded for proper medical 
 inspectors of schools — "Many a brilliant career has 
 been spoilt, and many a child condemned to a life of 
 misery and toil, because some defect of vision has 
 been neglected" ; and in 1895 Mr Brudenell Carter, 
 from an examination of London children, obtained
 
 COMPULSORY CONTAGION 31 
 
 similar results. But it is a very terrible thing that 
 such examinations should only be made occasionally 
 — seldom more frequently than once in five years — 
 for James Kerr, M.D., Medical Superintendent to 
 the London School Board, writes : — " The remote 
 efi'ect of a single week of neglected corneal inflam- 
 mation may take a couple of years to get over." 
 And Dr R. J. Hamilton, in his report on " Defective 
 Vision," No. 1, Liverpool Board, says, "The School 
 Board is to blame if it does not take steps to detect 
 these defective ones in the earliest stages possible." 
 
 And finally, if the School Board will not admit their 
 direct responsibility for the health of the children 
 deteriorating so rapidly under its care, we may point 
 out that every one of these ailments are positively 
 destructive to the obedience and industry it is their 
 admitted province to promote. There is a case on 
 record (Allbutt's System of Medicine, vol. viii.) of 
 acute mania caused by a dirty head, while a general 
 deterioration of health and spirits is universal. The 
 presence of vermin lowers the vitality, the intense 
 irritation (provoking skin diseases) must also cause 
 mental unrest and fretfulness. "Industrious and well- 
 cared-for children," as Dr F. Calcott Fox pointed out, 
 "suffer indiscriminately with the idle and neglected. 
 However painstaking and cleanly a mother may be in 
 tending her children, she can never be secure against 
 infection while they are attending school."
 
 32 CONSIDER THE CHILDREN 
 
 Dirty children are always fidgety children ; they 
 are to a large extent incapable of attention or 
 memory : they confuse discipline, and their example 
 is in every way a serious danger to the class. 
 
 Medical Inspection of Schools 
 
 Enough has surely been said to establish the 
 existence of the evil, and it remains to point out the 
 simplest and most effective method by which it may 
 be almost entirely removed. 
 
 The inspection of medical officers made weekly in 
 country schools and daily in town (with the assistance 
 of trained nurses in attendance throughout the school 
 hours) has been proved most beneficial and should be 
 universally enforced. The only possible danger to be 
 avoided is one of friction with parents, which can 
 never arise if the Board insists that the doctor's work 
 shall be exclusively preventive. His function is to 
 detect disease and exclude the victim. He may 
 advise, indeed, but should never prescribe. To the 
 nurses a slightly more active course may be recom- 
 mended ; for though there are hospitals with their 
 fever and other wards, we have no wards for minor 
 infections, and it is desirable that someone should 
 at least instruct the mothers on the cleaning of heads 
 and eyes. In which cases the best teaching is by 
 example.
 
 COMPULSORY CONTAGION 33 
 
 The want of nurses has been supplied to some 
 extent by various voluntary associations, but the 
 work cannot be done with any thoroughness without 
 the co-operation or entire management of the Board. 
 Considering the encouraging reports of present results 
 from H.M. Inspectors, it seems scarcely credible that 
 the system has not yet been finally adopted. 
 
 Meanwhile the appointment of doctors has been 
 tried with marked success in Germany on the recom- 
 mendation of Dr Max Bresgen in 1882 ; in New 
 York and Boston ; in France since 1890 ; and in 
 Switzerland. Everywhere we may see encouraging 
 results in improved regularity of attendance and a 
 marked decrease in actual cases of disease. 
 
 The expense in London may be roughly esti- 
 mated, for nine local medical officers, with two or 
 three nurses under each, at no more than £2500 a 
 year — an expense which would be largely balanced 
 by the abolition of expensive blind schools and the 
 partial emptying of fever wards. And how much 
 sufi'ering would be alleviated, if not entirely swept 
 away ? 
 
 A last word is needed in this matter to point out 
 
 the many details in which a little attention to 
 
 hygienic conditions in daily work of inestimable 
 
 preventive value could be secured by the medical 
 
 officers or by the presence of medical men on the 
 
 Board. For the full advantage of which precaution 
 
 it is finally imperative to abolish once and for all the 
 
 c
 
 34 CONSIDER THE CHILDREN 
 
 foolish regulation by which the absolutely regular 
 attendance of a child throughout one year is 
 rewarded by a prize and medal. This means that 
 the children will miss their few chances of healthy 
 and educational country excursions ; that they attend 
 school when not fit to learn and a danger to their com- 
 panions ; that they grow selfish, unwilling to help at 
 home even in real emergencies of sickness or trouble. 
 I have seen cases of children sujQfering from mumps, 
 for example, who have actually been kept sitting by 
 the fire through the school hours because even the 
 teacher has recognised that they are too ill to work 
 and is yet unwilling they should lose their medal. 
 The motive itself is unworthy of serious consideration, 
 but the results on health are more tangible and more 
 open to instant attack.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 SCHOOL DISCIPLINE 
 
 " In a large number of schools the caning not only of boys, 
 but of girls and little children, is a regular part of the curriculum. 
 It terrifies the children ; it makes them hate school and escape 
 from it as much as they can ; it exasperates those parents who 
 do not beat their children themselves and resent it being done 
 by persons to whom they are compelled by law to entrust them. 
 But the National Union of Teachers has taken the matter under 
 its special protection, and magistrates give it their support," — 
 Sir John Gorst. 
 
 England was the last among civilised nations to 
 abolish flogging in the army, and it seems likely 
 that she will maintain the same cruel superstition 
 in her schools till it has been universally abolished 
 elsewhere. 
 
 Elementary schools already maintain perfect order 
 without recourse to it, in New York (where emigrants 
 of all nations are mingled), in France, Japan, Holland, 
 Belgium, Italy, Austria, Turkey, Egypt, and parts of 
 South Australia. Among ourselves corporal punish- 
 ment is not allowed in the London Jews' Free 
 Schools, or in the Quaker Schools throughout the 
 
 35
 
 36 CONSIDER THE CHILDREN 
 
 country. It has been long entirely discredited in 
 the best non-government schools, whether secondary 
 or elementary ; and there are a few honourable 
 exceptions among the Board and Voluntary Schools, 
 where the power to wield the cane is never enforced, 
 such as the Girls' Bow Road, London, the Infants' 
 Griffin School, Blackburn, and the Birmingham 
 Infant Schools. 
 
 Yet the old arguments are persistently advanced 
 to support the old methods. Corporal punishment, 
 we are told : — 
 
 (1.) Is easy and swift. 
 
 (2.) Is supported by the maxim, "If you spare 
 the rod you spoil the child." 
 
 (3.) Is necessary for the maintenance of discipline. 
 
 (4.) Is an ancient custom. 
 
 First. We may admit at once that it is more 
 difficult for a teacher to rule by the mental and 
 moral force of example, to make his lessons attrac- 
 tive, than to produce a certain surface obedience by 
 the use of a cane. But Aristotle declares that every- 
 thing good is difficult, and the " easy " punishments 
 are obviously liable to constant abuse. Thus we 
 find, for example, in 1902, that 1100 cases of 
 corporal punishment were reported in seven weeks 
 from the Stanley Road Boys' School, and over 1000 
 in eleven months from the Creek Road Girls' 
 School ! 
 
 This state of things is apparently accepted as
 
 SCHOOL DISCIPLINE 37 
 
 normal by the National Union of Teachers, who 
 have always been loud in their denunciations of 
 any suggestion for abolishing the cane. They 
 triumphantly ask what form of punishment is to 
 be substituted, as if the infliction of pain were 
 their one idea of education. Yet Mrs Humphrey 
 Ward can claim to ** have maintained perfect order 
 and discipline " in a Vacation School of the poorest 
 London children " without the help of any punish- 
 ment whatever." 
 
 Secondly. The maxim on sparing the rod and 
 spoiling the child is a favourite with ministers of 
 all denominations, and most commonly attributed 
 to Solomon. It occurs, however, in Butler's Hudi- 
 hras in a connection scarcely applicable to educa- 
 tion : — 
 
 " Love is a boy, by poets styled, 
 Then spare the rod, and spoil the child. 
 As skilful coopers hoop their tubs 
 With Lydian and with Phrygian dubs, 
 Why may not whipping have as good 
 A grace, performed in time and mood. 
 With comely movement, and by art. 
 Raise passion in a lady's heart 1 " 
 
 Hudibras, II. 1. 
 
 Solomon, indeed, has the precept, "He who spareth 
 the rod hateth his son " ; but no reference is here 
 intended to teachers, girls, or women. It is the 
 utterance of a father, and we should remember that 
 none of Solomon's many sons turned out well Not
 
 38 CONSIDER THE CHILDREN 
 
 can any detached sentence from the Bible be accepted 
 as a complete rule of life. 
 
 Thirdly. To say that corporal punishment is 
 essential to discipline presumes incompetence. We 
 have seen already that in most foreign countries 
 and in our own best schools these old-fashioned 
 " aids to order " are unknown ; and it would not be 
 difficult to convince impartial observers that moral 
 discipline is actually destroyed by the practice of 
 caning. 
 
 Fourthly. We may admit again that flogging 
 is an ancient custom, but the argument might be 
 advanced in support of every abuse under the sun. 
 Moreover, the wisdom of the ancients was here in 
 advance of their practice. Plato writes in his 
 Republic, " No trace of slavery ought to mix with 
 the studies of free-born men, and no study pursued 
 under compulsion remains rooted in the memory. 
 Hence you must train children in a playful manner, 
 and without any atmosphere of restraint, with the 
 further object of discerning more clearly the natural 
 bent of their respective characters." Jesus of 
 Nazareth declared that it was better a man should 
 die the death of a dog than that he should beat 
 a little child. St Augustine says in his confessions, 
 " Nor will any sound discretion approve of my being 
 beaten as a boy, for how was he better who corrected 
 me ? And no one doth well against his own will, 
 even though what he doth is good. But woe is
 
 SCHOOL DISCIPLINE 39 
 
 thee, thou torrent of human custom ! Who shall 
 stop thy course ? " 
 
 Yet peers and magistrates keep up the parrot- 
 formula, " / was birched as a boy," and fancy their 
 "argument " (?) unanswerable. They forget, among 
 other things, that the conditions of life are entirely 
 changed. Even admitting that flogging may have 
 done no great harm to the healthy country children 
 of our fathers' days, its effects are very diff'erent on 
 the underfed, nervous and feeble children bred in 
 modern cities. 
 
 On the other hand the reasons against corporal 
 punishment are obvious and cogent : — 
 
 (1.) It has no beneficial efl"ect on the child 
 punished. 
 
 (2.) It is demoralising to the teacher. 
 
 (3.) It is an evil example of physical violence. 
 
 Firstly. The simplest proof of the inefficiency 
 of the cane may be found in any punishment book. 
 The same names occur on every page, and there are 
 numerous instances of a child being punished as 
 many as twenty times in a year for the same 
 fault. 
 
 The moral may be even more pointedly enforced 
 from such testimony as the following, which is in 
 no way exceptional. 
 
 Mr Balme, an experienced Yorkshire magistrate, 
 has noted that " a whipping appears often at the 
 beginning of a long list of re-convictions. This led
 
 40 CONSIDER THE CHILDREN 
 
 me to get Mr Shepherd, the Governor of Wakefield 
 Prison, to go very carefully into a large number of 
 cases of juvenile crime recorded there. We found 
 that, while on the average about 30 per cent, of 
 juvenile offenders sentenced to ordinary imprison- 
 ment were re-convicted, of those on whom a whip- 
 ping had formed part of the sentence no less than 
 60 per cent, were re-convicted." 
 
 Lord Roberts is no less emphatic in his Forty- 
 one Years in India : — 
 
 " The parade was ordered for the punishment of 
 two men who had been sentenced to fifty lashes 
 each for stealing their kits, and to a certain term 
 of imprisonment in addition. They were fine, 
 handsome young horse artillerymen, and it was 
 hateful to see them thus treated. Besides, one 
 felt it was productive of harm rather than good, 
 for it tended to destroy the men's self-respect, 
 and to make them completely reckless. 
 
 " In this instance, no sooner had the two men 
 been released from prison than they committed the 
 same ofifence again. They were a second time tried 
 by court-martial, and sentenced as before. How I 
 longed to have the power to remit the fifty lashes, 
 for I felt that selling their kits on this occasion was 
 their way of showing their resentment at the igno- 
 minious treatment they had been subjected to, and 
 of proving that flogging was powerless to prevent 
 their repeating the ofl'ence."
 
 SCHOOL DISCIPLINE 41 
 
 The fact seems to be that in general the teacher 
 does not consider the efect of punishment ; he 
 merely canes on the instinct of retaliation ; he 
 must inflict pain for every offence. Yet the lesson 
 of fear is of no educational value whatever. As 
 Seneca has it : — 
 
 "Which preceptor is the worthier to teach — 
 the one who scarifies his pupils' backs if their 
 memory happen to fail or if they make a slight 
 blunder, or the one who chooses rather to instruct 
 and correct by admonition and the influence of 
 shame? .... You will find that those crimes 
 are the most often committed which are the most 
 often punished." 
 
 And if flogging is no deterrent of these faults 
 over which we have some control, it is still less a 
 remedy for mental deficiency. Many teachers to 
 this day uphold the superstition that spelling, 
 writing and the rest can be taught by the cane. 
 A few cases, from innumerable on record, must be 
 quoted to prove this lamentable fact. They will 
 serve also to show how often the teachers abuse 
 their right to punish under the influence of 
 temper. 
 
 The Teaching Staff Committee of the London 
 School Board had two cases to examine on March 
 17, 1902. 
 
 In one "because a boy (not quite eight years 
 old) was unable to spell a word, he received at the
 
 42 CONSIDER THE CHILDREN 
 
 hands of the teacher a succession of blows on her ear, 
 so many and so violent as to render it black with 
 bruises." The mother stated "that she had had 
 occasion to complain of Mr S. on many occasions on 
 account of his severity to the child, but she added 
 that the hoy was naturally xiery dully In another a 
 headmistress is found "to have struck a little girl 
 aged nine on both sides of the head, causing her 
 head to ache all the afternoon, for inahility to 
 get her sums right." 
 
 The following report, from the Scarborough Even- 
 ing News, September 2, 1901, is particularly impres- 
 sive : — 
 
 "At the Ryedale Petty Sessions at Kirbymoor- 
 side, Thomas Johnson, master of the day schools 
 at Harome, near Helmsley, was accused by the 
 R.S.P.C.C. of having used excessive violence to a 
 scholar, eleven years of age, named Minnie Morley, 
 on the 1st of August. It was stated by several 
 witnesses that the child was in a dictation class, and 
 the master, prior to giving out the lesson, had 
 intimated that for each mistake made he should 
 give the scholars the strap. Minnie Morley became 
 nervous at this announcement, and she made twenty- 
 three mistakes. It was alleged defendant took the 
 child by the back of the neck and held her chest 
 against a desk, and then administered as promised 
 the twenty-three strokes with a leathern strap, in- 
 viting the scholars to count the number as he
 
 SCHOOL DISCIPLINE 43 
 
 proceeded. Subsequently the child went home 
 crying, and vomited violently. Dr Blair stated 
 that one bruise extended across the shoulders 11 
 inches, and was 2^ to 4 inches broad. The flesh 
 was swollen, and the child excited. The Chairman 
 said the Bench considered the defendant's conduct 
 most unjustifiable, and very wrong. He would be 
 fined £6, including costs, or, in default of payment, 
 two months' imprisonment." 
 
 Yet in this very year of 1903, when the London 
 School Board had decided to withdraw the power 
 of using a cane from the assistant teachers in the 
 schools for the mentally deficient, these teachers 
 (who are all women) were unanimous in signing 
 a petition for the restitution of their rights. Whips 
 and chains have been for many years abolished in 
 asylums ; and yet the flogging goes on where surely 
 the teachers have special reasons, as from the smaller 
 classes they have special opportunities, for con- 
 trolling their pupils by example and kindness. 
 
 Moreover, caning is not only an obviously unjust 
 punishment for stupidity, but has often been proved 
 the actual cause (through fright, nervousness and 
 chorea) of what it is claimed to cure. Many 
 children are absolutely terrified by the treatment, 
 and constantly run away from school to escape the 
 cane. The transactions of the International Con- 
 gress of Hygiene, sec. iv., contain emphatic state- 
 ments from Drs Sturges and Cheadle as to the
 
 44 CONSIDER THE CHILDREN 
 
 effect of school worry in producing St Vitus's 
 dance, which is always liable to grow worse since 
 the increased liability, from ill-health, to do bad 
 work is always followed by increased punishment. 
 One of the most disgusting and degrading 
 spectacles I ever saw in a Board School was the 
 punishment of two lads of about eight years of 
 age for bad work. I heard howls, and went into 
 the hall of the school and found the two boys 
 not only writhing and crying, but actually so lost 
 to all sense of self-respect that they were slobbering 
 on the floor. A row of some eight or ten other 
 boys was drawn up (evidently to witness the punish- 
 ment), with their hands held above their heads. 
 On inquiring into the two cases, I found that both 
 boys were being punished for careless work, and 
 their copy-books were produced for my inspection. 
 In the first case there was persistent bad writing ; 
 the boy, I found, had been a "special," that is, in a 
 class for the mentally defective, and this was his first 
 term in an ordinary class. He was undoubtedly dull. 
 The second copy-book showed increasing failure to 
 write well, increasing blots and jerks and obvious 
 trembling. No one with any knowledge of physiology 
 on looking at that book could have had any doubt 
 that the boy was in the early stage of chorea or 
 St Vitus's dance, and simply could not control his 
 hands and writing. Some weeks subsequently I 
 took a doctor to see both boys, and he saw them,
 
 SCHOOL DISCIPLINE 45 
 
 not immediatel}^ after punishment, but quietly in 
 class, and he confirmed my suspicions that the one 
 was a dullard and the other a neurotic. 
 
 Secondly. Corporal punishment demoralises the 
 teacher, because he comes to rely on it for con- 
 trolling and because it leads in many cases to the 
 well-known disease of flagellomania. The habit of 
 beating children once formed is very difficult to 
 restrict or keep within bounds, and nothing is more 
 disheartening than the amount of " irregular " 
 punishment that goes on in the schools. The 
 teachers' argument that where caning is not per- 
 mitted secret and various forms of torture are 
 employed instead is merely an example of the 
 demoralisation of the profession. 
 
 The fact is that the habit of flogging, and the 
 shifting excuses involved, produces as much lying 
 and deceit among the teachers as the children. 
 Complaints are constantly met by such disingenuous 
 admissions as the following: — (i.) "The boy turned 
 round suddenly and his eye came into contact with 
 my fist"; (ii.) " The boy was not struck, but only 
 pushed in the back " ; (iii.) " I accidentally knocked 
 the boy with a reading book"; (iv.) "I caught the 
 boy quickly by the head to turn him round and 
 the little fellow toppled over." 
 
 A lady teacher, who was accused of having struck 
 a small girl on the head, denied it. The parent 
 remaining positive and asking, " Why do you lie
 
 46 CONSIDER THE CHILDREN 
 
 about it ? " is quietly informed that " there are many 
 kinds of lies ! " 
 
 It is idle, however, to lay the principal blame 
 on the teachers themselves, for where they are 
 summoned and pay compensation (in some cases 
 as much as £6) the Board complacently decides 
 " to take no further notice,'' and retains their ser- 
 vices. 
 
 Yet the habit of corporal punishment, once 
 indulged without restraint, is well known to pro- 
 duce flagellomania — a recognised disease. The 
 sensual delight in cruelty may easily ruin men 
 and women of the semi-cultivated neurotic type 
 from which our teachers are drawn. Evidence is 
 not difficult to find for those who seek honestly ; 
 and it is of the first importance we should realise 
 that it is not till he exceeds all bounds and is 
 fined by a magistrate or expostulated with by his 
 Board, that the teacher discovers that he cannot 
 stop, that he craves to flog, and that he has lost 
 all self-control. And then there comes the final 
 step and we get bestial scandals in the schools — 
 scandals which do take place though they are 
 seldom, if ever, allowed to acquire publicity. In 
 a letter that appeared in a Bristol paper in 1899 
 over the signature of Bernard Shaw the following 
 case was given : — 
 
 "The subject is so disagreeable that it is neces- 
 sary to justify the publication of even a warning
 
 SCHOOL DISCIPLINE 47 
 
 against it by a practical example of its danger. 
 Early this year a Committee, in spite of the efforts 
 of some humane members, authorised public flog- 
 gings. A boy at the school, having made an 
 accusation against one of the officers, and then 
 withdrawn it, was thereupon publicly flogged, 
 receiving the maximum punishment of twelve 
 lashes. Some weeks later, the accused officer was 
 found presumahly committing an offence with the 
 flogged hoy. The police applied for a warrant ; the 
 officer absconded ; the boy was transferred to another 
 school ; and the flogging majority of the Committee 
 stood convicted." 
 
 The warning may be sufficient. 
 
 Thirdly. Surely we need not dwell at any 
 length upon the obviously bad example of physical 
 violence set before children by the use of the cane. 
 Their only idea of " playing at school " is that one 
 should **be teacher" and beat the rest. Their one 
 conception of authority is the power to inflict pain. 
 The following report is only a concentrated instance 
 of evil example in which violence spread from the 
 teacher to the child herself, her mother, grandmother, 
 and even the vicar : — 
 
 " On Saturday, at Worship Street Police Court, 
 Mrs Selina Pierpoint was summoned for assaulting 
 Sarah Parker, assistant mistress of St Matthias 
 National Schools, Granby Street, Bethnal Green. 
 The complainant said she sent the defendant's girl
 
 48 CONSIDER THE CHILDREN 
 
 to the headmistress for punishment, and as the girl, 
 for the same fault — talking in class — had been 
 punished only three days before, the headmistress 
 gave the girl three strokes on the hand with a cane. 
 The girl then hit the mistress with her fists, and the 
 mistress, protecting herself, struck the girl across 
 the arm with the cane. After that the girl's 
 conduct became so violent and rude that the chair- 
 man of the school (the vicar) was sent for. He 
 decided that the girl should not be expelled, but be 
 made to take further punishment — four more strokes 
 on the hands — which were given. It was the 
 morning after when the mother, with the girl and 
 the girl's grandmother, entered the school, the 
 defendant behaving noisily, using bad language, 
 and seizing the headmistress, and ordering the girl 
 to take the cane and cane the mistress. The witness 
 then deposed to the assault on herself, and said her 
 side was hurt." — Daily Chronicle, October 13, 1902. 
 
 So schools produce Hooligans. And, as Mr W. 
 F. Collier has well written : — 
 
 "Example to a child is everything, precept is 
 nothing. By these punishments you teach it fear 
 and deceit for its own protection, and by the force 
 of example you teach it cruelty and violence. . . . 
 We violate first principles in their earliest education 
 by teaching them that which is a radical error in 
 social science, viz., to attempt to govern mind by 
 physical force." — Punishments in Education.
 
 SCHOOL DISCIPLINE 49 
 
 How far have we wandered from Ruskin's ideal: 
 "The object of all true education is not to make 
 children do the right thing, but to make them enjoy 
 doing the right thing."
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE MAKING OF THE CRIMINAL 
 "Alas! every prisoner becometh a fool." — Nietzsche. 
 
 Truant Schools 
 
 A CRUEL and mechanical system of education teaches 
 many children to dread and hate school, and to 
 avoid it by all the means in their power. A boy is 
 late and is caned ; next time he is late he stays away 
 altogether and has a happy few hours of freedom 
 perambulating the streets, or perhaps joins some 
 comrades and goes an excursion to a neighbouring 
 park. He invents excuses for his absences as long 
 as possible, but when caught in lying he be- 
 comes openly defiant and joins a gang of habitual 
 truants. The chief reason of truancy is a dislike of 
 school, and this dislike may arise simply because a 
 natural and bright child objects to the unnatural and 
 dreary form of learning ; it may arise from dread of 
 punishment, or from dread of being jeered at for his 
 ragged clothing or some other peculiarity ; or it may 
 arise from bad sight or hearing which the child only 
 half understands and thinks it useless to try and 
 
 explain. 
 
 50
 
 THE MAKING OF THE CRIMINAL 51 
 
 Now our boy in his wisdom having fled from 
 school, the wrath of the land is aroused against him, 
 a vast machinery is put in motion to catch him and 
 force him back to sit on a form and hear a Cockney 
 teacher teach French. This machinery in London 
 alone costs £150,000 a year ! 
 
 The first step is to secure a body of men to visit 
 the homes and prowl about the streets, to catch 
 the children not in school. The advertisement 
 for these "attendance officers" distinctly suggests 
 that ex-policemen and ex-soldiers should apply. 
 These men form the part of the educational authority 
 which comes into closest contact with the parents, 
 and are generally spoken of as " the School Board." 
 A woman will call to her neighbour, — 
 
 " 'Ere, Mrs Jones ! 'ere's the School Board a 
 arskin' arter your Jim agen." 
 
 In other districts these attendance officers are 
 popularly known as " kid-catchers." 
 
 These men have to trap some children and make 
 out cases to justify their own existence ; and on 
 their word alone the child is sent to the Truant 
 School — a penal institution — the first step towards 
 a life in prison. 
 
 There can be no question that the first cause of 
 much truancy is nothing but ill-health. We |have 
 statistics from the John Worthy Truant School of 
 Chicago, where the standard of physical measurements 
 is exceptionally low, and where 48 per cent, were
 
 52 CONSIDER THE CHILDREN 
 
 found to be suffering from defective vision as against 
 28 per cent, in the ordinary schools. Further, many 
 of the boys had strabismus, hypermetropia and astig- 
 matism, conditions which would induce asthenopia 
 when the eyes were used in close and long applica- 
 tion to books, and it is easy to believe that the 
 strain thus set up when an attempt was made to 
 study was a factor in producing dislike for school 
 and subsequent truancy. 
 
 In October 1901 I visited the Upton House 
 Truant School and was asked by the medical officer 
 to go and see a child received that day in the 
 infirmary. The nurse took me into a carefully 
 darkened room where, curled up in bed with his 
 head under the clothes, was a very small child of 
 seven. When the sheet was thrown back the child 
 immediately put both hands over his face. He was 
 with difficulty persuaded to let me have a glance at 
 the poor inflamed eyes to which the least light caused 
 intense agony, and the doctor told me the child also 
 had wens on the conjunctiva. The nurse said the 
 child was so babyish she actually had to feed him. 
 And this was a child sent to a truant school to be 
 " punished " for not attending day school ! 
 
 This unfortunate wee waif had fallen into kindly 
 hands and spent his period of punishment in the 
 infirmary under proper treatment. But what of the 
 officer who had caught him ? I reported the case 
 to the Committee, but they took no action, and I
 
 THE MAKING OF THE CRIMINAL 53 
 
 interviewed the officer myself. I found him an old 
 man — probably nearly sixty — with laziness written 
 in every movement. He told me the child's eyes 
 were perfectly well before he went to the school — 
 on the morning of the day I had seen him. 
 
 " He must have rubbed them and made them bad 
 on purpose," said the old man. "These children are 
 that artful, miss ! " A child of seven must be more 
 than artful who can produce violent granular oph- 
 thalmia and wens on the conjunctiva in two or 
 three hours. 
 
 And what are the conditions of life in this school 
 outside the infirmary to which our waif was fortun- 
 ately admitted ? On admission all children are 
 bathed and have their heads shaved — whereat street 
 boys shout " Conviks ! " Their life is given up to the 
 unrelieved monotony of work. 
 
 Rule No. 1 of Secular Instructions states : " When 
 rising in the morning, and during the time occupied 
 in the dormitories and lavatory, and during meals, 
 drill, and preparation for bed, talking shall not be 
 allowed." If parents or near relatives interfere 
 (irrespective of cause) with this strict discipline, they 
 forfeit the privilege of being allowed to visit the 
 boys, which otherwise they can do, in cases of first 
 admission, for one hour once a month. As a rule 
 the boys shall be allowed two hours for recreation 
 and exercise. But this may be diminished to allow 
 only a period of not exceeding half an hour daily,
 
 54 CONSIDER THE CHILDREN 
 
 the remaining portion of the time being occupied in 
 menial work or extra drill. 
 
 Among " Punishments " we find: (a) Forfeiture 
 of privileges, degradation from rank previously 
 attained by good conduct, extra drill, or some 
 routine work of the school which the boys most 
 dislike, (b) Reduction in quantity or change in 
 character of food. For simple ofi"ences they shall 
 be allowed eight ounces of bread, with water or 
 gruel, when deprived of any regular meal, (c) Con- 
 finement in a light room. Maximum confinement, 
 forty-eight hours. Each ofi"ender allowed one pound 
 of bread, with no less than one pint of gruel or 
 milk and water, daily, (d) For less serious ofi'ences, 
 flagellation with the school cane, applied to the palm 
 of the hand. For very serious ofi"ences (absconding, 
 for instance) flogging on the posterior with a birch 
 rod ; maximum number of strokes, six. 
 
 The inevitable result of such treatment is to 
 degrade the child and increase his hatred of school ; 
 so that we find that those released on license 
 for good behaviour frequently find their way back 
 to punishment for the old offence. The truant, 
 largely manufactured by over- discipline, has been 
 known to return four, five, or even six times. The 
 idea of curing him by making his lessons attractive 
 is unheard of. The Upton House School costs the 
 ratepayers £4749 a year, and that at Highbury 
 £5117.
 
 THE MAKING OF THE CRIMINAL 55 
 
 Day Industrial Schools 
 
 The punitive institution beyond the Truant 
 School, used for girls and extra naughty boys, is the 
 Industrial School. This exists in two forms — the 
 Day Industrial School, to which children are sent for 
 three years or less, and the full Industrial School, 
 where they are detained to the age of sixteen. 
 
 The origin of these schools was intelligent, even 
 humane ; and we may note in passing that they 
 have actually, in one case at least, been made of 
 real service to our children. 
 
 The first of the Day Schools, established at 
 Drury Lane, has been very successful in coping with 
 truancy, showing an average attendance, for example, 
 of 93 per cent, for the quarter ending June 1900. 
 Children once "licensed out" to attend the ordinary 
 elementary schools have been seldom recalled, and 
 " unexpectedly good results have been obtained in 
 the matter of ordinary education, industrial training, 
 and moral teaching." The reports of this school 
 were encouraging from the first, and have steadily 
 improved year by year. 
 
 Now at Drury Lane : — 
 
 (1.) The children are fed. 
 
 (2.) The children are not beaten. 
 
 (3.) The governor is a man who loves children 
 and understands them.
 
 56 CONSIDER THE CHILDREN 
 
 Mr Thomas Humphreys, who has reigned at 
 Drury Lane since its foundation, has been given 
 rules that permit, nay encourage, him to cane the 
 children, but he prefers to rule by the force of 
 example. His steady kindness and justice is repaid 
 by the devoted admiration and imitation of the 
 children. There is no finer example of what ex- 
 cellent discipline can be obtained without the rod 
 than this school in the heart of London, peopled by 
 the worst class of children. Yet it is a dreary 
 neighbourhood, an unlovely building. The force of 
 one man's character has made it the most brilliant 
 and most hopeful school in all England : for here, at 
 least, there are no criminals being manufactured and 
 passed on to the prison. Here, on the contrary, 
 some hundreds of children, who have taken the first 
 step towards breaking the law of the land, are turned 
 back into the paths of respectability, and given in 
 their hearts some ideal of love and humanity to 
 make them helpful members of the community. 
 
 Perhaps we cannot find another Thomas 
 Humphreys, but if only his methods were adopted 
 by the central authority the other Day Industrial 
 Schools (which promise fairly) might tread the same 
 upward path. Yet, at the foundation of the Bruns- 
 wick Road Industrial School, thirty-one members of 
 the Board voted in favour of birching, both private 
 and public, and only twelve against. Among those 
 to uphold the use of force were Canon Allan Edwards,
 
 THE MAKING OF THE CRIMINAL 57 
 
 Prebendary Eardley Wilmot, the Hon. E. Lyulph 
 Stanley (Vice-Chairman of the Board), Sir T. Brooke- 
 Hitching, the Earl of Shaftesbury, Viscount Morpeth, 
 the Rev. Stewart Headlam, the Hon. Frederick 
 Thesiger, and the Hon. Maude Laurence. 
 
 Resident Industrial Schools 
 
 The original Industrial Schools were designed, at 
 the instigation of Mary Carpenter and other humani- 
 tarians, for the express purpose of saving young 
 criminals from the contamination of prison. They 
 were first established in 1854 for the reception of 
 boys between seven and fourteen charged before a 
 magistrate as first offenders, or by reason of their 
 surroundings likely to become law-breakers. 
 
 Yet, by the irony of fate, these very institutions 
 have been turned into a fruitful source of contamina- 
 tion, and do actually conduce to the making of child- 
 criminals. 
 
 Dishonest and destitute children are here herded 
 together, frequently under unsanitary conditions ; 
 they are retained till the age of sixteen, and the 
 standard education is far below that of the ordinary 
 Board School. The industrial training itself does not 
 fit the child to become a useful, self-supporting 
 citizen. Now the child who is sent to a Truant or 
 Industrial School is generally the city child who.
 
 58 CONSIDER THE CHILDREN 
 
 through poverty, has no legitimate outlet for his 
 natural restlessness and boisterousness, and is there- 
 fore a nuisance to his neighbours. He has no wood 
 in which to play robbers, no village green on which 
 to play Tom Tiddler's ground, so his love of romance 
 and wonderment lead him to band himself with 
 others to attack an automatic sweet machine, or to 
 sleep out under a railway arch. And then a big 
 policeman seizes this atom of intelligence aged eight, 
 and he is taken to the police station and charged 
 before a magistrate and sent to an Industrial School 
 until he is sixteen. Eight years of unbroken 
 monotony and restraint and ugliness of surroundings ! 
 Iron rules crush all spirit of romance, daily drudgery 
 dulls all intelligence, sameness cures the spirit of 
 wonderment and inquiry. Lucky is the child if the 
 school is one which supplies sufficient food and 
 efficient clothing. Imagine what it is to a child to 
 have a lump of bread and a mug of thick coffee for 
 breakfast every morning for eight years without a 
 break. Imagine what it is to be clothed winter and 
 summer in stiff corduroy. Would the child not 
 rather go hungry some mornings with a chance of 
 an occasional red herring ? Would the child not 
 rather go ill shod at times than wear unbendable 
 hob-nail boots for ever ? 
 
 The most serious aspect of the matter, however, 
 arises from the imagined necessity of keeping up the 
 numbers in an Industrial School once established, of
 
 THE MAKING OF THE CRIMINAL 59 
 
 "making cases." Now this is a very serious state- 
 ment, but surely it is justified by the following facts : 
 In 1901 the London School Board put certain 
 " kid-catchers " on to night work to perambulate the 
 streets at night and take up children found sleeping 
 out or selling. Most of the children they took up were 
 in regular attendance at school, a large proportion of 
 them were under five years of age (the compulsory 
 school age), 90 per cent, of them were charged with 
 being "found wandering " or " sleeping out." Why 
 was it the work of the London School Board to thus 
 interfere with children who were not breaking their 
 laws and who were under school age ? 
 
 Of some 200 children thus charged before a 
 magistrate and familiarised with the police court 
 more than half were discharged. Surely that is 
 sufficient evidence of the attempt to "make cases." 
 
 Knowing the verminous rooms in which many of 
 the children live, I say that in the summer months 
 it is a hygienic virtue on the part of the children to 
 sleep out. I cannot see here any excuse for con- 
 demning a child to what is practically a prison until 
 the age of sixteen. It is a shocking sentence on any 
 child to subject it to confinement, monotony and herd- 
 ing with criminals, all through those years of child- 
 hood which ought to be so bright and happy and free. 
 
 Many of the members of the Board believe it 
 is better for the children, believe that they are 
 "rescuing" the children by thus twisting an Act to a
 
 6o CONSIDER THE CHILDREN 
 
 wrongful use, and by thus neglecting the Board's true 
 work of education and doing police duty. 
 
 But those who have any love for children or com- 
 prehension of child-life know that to them freedom 
 and affection are more than food and raiment, and 
 that the romantic and imaginative side of a child's 
 nature, the love of change, the need of petting, are 
 wanted for mental and moral development. At the 
 late annual meeting of the Bomilly Society two or 
 three speakers stated that it was the " institution " 
 child — set free at sixteen after years of restraint 
 and unused to face life — who became the prison 
 bird. 
 
 I quote, in conclusion, the most startling instance 
 of kidnapping yet on record : — 
 
 "In the Dublin Express for 12th July last 
 (1900) it was reported that two little girls in 
 Dublin were told by a Sister, in the garb of a nun, 
 that if they asked her for a penny she would give it 
 them to buy sweets. They naturally asked for the 
 penny, upon which the pious-looking Sister hurried 
 them both off to the magistrates' court, and had 
 them committed to a Nuns' Industrial School for 
 begging in the streets. The father, being a Pro- 
 testant, moved in the Queen's Bench for a writ to 
 quash the convictions, and to have the children 
 restored to him. Mr Justice Boyd granted what 
 was asked, and commented in strong terms upon 
 this system of kidnapping unwary little children to
 
 THE MAKING OF THE CRIMINAL 6i 
 
 fill Industrial Schools with inmates who should never 
 be there. It transpired that one of these Sisters 
 of Mercy had managed to kidnap no less than sixty 
 children per annum, while another agent had been 
 even more successful in this nefarious work." 
 
 Yet the highest honour of taking up a baby 
 aged one year and ten months for "wandering" 
 rests with the London School Board, when it had a 
 Nonconformist majority. She was sent to an 
 Industrial School, with inmates of varying ages up 
 to thirteen, admitted for "stealing" and "living in 
 a brothel " — there to remain till her sixteenth 
 year. 
 
 The appeal to physical force is even more pre- 
 valent in the Industrial Schools than elsewhere. 
 The children are constantly running away and 
 being always caned on their re-capture, naturally 
 repeat the offence. A case is on record of a little 
 chap, aged eleven, trying to let himself out of a 
 dormitory window, to meet his death by falling 
 on the asphalt court below. His school-fellows 
 dare not disturb the authorities, and his body was 
 found at seven o'clock the next morning. 
 
 They birch the girls also in some of the schools 
 — girls in their teens. And what modesty, decency 
 or self-respect can you expect from girls subjected 
 to such punishments ? And is it likely that poor 
 girls turned out on the world without a sense of 
 modesty and self-respect are likely to keep straight ?
 
 62 CONSIDER THE CHILDREN 
 
 Here are some of the punishments of one girls' 
 Industrial School : — 
 
 V. W., twelve, stealing ; tawse and twenty-four 
 hours' solitary. 
 
 F. G., fifteen, disobedience; six slaps, mouth 
 tied with towel. 
 
 A. B., eleven, stealing food ; twelve tawse, 
 labelled thief. 
 
 C. D., thirteen, disobedience; caned, and sent to 
 bed. 
 
 E. F., thirteen, disobedience ; whipped. 
 
 Under date 20/2/01 I find the lady visitor of a 
 girls' school in the North of England reporting : 
 " One or two of the girls are feeble-minded. Three 
 girls have been birched during the year, and none 
 of them have improved ; one received twelve strokes. 
 Two old girls, aged seventeen and nineteen years, 
 have been sent to a refuge." 
 
 Industrial Schools, in a word, have been wrested 
 from their proper use as an alternative to prison for 
 child-ofi"enders. But there are still some very good 
 Industrial Schools, there is still room for their 
 legitimate influence, if only Government would 
 take them over entirely and make them honestly 
 educational. 
 
 The following reforms are urgently needed : — 
 
 (1.) Age. — The tendency to send very young 
 children is increasing, babies of two, three and four 
 being constantly sent to Industrial Schools by the
 
 THE MAKING OF THE CRIMINAL 63 
 
 London School Board. A minimum age — preferably 
 six years — should be imperative. The late Act, 
 enabling Guardians to adopt children, covers the 
 cases where it is necessary to rescue the children 
 from their parents, and Guardians have learnt by 
 experience the evils of barrack schools, and can 
 board out the children. 
 
 (2.) Inspection. — There should be a more adequate 
 system of Government inspection and report. At 
 present the inspection is very faulty, particularly 
 from the domestic point of view, and the reports are 
 so colourless as to be no guide whatever to the local 
 authorities. Where a school is not quite satis- 
 factory, but the inspector's facts do not warrant his 
 printing that word in the blue book, a private 
 report should be sent to the local authorities, to 
 enable them to inquire more fully into the matter. 
 
 (3.) Classification. — There is at present no classi- 
 fication of children except according to the creed 
 they profess. Roman Catholics and Jews go to 
 special schools, but of course the majority of 
 children are entered as "Church of England," in 
 default of any other profession of faith. It is 
 obvious that a baby of three, with a bad mother, 
 should not be subjected to the same treatment as a 
 boy of thirteen who has taken to pilfering. The 
 many children now sent to the schools for destitu- 
 tion are brought into contact with the few criminal 
 children, and even if they do not personally de-
 
 64 CONSIDER THE CHILDREN 
 
 teriorate through the companionship, their whole 
 future is prejudiced by the association. 
 
 (4.) Treatment. — This varies enormously, not 
 according to the age or demerits of the child, but 
 according to the schools in which there are vacancies 
 at the time the child is committed, and the opinion 
 of the managers of the school to which the child 
 happens to be sent. Some of the schools partake of 
 the character of a "home," some of the character 
 of a "prison." In some of the schools there are no 
 women officers, and at several there are no women 
 on the committee. Canon Barnett, in his Memo- 
 randum to the Departmental Committee, said, "It 
 is terrible to think of children of six remaining 
 under such treatment for ten years, and deprived of 
 all womanly care for no fault but that of having a 
 careless parent." Certainly, more feminine control 
 might mean more reforming and refining influence 
 in many of these schools, and in time the treatment 
 might tend towards improving the children rather 
 than punishing them. 
 
 (5.) Training. — It is too frequently found that 
 the boys are kept at wood-chopping, and the girls at 
 washing, in order to make money for the institution. 
 Every child should be taught a trade ; the main 
 object of the training being to benefit the child, not 
 the institution. And every child should during part 
 of its training go out to school or classes, so as to 
 mix with other children and lose the institution
 
 THE MAKING OF THE CRIMINAL 65 
 
 taint and the sense of imprisonment, and become 
 more fitted for freedom. 
 
 (6.) Public Control. — Finally, no State official 
 should be empowered to send any child to an 
 institution that is not endowed and controlled by 
 the State, and private charity ought not to be 
 mixed up with the punishment of crime by the 
 State. Industrial Schools were an experiment, and 
 have proved their usefulness ; the element of charity 
 ought now to be eliminated, and they ought to be 
 brought entirely under the new Education Authority, 
 so that proper classification, inspection and training 
 can be secured to them. 
 
 A word in conclusion as to the well-recognised 
 gradations by which the child-criminal passes on to 
 the reformatory and the prison. 
 
 Mr John Henry King wrote to The Echo from 
 his own experience, and his deductions are un- 
 qualified : — 
 
 " I myself have been responsible for the train- 
 ing of some thousands of youths straight from the 
 Eldorados known as Industrial Schools, and I 
 unhesitatingly assert that 95 per cent, of those 
 who have passed through my hands have been 
 absolutely worthless, the monotony of mere institu- 
 tions having emasculated their individuality and 
 created a set of beings of difi'erent growth to their 
 fellow-creatures. The same may be said of the 
 girls, 7 in 10 of those who entered a certain home
 
 66 CONSIDER THE CHILDREN 
 
 for fallen women in 1898 had formerly been in 
 Industrial Schools." 
 
 Such melancholy results are due in part, it 
 should be noted, moreover, to the shocking in- 
 efficiency of the actual teaching in these schools, 
 and in part to the low wages at which the children 
 are placed on leaving. 
 
 Lads of fifteen and sixteen are "supplied" to 
 farmers at £4 a year, and domestic servants at £5, 
 or sometimes at Is. a week pocket-money and all 
 found. In November 1900 it is reported that a 
 " Rev. Father " secures a page-boy for 6d. a week ; 
 in October 1899 a teacher secures a house-boy for 
 £2, 10s. a year; a "Canon" secures a page for £3 
 a year. 
 
 Such wages are a premium on theft, and form 
 but the last link in the vicious chain by which 
 the infant, for some outburst of childish mischief, 
 is led remorselessly by a paternal government 
 through the Truant and Industrial Schools to the 
 altitude of the hardened gaol-bird.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE ATTITUDE OF THE TEACHER 
 
 TO A LITTLE CHILD 
 
 " O thou bright thing, fresh from the hand of God ! 
 The motions of thy dancing limbs are swayed 
 By the unceasing music of thy being ! 
 Nearer I seem to God when looking on thee. 
 'Tis ages since He made His youngest star, 
 His hand was on thee as 'twere yesterday, 
 Thou later Revelation ! Silver Stream, 
 Breaking with laughter from the lake divine 
 Whence all things flow ! O bright and singing babe ! 
 What wilt thou be hereafter?" — Alexander Smith. 
 
 The attitude of the average teacher towards the 
 child is one of antagonism and superior force. The 
 theory commonly acted on is that the Almighty 
 has filled the children with instincts which it is the 
 duty of the pedagogue to drive out with blows. 
 No doubt this aggressive attitude arises largely from 
 the narrow curriculum and confined surroundings 
 of the training college. 
 
 The Training of Teachers 
 
 The vast majority of the teachers enter the 
 
 67
 
 68 CONSIDER THE CHILDREN 
 
 profession straight from an elementary school at 
 the age of fourteen ; and it is significant that the 
 medical officer of the London School Board had to 
 print a circular asking these candidates to clean 
 themselves before coming up for examination. They 
 are scholars in Board and Voluntary Schools, pupil 
 teachers in these same schools, and finally teachers 
 in these same schools. They have no ideas beyond 
 these schools, and are naturally crusted with con- 
 servativism and the belief that what was good 
 enough for them is good enough for the child of 
 to-day. After four years as pupil teachers, they 
 sit for the Queen's Scholarship examination, and 
 may be recognised as assistant teachers. Those who 
 pass well can go on into a training college. But 
 the "colleges" are solely for the teachers, and have 
 the same stale atmosphere, the same dogmas, the 
 same class of students, the same system and style 
 of thought. The inmates never have a chance of 
 getting to know anything better than the ordinary 
 Board School and the ordinary elementary teacher, 
 and their ideals (if they can be called "ideals!") 
 are pitifully narrow and inhuman. 
 
 They are frequently ill-fed, while out of the 
 twenty-four hours eight are devoted to sleep, four 
 and a quarter are occupied in dressing, prayers and 
 meals, ten and a half are given to study, and one 
 and a quarter to exercise. Students thus acquire a 
 great deal of information which tends to fill them
 
 THE ATTITUDE OF THE TEACHER 69 
 
 with conceit, but their minds are closed to new 
 thoughts and ideas. They become languid or 
 anaemic, and, knowing nothing of the joy of life, 
 they regard the listless and quiet child as a model. 
 Their one idea of teaching is to fill the heads of 
 the children with facts or words. 
 
 And in the rush of training college there is but 
 little time for the formation of character. Life is 
 all class and chatter, rubbing shoulders with 
 others of the same level and the same outlook. 
 Even the bedrooms are usually double, or else 
 divided into cubicles. There is no time or place 
 for thought, nothing but the struggle for certifi- 
 cates. " Solitude, in the sense of being frequently 
 alone, is necessary for the formation of any depth 
 of character," says J. S. Mill. But for these young 
 men and women, just through the routine of the 
 large classes in an elementary school in a noisy 
 town, and passed on to a training college, 
 
 *' What shelter to grow ripe is theirs ? 
 What leisure to grow wise ? " 
 
 The teachers will never be really efficient till 
 their special colleges are abolished and they are 
 sent to the universities to mix with men and 
 women of other training and ambitions than their 
 own. They should travel too, and learn the im- 
 portance of character and its divine element in 
 children.
 
 ^o CONSIDER THE CHILDREN 
 
 Physiology for Teachers 
 
 It is impossible to divorce the physical from the 
 mental and moral sides of education, and every 
 teacher ought to go through a thorough course in 
 physiology and child-study. He should be examined 
 not only in "drill" and "exercises," but also in 
 a knowledge of games. We must first improve 
 the physique of our teachers and try to instil into 
 them a less morbid and narrow view of life. That 
 half-deaf and half-blind children are constantly 
 treated as stupid or careless ; that children with 
 mumps and even with scarlet fever have attended 
 school all through their illness is sufficient evidence 
 of how little attention the teachers pay to the 
 physical state of the child into whom they are 
 trying to cram information about the "capes of 
 Great Britain." That the child has never seen 
 such "capes," not even in pictures, and associates 
 " Cape Wrath " with its mother's black mantle, 
 never occurs to the pedagogue. The teacher should 
 be half a physician — the preventive half, in no 
 way "treating" the child or recommending medi- 
 cines, but quick to discover and note every abnor- 
 mality, ready to give rest to the mind when the 
 body is tired, careful to soothe the nervous and 
 stimulate the sluggish. A knowledge of hockey 
 and skipping for girls' teachers, of " Looby Loo "
 
 THE ATTITUDE OF THE TEACHER 71 
 
 and ** Bean Bags " for infants' teachers, and of 
 cricket and rounders for boys' teachers, should 
 count before any number of bits of parchment. 
 
 The syllabus of practical hygiene of the Sanitary 
 Institute, arranged specially for teachers, includes 
 the following : — 
 
 "Hygienic instruction must be understood as 
 consisting in establishing intelligent interest in 
 children, as to the reason of all cleanly habits with 
 regard to the skin (this can best be done when in 
 the act of washing them), and the danger of 
 draughts, etc. Children will take an inquiring 
 interest, moreover, in all hygienic appliances of 
 home and school, which will lead to them taking 
 care of such things as drinking-water, cisterns, 
 stoves, traps, gulleys, water-closets, drain-pipes 
 and manholes. The general activities of a child's 
 mind may be made use of to secure the proper 
 employment of such fittings by the child himself, 
 and his natural assertiveness will pass the know- 
 ledge on, and see it put into practice in homes and 
 schools by younger children. 
 
 " The efforts of home and school should be 
 directed towards maintaining perfect health in the 
 individual. An attitude expectant of perfection in 
 health and a slight scorn for preventable declen- 
 sions would do much to foster habits conducive to 
 good health. 
 
 "The teacher should recognise the early symp-
 
 72 CONSIDER THE CHILDREN 
 
 toms of the diseases to which children are most 
 subject, and be competent to take suitable precau- 
 tions against infection. He should notice at once 
 if any child is suffering from over-pressure and 
 understand the remedies. He should appreciate 
 the true value of physical exercises, which should 
 result in giving aim to restlessness, in developing 
 each part and function of the body, in correcting 
 inherited tendencies." 
 
 Intellisrent interest in the children's bodies would 
 do much for national physique. This is possible 
 only to teachers who can see the importance of 
 health to themselves, and are prepared to live under 
 the hygienic conditions which it is part of their 
 duty to recommend. 
 
 The National Union of Teachers 
 
 That labour should organise against capital, that 
 man should unite against man, may seem deplorable 
 necessities of the age of competition ; but is there 
 any necessity for men and women teachers to 
 organise against the little child ? Apparently, one 
 of the chief objects of the National Union of 
 Teachers is to protect the flagellomaniac and the 
 unfit teacher at the expense of the child, and to 
 foster the tone of antagonism between master and 
 pupil. The Union sends its paid representatives
 
 THE ATTITUDE OF THE TEACHER 73 
 
 to sit in the House of Commons and on Educational 
 Authorities, it supplies legal aid to those who assault 
 children, and the style of its official paper may be 
 gathered from the following quotation : — 
 
 " We have before this congratulated London 
 Magistrates upon the exceedingly common - sense 
 view they have taken of complaints that have been 
 brought to them by fond parents respecting the 
 hand of correction and the immaculate persons of 
 their hopefuls. Last Saturday one of the said fond 
 parents," etc. 
 
 The Attitude of the Teacher 
 
 We see thus the many forces at work (which 
 it is our manifest duty to counteract) that en- 
 courage the teacher to look upon the child as a 
 creature of diabolic origin, whose natural instincts 
 and impulses he must eradicate by blows and 
 punishments. 
 
 He sets forth to ''discipline" the children into 
 subjection and through standards, to impose his 
 own will upon them without reason or explanation. 
 He rears slaves instead of citizens, mechanisms not 
 men. How different would be the methods of an 
 ideal teacher. 
 
 "It was not without reason," says Tolstoi, "that 
 Jesus praised little children, saying that theirs was
 
 74 CONSIDER THE CHILDREN 
 
 the kingdom of Heaven, that the things concealed 
 from the wise and prudent are revealed to them. 
 We know this ourselves : if there were no children, 
 if they ceased to be born, no hope of the kingdom 
 of God on earth would remain. Only in them 
 have we hope. We are already soiled, and it is 
 difficult to purify ourselves ; but here, with every 
 generation, in every family, are new, innocent, pure 
 souls, which may remain such. Dim and dirty is 
 the river, but many pure streamlets flow into it, 
 and thus there is hope that the water will be 
 cleansed." 
 
 In fact children cannot be taught without love. 
 If a man has in him no zeal for humanity, no spirit 
 of brotherhood, let him confine his touch to wood 
 and stone, and be a carpenter or a mason. It is 
 a spiritual sin to teach where there is no sympa- 
 thetic reverence for childhood, no love for the 
 little ones to inspire the heart. So comes a natural 
 growing together in grace of mind and body and 
 soul, a natural bond of sympathy and love. 
 Nothing is more beautiful than to go into one of 
 the many class-rooms where a true teacher reigns 
 and see the child-souls blossoming like flowers in 
 the sun. The helpful kindness and consideration 
 towards one another ; the child's flush at the 
 teacher's quiet word of approval, the child's dis- 
 tress if the teacher's head is averted in displeasure. 
 The earnest interest of all in the lesson ; the shy
 
 THE ATTITUDE OF THE TEACHER 75 
 
 homage of the penny bunch of violets put silently 
 on the teacher's desk. In many parts of our big 
 towns the minister and the teacher are the only 
 examples of the higher life before the children. 
 The minister is for Sundays, but the teacher for 
 the week days, and a high standard may surely 
 be asked of those who venture to take upon them- 
 selves the training of youth. To teach the laws 
 of love and not of violence ; to teach co-operation 
 and not competition ; to teach the brotherhood of 
 all mankind is work which makes life worth living. 
 Blessed is he who has found such work. 
 
 To MAKE Bad Children Good 
 
 For those teachers who find children " naughty," 
 there is an infallible recipe foreshadowed in the 
 " Revised Instructions " which the Board of Educa- 
 tion issued in 1901 : — 
 
 " The most effective agent for maintaining good 
 discipline is the teacher's own example. Children 
 readily recognise that their teachers are anxious 
 to help them, patient, but yet determined to be 
 obeyed. They notice also such details in their 
 conduct as punctuality, order, neatness, gentle 
 speech, and imitate what they see and hear. They 
 observe little defects of conduct more keenly still, 
 and with disastrous effect. It is on this account,
 
 76 CONSIDER THE CHILDREN 
 
 therefore, that great stress is laid on matters that 
 appear to be unimportant. The punctual, methodi- 
 cal performance of all the duties of the day, how- 
 ever trifling they may seem, is the result of good 
 habits on the part of the teacher and the foundation 
 of good habits in the scholars. If discipline were 
 perfectly efficient, punishment would be unknown, 
 for the result of efficient discipline is to engender 
 the good habits which render punishment unneces- 
 sary." 
 
 In one word, if we wish children to be good 
 we have only to be good ourselves.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE RELIGIOUS WRANGLE 
 
 " Speak truly, and each word of thine 
 Shall be a faithful seed ; 
 Live truly, and thy life shall be 
 A great and noble creed." — Bonar. 
 
 There are four main reasons why the teaching in 
 the public elementary schools should be wholly 
 secular : — 
 
 (1.) To avoid hypocrisy, and the evil example of 
 having teachers teach what they and we and the 
 children do not believe. 
 
 (2.) To avoid the religious squabbles at elections 
 and on committees, which leave no time or temper 
 for the consideration of the children's interests. 
 
 (3.) Because the State already supports a body 
 of clergy and buildings for the teaching of the State 
 religion. 
 
 (4.) Because citizens who do not believe in the 
 religion taught in the schools have to pay the educa- 
 tion rate. 
 
 Firstly. It requires little argument to show that 
 
 77
 
 78 CONSIDER THE CHILDREN 
 
 the so-called religious teaching now in vogue, designed 
 as it is to satisfy diverse churches, cannot be given 
 without hypocrisy. The individual teacher must 
 believe more or less. He must colour the lesson 
 with his own convictions or go through it without 
 the faith and the enthusiasm which alone can make 
 it an element of good. The amount of hypocrisy 
 engendered in children who may be taught the same 
 series of Bible lessons in one standard by a Baptist, 
 in the next by an Agnostic, in the next by a Roman 
 Catholic, and in the next by a Plymouth Brother, is 
 productive of serious harm. They must come to 
 regard religion as words to be committed to memory, 
 with no relation to daily life. They cannot dis- 
 tinguish between " religious truths " or parables, 
 ** social conventions," "business methods" and "tell- 
 ing the truth." School-life should be concerned 
 with matters outside the realm of controversy. 
 
 Secondly. The disgraceful and unchristian wrang- 
 ling provoked by religious questions at elections, on 
 boards or committees, and in political circles, is in 
 itself a melancholy circumstance ; but the neglect 
 which it causes of the truly educational issues at 
 stake cannot be estimated. Sectaries of every 
 complexion are equally at fault. Elections turn on 
 creeds and, since few committees are in such matters 
 unanimous, the old issues are fought out again and 
 again by the actual executive to the patent injury 
 of other business. No compromise can be permanent,
 
 THE RELIGIOUS WRANGLE 79 
 
 and the burden must sooner or later be taken from 
 the shoulders of the educational authority. 
 
 Tliirdly. We have already a State-supported body 
 of men presumably called to the teaching of a State 
 religion, and trained to this office. These men have 
 reasons for the faith that is in them, have firm con- 
 victions with regard to the creed they profess, and 
 there would surely be less chance of degrading the 
 spiritual, of keeping the supernatural apart from the 
 scientific, if religious teaching were given in con- 
 nection with the Church and not with the school. 
 
 Fourthly. For very many years Agnostics and 
 others have had to pay an education rate for schools 
 which instructed children in what they believed to be 
 gross superstition. The Agnostic is a very negative 
 person as a rule, but Agnosticism is steadily on the 
 increase, and the injustice of the position is being 
 made manifest by sectarians. A man's religion is a 
 question for his own heart ; it is not possible for it 
 ever to be a satisfactory State subject, yet the grants 
 are constantly increased to the denominational 
 schools. 
 
 By no means the least serious aspect of this matter 
 is the spiritual influence lost to the child through 
 the clash of creeds. The mixture of fairy tales with 
 Bible stories, recommended by ethical societies, will 
 not carry us a step further. It has been well said 
 we should "make our religion practical by watching 
 the child at work and at play, by helping him to
 
 8o CONSIDER THE CHILDREN 
 
 live his little life and fight his little battles. Don't 
 let him ' profess ' anything. Remember, he is a 
 little child, and not a theologian." 
 
 What we should teach the child above all is that 
 truth and honesty and kindliness are part of every 
 lesson, are needed every hour. We do not want the 
 child to divorce the question of right and wrong 
 from any of its work or play : we want it to "live 
 the life," and not to look upon all higher ideals as a 
 " Scripture lesson " or a " moral lesson," learnt once 
 a day and forgotten. All work is religious if 
 directed aright, all lessons are ethical if properly 
 taught. 
 
 And, above all, if we want to become a nation of 
 upright, healthy, honest men and women, we must 
 more strenuously " consider the children — how they 
 grow." Remember what Mr W. G. Wells says : — 
 
 " Come to think, it is all the Child. The future 
 is the Child. The Future. What are we— any of 
 us — but servants or traitors to that ? " 
 
 FINIS 
 
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