Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/656

638 As might be expected, children are continually being received into the school who are unclean and accustomed to uncleanly habits. These are washed and taught to keep themselves clean. Those come, too, into whose young lives no spark of happiness has ever entered, who are sad and do not smile, and it requires no little skill to induce them to forget their childish woes, and take part in the games and occupations of their comrades.

But it is in dealing with character in its various phases that the managers would seem to have scored the most marked success.

There are those who, like Henry George, believe that humanity is much the same; that a cruel instinct may be traced to a childhood which no spark of kindly solicitude ever served to brighten, and sullenness and obstinacy to a novitiate of injustice and ill-treatment. Others there are who insist that, as the father, so is the child, and these may be set down as agreeing with Hesiod, who distributed mankind into three orders: The first, he says, belongs to him who can by his own powers discern what is right and fit, and penetrate to the remoter motives of action; the second belongs to him that is willing to hear instruction and can perceive right and wrong when they are shown him by another; but he who has neither acuteness nor docility, who can neither find the way by himself, nor will be led by others, is a wretch without use or value.

"If any one denies," says Herbert Spencer, "that children bear likenesses to their progenitors in character and capacity, if he holds that those whose parents and grandparents were habitual criminals, have tendencies as good as those whose parents and grandparents were industrious and upright, he may consistently hold that it matters not from what families in a society the successive generations descend. He may think it just as well if the most active, and capable, and prudent, and conscientious people die without issue, while many children are left by the reckless and dishonest. But whoever does not espouse so insane a proposition must admit that social arrangements which retard the multiplication of the mentally-best and facilitate the multiplication of the mentally-worst must be extremely injurious."

Now, with no desire to affirm the proposition of the one, nor to point out the fallacy of the other, let us see what has been the experience of the managers of the Workingman's School in this regard; let us see how much heredity of temperament and inclination has there been exhibited by juvenile humanity while under treatment.

As may readily be seen, if only the promising children could be permitted to enjoy the benefits of the school, and the vicious and stupid children were excluded, the work of the projectors, if it did not fail utterly, would, at least, be greatly restricted in its scope, and wanting in that particular attribute whence the most important results were looked for.

It is, perhaps, not immediately obvious how it can affect a scheme