Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/658

640 those who would do them a service, as if, unaccustomed to kindly treatment, they felt these advances only concealed new projects for their discomfiture. A supply of new clothes and a few comfortable and palatable meals do much, it has been found, to dispel this feeling, and the round of interesting tasks set before them, in which the hands as well as the mind are called into action, has a still more powerful effect in awakening the better instincts of childhood.

The experience of the Workingman's School tends to verify the conclusion of an eminent writer, that the theorem relative to the moral and intellectual debasement of societies would, when pushed too far, have consequences even more inadmissible than that relative to their physical debasement, and that the principle of mental and moral debasement is by no means so much to be relied upon as the law of physical heredity.

This conclusion has not been reached by a course of reasoning but by actual observation, and though, of course, it does not go far enough to be conclusive, furnishes, nevertheless, valuable data; data which may yet do much toward refuting, at least in part, the arguments which have from time to time been put forward by learned reasoners.

The children of what might be called professional mendicants have shown, when their intellects were polished up and dusted off, as we might say, not a whit less intelligence nor more uncanny characteristics than their fellows; the children of intelligent workingmen; and he would be a bold man who, after observing the present condition of these children, should predict that, when cast loose with an artisan's education, both practical and theoretical, they will fall back upon the charitable institutions instead of earning their own bread and butter; and he would be no less bold who should prophesy an ultimate career of crime for those children who were gathered, while very young, from the haunts of the criminal and the outcast.

This is no scheme of indiscriminate charity in which those who are the most importunate get the most relief, nor is it an institution where the children of the well-to-do may get an artisan's education gratis. There always has been plenty of encouragement for the workers in the great human hive, but here is a project to stimulate those who might not unreasonably be expected, on account of their surroundings, to be the drones and the criminals of the future, into honest activity, and enable them to obtain by their own industry more wealth or comfort than could be hoped for in a career of crime or indolence.