Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/86

76 time for reading or other means of rescue from mental torpor, are among the causes of loss of mental balance.

Dr. Elisha Harris, Corresponding Secretary of the Prison Association of New York, who has made a special study of the criminal classes, says that habitual criminals spring almost exclusively from degenerating stock. Thus, physiological unsoundness is moral decay. The inference is obvious, and the remedy for criminality from this source stares us in the face. Hygienic methods of living, which, with judicious medical precautions and care, tend toward the prevention of physical degeneration, will tend in an equal ratio to lessen the number of candidates for criminal careers.

The correctional discipline which is sought after (if not found) in our reformatories and prisons, is not only vastly more expensive, but far less satisfactory, than would be the application of preventive measures.

Professor Ferris, in a paper on the hygiene of schools, says: "I can not recall ever having visited a room occupied by forty or fifty pupils that could be said to be properly ventilated; and, under the influence of impure air, study is irksome and good behavior difficult." Thus in our very schools the seeds of physical deterioration and moral degeneracy are sown in the tender bodies and unresisting minds of these criminals of the future, condemned beforehand—foreordained by their unhealthful, and hence immoral, surroundings to careers of pauperism and crime. For their future detention and safe-keeping, living mausoleums are built and officered and maintained at an expense in money but grudgingly supplied for properly constructed school-houses, and at a human sacrifice which I will not attempt to estimate. The preventive method of dealing with immorality, on the other hand, anticipates the development of the potential offender by effecting ameliorations in public and individual health and by methods of education which include moral training; thus removing many of the predisposing causes of immorality—the development of sound minds in sound bodies yielding the necessary product of well-balanced lives.

Men do not, as a rule, become moral by intuition (although the moral genius, like the musical prodigy, is not unknown), but by patient organization of the moral faculties. The phenomena of vice and crime take place, not from any aberration of the laws of Nature, but in exact accordance with them, since educational neglects and unsanitary conditions, with their resulting diseases, lead to imperfect mental development or to the perversion of normal mental qualities. The development of moral activities must be recognized as dependent on the same principles as that of other activities, and the human being must be trained in morals as he is trained in athletics, in music, and in the mechanic or other arts. "By dint of forging, one becomes a blacksmith," says the French proverb; while all the talk of all the