Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 80.djvu/475

Rh uniform; but the penalty for departure from the right line of conduct is so terrible, so inflexible, as to fasten upon him—if not naturally straight—a mechanical equivalent for straightness that, become habit, tends to render him immune to temptation. Some graduates have gone fatally wrong; but the percentage of such is amazingly small.

Then there is the Naval Academy at Annapolis, whose methods are virtually identical with those of West Point. Both these institutions ought to be visited and much time spent in acquiring the proper point of view. The post-graduate schools of the army should also have some attention paid to them; but more influential will be found the schools for molding the man-in-the-ranks, one of which is at Fort Slocum on Davids Island, near New Rochelle. Still more interesting and instructive will be the training-schools for naval apprentices. Of these there are four, one at Newport, R. I., another at San Francisco, and still others at Norfolk, Va., and at Lake Bluff, near Chicago, while the school for the revenue cutter service, now located at Arundle Cove, Maryland, but to be removed to New London, Conn., will furnish material for study. The navy department has printed an instructive booklet: "The Training of a Man-O'Warsman," well worth attentive consideration.

When the methods of all these, as well as many private institutions, have been carefully examined, and their force and meaning in each particular case been thoroughly digested, then will come the difficult task of application, of deciding as to what shall be included and what avoided in a school for New York's ten thousand. As to the location of the school, undoubtedly it ought to be so situated as to be quite separate and apart from civilian pressure, at least from civilian contamination. At the same time no attempt should be made to effect isolation or undue exclusiveness; on the contrary, proper provision should be made for visitors, relatives of the police cadets and others, and these should be invited to rather than prohibited from acquiring full knowledge of the processes of the institution. The locality selected ought to be within convenient distance from the city, with the view of affording easy access and opportunity for the graduating class (such as is now given during the six months probationary period) of accompanying regular patrolmen on certain tours to gain a practical, first-hand knowledge of actual duty. As a site none could be more suitable than either Wards or Randalls Island, though it is not probable that either—so admirably fulfilling some of the city's greatest needs, by the Manhattan State Hospital on the former and the department of public charities in the latter—could be made available. If the rapid growth of the city were not likely to render Pelham Park unsuitable in the near future, that site could be made to serve the uses of the proposed academy. But this consideration can safely "await the event"; if once the founding of