Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/516

512 Since the removal of his last physical handicap I have examined him again and he is to-day about normal in his mental ability, having apparently advanced almost two years in type of intellectual activity in less than a year, largely because relieved of these physical drains on his vitality. The physical defects, we may say, are to-day practically corrected and he is quite a healthy boy. But the result of all these past handicaps has been serious for Harold and he has carried over to his present age of twelve years the childish propensities and childish lack of control which he acquired during those long years of childish mental existence, while he was associating with boys much younger than himself and amusing himself almost like a child in the kindergarten. One of these childish impulses, while it was little more than mischievous, has become so firmly established that society must be protected from the boy until he can learn to correct it and control himself. His particular passion is for horses. When the whim strikes him to take a ride, all of the restraints which his parents, his teachers, the probation officers, the court and a term at the detention home are able to pile up for him have apparently so little effect that he will not think twice before driving off the nearest and most convenient horse in his vicinity. Longer training at the detention home, which all desired, he has made impossible by running away almost as quickly as he is taken there, another manifestation of his childish lack of control. Five times he has come to his home in Minneapolis, 15 miles away, in spite of the warning that boys were sent to the State Training School for this. On the last of these visits at home he went to a neighbor's barn, harnessed up the horse and drove off with another boy for an evening's ride. After this lark they returned the animal unharmed to the stable. Having repeatedly tried and finally exhausted the entire list of milder forms of restraint, it was necessary for the good of the boy and the protection of delivery wagons to see what the more severe discipline of some months of life at the State Training School would do to break up this childish habit which has been carried over into youth, to teach the boy the self-control that must belong to young men and which he would probably have normally attained had he not been handicapped by the ill health which kept him for years in the stage of early childhood.

Harold was trained under favorable conditions at home and in school. There is an excellent prospect for him to turn out well; but how much more difficult is the problem when the home is a nest of filth and corruption, as it sometimes is. The probation officers have discovered homes of delinquents where literally the pigs are brought up in the parlor; others where children do not know what it is to sit down to a table for their meals, but walk about helping themselves to the family bowl of mush or loaf of bread. Worse than this are the examples of theft and vileness set by others in the house or