Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene Part 3

Leg exercise has perhaps a higher value than that of any other part. Man is by definition an upright being, but only after a long apprentices.h.i.+p.[16] Thus the hand was freed from the necessity of locomotion and made the servant of the mind. Locomotion overcomes the tendency to sedentary habits in modern schools and life, and helps the mind to helpful action, so that a peripatetic philosophy is more normal than that of the easy chair and the study lamp. Hill-climbing is unexcelled as a stimulus at once of heart, lungs, and blood. If Hippocrates is right, inspiration is possible only on a mountain-top. Walking, running, dancing, skating, coasting are also alterative and regulative of s.e.x, and there is a deep and close though not yet fully explained reciprocity between the two. Arm work is relatively too prominent a feature in gymnasia. Those who lead excessively sedentary lives are p.r.o.ne to be turbulent and extreme in both pa.s.sion and opinion, as witness the oft-adduced revolutionary disposition of cobblers.

The play problem is now fairly open and is vast in its relation to many other things. Roof playgrounds, recreation piers, schoolyards and even school-buildings, open before and after school hours; excursions and outings of many kinds and with many purposes, which seem to distinctly augment growth; occupation during the long vacation when, beginning with spring, most juvenile crime is committed; theatricals, which according to some police testimony lessen the number of juvenile delinquents; boys' clubs with more or less self-government of the George Junior Republic and other types, treated in another chapter; nature-study; the distinctly different needs and propensities of both good and evil in different nationalities; the advantages of playground fences and exclusion, their disciplinary worth, and their value as resting places; the liability that "the boy without a playground will become the father without a job"; the relation of play and its slow transition to manual and industrial education at the savage age when a boy abhors all regular occupation; the necessity of exciting interest, not by what is done for boys, but by what they do; the adjustment of play to s.e.x; the determination of the proper average age of maximal zest in and good from sandbox, ring-toss, bean-bag, shuffle-board, peg top, charity, funeral play, prisoner's base, hill-dill; the value and right use of apparatus, and of rabbits, pigeons, bees, and a small menagerie in the playground; tan-bark, clay, the proper alternation of excessive freedom, that often turns boys stale through the summer, with regulated activities; the disciplined "work of play" and sedentary games; the value of the washboard rubbing and of the hand and knee exercise of scrubbing, which a late writer would restore for all girls with clever and Greek-named play apparatus; as well as digging, shoveling, tamping, pick-chopping, and hod-carrying exercises in the form of games for boys; the relations of women's clubs, parents' clubs, citizens' leagues and unions, etc., to all this work-such are the practical problems.

The playground movement encounters its chief obstacles in the most crowded and slum districts, where its greatest value and success was expected for boys in the early teens, who without supervision are p.r.o.ne to commit abuses upon property and upon younger children,[17] and are so disorderly as to make the place a nuisance, and who resent the "fathering" of the police, without, at least, the minimum control of a system of permits and exclusions. If hoodlums play at all, they become infatuated with baseball and football, especially punting; they do not take kindly to the soft large ball of the Hall House or the Civic League, and prefer at first scrub games with individual self-exhibition to organized teams. Lee sees the "arboreal instincts of our progenitors" in the very strong propensity of boys from ten to fourteen to climb in any form; to use traveling rings, generally occupied constantly to their fullest extent; to jump from steps and catch a swinging trapeze; to go up a ladder and slide down poles; to use horizontal and parallel bars. The city boy has plenty of daring at this age, but does not know what he can do and needs more supervision than the country youth. The young tough is commonly present, and though admired and copied by younger boys, it is, perhaps, as often for his heroic as for his bad traits.

Dr. Sargent and others have well pointed out that athletics afford a wealth of new and profitable topics for discussion and enthusiasm which helps against the triviality and mental vacuity into which the intercourse of students is p.r.o.ne to lapse. It prompts to discussion of diet and regimen. It gives a new standard of honor. For a member of a team to break training would bring reprobation and ostracism, for he is set apart to win fame for his cla.s.s or college. It supplies a splendid motive against all errors and vices that weaken or corrupt the body. It is a wholesome vent for the reckless courage that would otherwise go to disorder or riotous excess. It supplies new and advantageous topics for compositions and for terse, vigorous, and idiomatic theme-writing, is a great aid to discipline, teaches respect for deeds rather than words or promises, lays instructors under the necessity of being more interesting, that their work be not jejune or dull by contrast; again the business side of managing great contests has been an admirable school for training young men to conduct great and difficult financial operations, sometimes involving $100,000 or more, and has thus prepared some for successful careers. It furnishes now the closest of all links between high school and college, reduces the number of those physically unfit for college, and should give education generally a more real and vigorous ideal. Its obvious dangers are distraction from study and overestimation of the value of victory, especially in the artificial glamours which the press and the popular furor give to great games; unsportsmanlike secret tricks and methods, over-emphasis of combative and too stalwart impulses, and a disposition to carry things by storm, by rush-line tactics; friction with faculties, and censure or neglect of instructors who take unpopular sides on hot questions; action toward license after games, spasmodic excitement culminating in excessive strain for body and mind, with alternations of reaction; "beefiness"; overdevelopment of the physical side of life, and, in some cases, premature features of senility in later life, undergrowth of the accessory motor parts and powers, and erethic diathesis that makes steady and continued mental toil seem monotonous, dull, and boresome.

The propensity to codify sports, to standardize the weight and size of their implements, and to reduce them to what Spencer calls regimentation, is a outcrop of uniformitarianism that works against that individuation which is one of the chief advantages of free play. This, to be sure, has developed old-fas.h.i.+oned rounders to modern baseball, and this is well, but it is seen in the elaborate Draconian laws, diplomacy, judicial and legislative procedures, concerning "eligibility, transfer, and even sale of players." In some games international conformity is gravely discussed. Even where there is no tyranny and oppression, good form is steadily hampering nature and the free play of personality. Togs and targets, b.a.l.l.s and bats, rackets and oars are graded or numbered, weighed, and measured, and every emergency is legislated on and judged by an autocratic martinet, jealous of every prerogative and conscious of his dignity. All this separates games from the majority and makes for specialism and professionalism. Not only this, but men are coming to be sized up for hereditary fitness in each point and for each sport. Runners, sprinters, and jumpers,[18] we are told, on the basis of many careful measurements, must be tall, with slender bodies, narrow but deep chests, longer legs than the average for their height, the lower leg being especially long, with small calf, ankle, and feet, small arms, narrow hips, with great power of thoracic inflation, and thighs of small girth. Every player must be studied by trainers for ever finer individual adjustments. His dosage of work must be kept well within the limits of his vitality, and be carefully adjusted to his recuperative power. His personal nascent periods must be noted, and initial embarra.s.sment carefully weeded out.

The field of play is as wide as life and its varieties far outnumber those of industries and occupations in the census. Plays and games differ in seasons, s.e.x, and age. McGhee[19] has shown on the basis of some 8,000 children, that running plays are pretty constant for boys from six to seventeen, but that girls are always far behind boys and run steadily less from eight to eighteen. In games of choice, boys showed a slight rise at sixteen and seventeen, and girls a rapid increase at eleven and a still more rapid one after sixteen. In games of imitation girls excel and show a marked, as boys do a slight, p.u.b.escent fall. In those games involving rivalry boys at first greatly excel girls, but are overtaken by the latter in the eighteenth year, both showing marked p.u.b.escent increment. Girls have the largest number of plays and specialise on a few less than boys, and most of these plays are of the unorganized kinds. Johnson[20] selected from a far larger number 440 plays and games and arranged the best of them in a course by school grades, from the first to the eighth, inclusive, and also according to their educational value as teaching observation, reading and spelling, language, arithmetic, geography, history, and biography, physical training, and specifically as training legs, hand, arm, back, waist, abdominal muscles, chest, etc. Most of our best games are very old and, Johnson thinks, have deteriorated. But children are imitative and not inventive in their games, and easily learn new ones. Since the Berlin Play Congress in 1894 the sentiment has grown that these are of national importance and are preferable to gymnastics both for soul and body. Hence we have play-schools, teachers, yards, and courses, both for their own value and also to turn on the play impulse to aid in the drudgery of school work. Several have thought that a well-rounded, liberal education could be given by plays and games alone on the principle that there is no profit where there is no pleasure or true euphoria.

Play is motor poetry. Too early distinction between play and work should not be taught. Education perhaps should really begin with directing childish sports aright. Froebel thought it the purest and most spiritual activity of childhood, the germinal leaves of all later life. Schooling that lacks recreation favors dulness, for play makes the mind alert and its joy helps all anabolic activities. Says Brinton, "the measure of value of work is the amount of play there is in it, and the measure of value of play is the amount of work there is in it." Johnson adds that "it is doubtful if a great man ever accomplished his life work without having reached a play interest in it." Sully[21] deplores the increase of "agolasts" or "non-laughers" in our times in merry old England[22] every one played games; and laughter, their natural accompaniment, abounded. Queen Elizabeth's maids of honor played tag with hilarity, but the spirit of play with full abandon seems taking its departure from our overworked, serious, and tons, age. To requote Stevenson with variation, as laborari, [To labor] so ludere, et joculari orare sunt. [To play and to jest are to pray] Laughter itself, as Kuhne long ago showed, is one of the most precious forms of exercise, relieving the arteries of their tension.[23]

The ant.i.thesis between play and work is generally wrongly conceived, for the difference is essentially in the degree of strength of the psycho-physic motivations. The young often do their hardest work in play. With interest, the most repellent tasks become pure sport, as in the case Johnson reports of a man who wanted a pile of stone thrown into a ditch and, by kindling a fire in the ditch and pretending the stones were buckets of water, the heavy and long-s.h.i.+rked job was done by tired boys with shouting and enthusiasm. Play, from one aspect of it, is superfluous energy over and above what is necessary to digest, breathe, keep the heart and organic processes going; and most children who can not play, if they have opportunity, can neither study nor work without overdrawing their resources of vitality. Bible psychology conceives the fall of man as the necessity of doing things without zest, and this is not only ever repeated but now greatly emphasized when youth leaves the sheltered paradise of play to grind in the mills of modern industrial civilization. The curse is overcome only by those who come to love their tasks and redeem their toil again to play. Play, hardly less than work, can be to utter exhaustion; and because it draws upon older stores and strata of psycho-physic impulsion its exhaustion may even more completely drain our kinetic resources, if it is too abandoned or prolonged. Play can do just as hard and painful tasks as work, for what we love is done with whole and undivided personality. Work, as too often conceived, is all body and no soul, and makes for duality and not totality. Its constraint is external, mechanical, or it works by fear and not love. Not effort but zestless endeavor is the tragedy of life. Interest and play are one and inseparable as body and soul. Duty itself is not adequately conceived and felt if it is not pleasure, and is generally too feeble and fitful in the young to awaken much energy or duration of action. Play is from within from congenital hereditary impulsion. It is the best of all methods of organizing instincts. Its cathartic or purgative function regulates irritability, which may otherwise be drained or vented in wrong directions, exactly as Breuer[24] shows psychic traumata may, if overtense, result in "hysterical convulsions." It is also the best form of self-expression; and its advantage is variability, following the impulsion of the idle, perhaps hyperemic, and overnourished centers most ready to act. It involves play illusion and is the great agent of unity and totalization of body and soul, while its social function develops solidarity and unison of action between individuals. The dances, feasts, and games of primitive people, wherein they rehea.r.s.e hunting and war and act and dance out their legends, bring individuals and tribes together.[25] Work is menial, cheerless, grinding, regular, and requires more precision and accuracy and, because attended with less ease and pleasure and economy of movement, is more liable to produce erratic habits. Antagonistic as the forms often are, it may be that, as Carr says, we may sometimes so suffuse work with the play spirit, and vice versa, that the present distinction between work and play will vanish, the transition will be less tragic and the activities of youth will be slowly systematised into a whole that better fits his nature and needs; or, if not this, we may at least find the true proportion and system between drudgery and recreation.

The worst product of striving to do things with defective psychic impulsion is fatigue in its common forms, which slows down the pace, multiplies errors and inaccuracies, and develops slovenly habits, ennui, flitting will specters, velleities and caprices, and neurasthenic symptoms generally. It brings restlessness, and a tendency to many little heterogeneous, smattering efforts that weaken the will and leave the mind like a piece of well-used blotting paper, covered with traces and nothing legible. All beginnings are easy, and only as we leave the early stages of proficiency behind and press on in either physical or mental culture and encounter difficulties, do individual differences and the tendency of weak will, to change and turn to something else increase. Perhaps the greatest disparity between men is the power to make a long concentrative, persevering effort, for In der Beschrankung zeigt sich der Meister [The master shows himself in limitation]. Now no kind or line of culture is complete till it issues in motor habits, and makes a well-knit soul texture that admits concentration series in many directions and that can bring all its resources to bear at any point. The brain unorganized by training has, to recur to Richter's well-worn aphorism, saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal, or all the ingredients of gunpowder, but never makes a grain of it because they never get together. Thus willed action is the language of complete men and the goal of education. When things are mechanized by right habituation, there is still further gain; for not only is the mind freed for further and higher work, but this deepest stratum of motor a.s.sociation is a plexus that determines not only conduct and character, but even beliefs. The person who deliberates is lost, if the intellect that doubts and weighs alternatives is less completely organised than habits. All will culture is intensive and should safeguard us against the chance influence of life and the insidious danger of great ideas in small and feeble minds. Now fatigue, personal and perhaps racial, is just what arrests in the incomplete and mere memory or noetic stage. It makes weak bodies that command, and not strong ones that obey. It divorces knowing and doing, Kennen and Konnen, a separation which the Greeks could not conceive because for them knowledge ended in skill or was exemplified in precepts and proverbs that were so clear cut that the pain of violating them was poignant. Ideas must be long worked over till life speaks as with the rifle and not with the shotgun, and still less with the water hose. The purest thought, if true, is only action repressed to be ripened to more practical form. Not only do muscles come before mind, will before intelligence, and sound ideas rest on a motor basis, but all really useless knowledge tends to be eliminated as error or superst.i.tion. The roots of play lie close to those of creative imagination and idealism.

The opposite extreme is the fact.i.tious and superficial motivation of fear, prizes, examinations, artificial and immediate rewards and penalties, which can only tattoo the mind and body with conventional patterns p.r.i.c.ked in, but which lead an unreal life in the soul because they have no depth of soil in nature or heredity. However precious and coherent in themselves, all subject-matters thus organized are mere lugs, crimps, and frills. All such culture is spurious, unreal, and parasitic. It may make a scholastic or sophistic mind, but a worm is at the root and, with a dim sense of the vanity of all knowledge that does not become a rule of life, some form of pessimism is sure to supervene in every serious soul. With age a civilization acc.u.mulates such impedimenta, traditional flotsam and jetsam, and race fatigue proceeds with equal step with its increasing volume. Immediate utilities are better, but yet not so much better than acquisitions that have no other than a school or examination value. If, as Ruskin says, all true work is praise, all true play is love and prayer. Instil into a boy's soul learning which he sees and feels not to have the highest worth and which can not become a part of his active life and increase it, and his freshness, spontaneity, and the fountains of play slowly run dry in him, and his youth fades to early desiccation. The instincts, feelings, intuitions, the work of which is always play, are superseded by method, grind, and education by instruction which is only an effort to repair the defects of heredity, for which, at its best, it is vulgar, pinchbeck subst.i.tute. The best play is true genius, which always comes thus into the world, and has this way of doing its work, and all the contents of the memory pouches is luggage to be carried rather than the vital strength that carries burdens. Grosswell says that children are young because they play, and not vice versa; and he might have added, men grow old because they stop playing, and not conversely, for play is, at bottom, growth, and at the top of the intellectual scale it is the eternal type of research from sheer love of truth. Home, school, church, state, civilization, are measured in one supreme scale of values, viz., whether and how, for they aid in bringing youth to its fullest maturity. Even vice, crime, and decline are often only arrest or backsliding or reversion. National and racial decline beginning in eliminating one by one the last and highest styles of development of body and mind, mental stimulus of excessive dosage lowers general nutrition. A psychologist that turns his back on mere subtleties and goes to work in a life of service has here a great opportunity, and should not forget, as Horace Mann said, "that for all that grows, one former is worth one hundred reformers."

[Footnote 1: Interest in Relation to Muscular Exercise. American Physical Education Review, June, 1902, vol. 7, pp. 57-65.]

[Footnote 2: The Influence of Exercise upon Growth by Frederic Burk. American Physical Education Review, December, 1899, vol. 4, pp. 340-349.]

[Footnote 3: A Study of Dolls, by G. Stanley Hall and A.C. Ellis.

Pedagogical Seminary, December, 1896, vol. 4, pp. 129-175.]

[Footnote 4: Studies in Imagination, by Lilian H. Chalmers.

Pedagogical Seminary, April, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 111-123.]

[Footnote 5: Some Psychical Aspects of Physical Exercise. Popular Science Monthly, October, 1898, vol. 53, pp. 703-805.]

[Footnote 6: Amus.e.m.e.nts of Worcester School Children. Pedagogical Seminary, September, 1899, vol. 6, pp. 314-371.]

[Footnote 7: A Study in the Play Life of Some South Carolina Children.

Pedagogical Seminary, December, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 439-478.]

[Footnote 8: Arbeit und Rythmus. Trubner, Leipzig, 1896.]

[Footnote 9: Descent of Man. D. Appleton and Co., 1872, vol. 1, chap. vi, p. 204 et seq]

[Footnote 10: Teasing and Bullying. Pedagogical Seminary, April, 1897, vol. 4, pp. 336-371.]

[Footnote 11: See my Study of Anger. American Journal of Psychology, July, 1899, vol. 10, pp. 516-591.]

[Footnote 12: Der deutsche Student am Ende des 19 Jahrhunderts, 6th ed., Goschen, Leipzig, 1896. See also H. P. Shelden: History and Pedagogy of American Student Societies, New York, 1901, p. 31 et seq.]

[Footnote 13: Bus.h.i.+do: The Soul of j.a.pan. An exposition of j.a.panese thought, by Inazo Nitobe. New York, 1905, pp. 203 et seq.]

[Footnote 14: The Hearts of Men. Macmillan, 1901, chap. xxii.]

[Footnote 15: La p.u.b.erte. Schleicher Freres, editeurs, Paris, 1902.]

[Footnote 16: See A.W. Trettien. Creeping and Walking. American Journal of Psychology, October, 1900, vol. 12, pp. 1-57.]

[Footnote 17: Constructive and Preventive Philanthropy, by Joseph Lee.

Macmillan, New York, 1902, chaps. x and xi.]

[Footnote 18: C.O. Bernies. Physical Characteristics of the Runner and Jumper. American Physical Education Review, September, 1900, vol. 5, pp. 235-245.]

[Footnote 19: A Study in the Play Life of some South Carolina Children. Pedagogical Seminary, December, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 459-478.]

[Footnote 20: Education by Plays and Games. Pedagogical Seminary, October, 1894, vol. 3, pp. 97-133.]

[Footnote 21: An Essay on Laughter. Longmans, Green and Co., London, 1902, p. 427 et seq.]

[Footnote 22: See Brand's Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, 3 Vols., London, 1883.]

[Footnote 23: Psychology of Tickling, Laughing, and the Comic, by G.

Stanley Hall and Arthur Allin. American Journal of Psychology, October, 1897, vol. 9, pp. 1-41.]

[Footnote 24: I. Breuer and S. Freud. Studien uber Hysterie. F.

Deuticke, Wien, 1895. See especially p. 177 et seq.]

[Footnote 25: See a valuable discussion by H. A. Carr. The Survival Values of Play, Investigations of the Department of Psychology and Education of the University of Colorado, Arthur Allin, Ph.D., Editor, November, 1902, vol. 1, pp. 3-47]

CHAPTER VII

FAULTS, LIES, AND CRIMES

Cla.s.sifications of children's faults-Peculiar children-Real faults as distinguished from interference with the teacher's ease-Truancy, its nature and effects-The genesis of crime-The lie, its cla.s.ses and relations to imagination-Predatory activities-Gangs-Causes of crime-The effects of stories of crime-Temibility-Juvenile crime and its treatment.

Siegert[1] groups children of problematical nature into the following sixteen cla.s.ses: the sad, the extremely good or bad, star-gazers, scatter-brains, apathetic, misanthropic, doubters and investigators, reverent, critical, executive, stupid and clownish, naive, funny, anamnesic, disposed to learn, and blase; patience, foresight, and self-control, he thinks, are chiefly needed.

A unique and interesting study was undertaken by Kozle[2] by collecting and studying thirty German writers on pedagogical subjects since Pestalozzi, and cataloguing all the words they use describing the faults of children. In all, this gave 914 faults, far more in number than their virtues. These were cla.s.sified as native and of external origin, acute and chronic, egoistic and altruistic, greed, perverted honor, self-will, falsity, laziness, frivolity, distraction, precocity, timidity, envy and malevolence, ingrat.i.tude, quarrelsomeness, cruelty, superst.i.tion; and the latter fifteen were settled on as resultant groups, and the authors who describe them best are quoted.

Bohannon[3] on the basis of questionnaire returns cla.s.sified peculiar children as heavy, tall, short, small, strong, weak, deft, agile, clumsy, beautiful, ugly, deformed, birthmarked, keen and precocious, defective in sense, mind, and speech, nervous, clean, dainty, dirty, orderly, obedient, disobedient, disorderly, teasing, buoyant, buffoon, cruel, selfish, generous, sympathetic, inquisitive, lying, ill-tempered, silent, dignified, frank, loquacious, courageous, timid, whining, spoiled, gluttonous and only child.

Marro[4] tabulated the conduct of 3,012 boys in gymnasial and lyceal cla.s.ses in Italy from eleven to eighteen years of age (see table given above). Conduct was marked as good, bad, and indifferent, according to the teacher's estimate, and was good at eighteen in 74 per cent of the cases; at eleven in 70 per cent; at seventeen in 69 per cent; and at fourteen in only 58 per cent. In positively bad conduct, the age of fifteen led, thirteen and fourteen were but little better, while it improved at sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen. In general, conduct was good at eleven; declined at twelve and thirteen; said, to its worst at fourteen; and then improved in yearly increments that did not differ much, and at seventeen was nearly as good as at eleven, and at eighteen four points better.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Percentage x Age]

He computed also the following percentage table of the causes of punishments in certain Italian schools for girls and boys near p.u.b.escent ages:

Boys Girls Quarrels and blows 53.90 17.4 Laziness, negligence 1.80 21.3 Untidiness 10.70 24.7 Improper language .41 14.6 Indecent acts and words 1.00 .24 Refusal to work .82 1.26 Various offenses against discipline 19.00 19.9 Truancy 9.60 .0 Plots to run away 1.70 .0 Running away .72 .0 Mr. Sears[5] reports in percentages statistics of the punishments received by a thousand children for the following offenses: Disorder, 17-1/3; disobedience, 16; carelessness, 13-1/3; running away, 12-2/3; quarreling, 10; tardiness, 6-2/3; rudeness, 6; fighting, 5-1/3; lying, 4; stealing, 1; miscellaneous, 7-1/3. He names a long list of punishable offenses, such as malice, swearing, obscenity, bullying, lying, cheating, untidiness, insolence, insult, conspiracy, disobedience, obstinacy, rudeness, noisiness, ridicule; injury to books, building, or other property; and a.n.a.lyzes at length the kinds of punishment, modes of making it fit the offense and the nature of the child, the discipline of consequences, lapse of time between the offense and its punishment, the principle of slight but sure tasks as penalties, etc.

Triplett[6] attempted a census of faults and defeats named by the teacher. Here inattention by far led all others. Defects of sense and speech, carelessness, indifference, lack of honor and of self-restraint, laziness, dreamy listlessness, nervousness, mental incapacity, lack of consideration for others, vanity, affectation, disobedience, untruthfulness, grumbling, etc., follow. Inattention to a degree that makes some children at the mercy of their environment and all its changes, and their mental life one perpetual distraction, is a fault which teachers, of course, naturally observe. Children's views of their own faults and those of other children lay a very different emphasis. Here fighting, bullying, and teasing lead all others; then come stealing, bad manners, lying, disobedience, truancy, cruelty to animals, untidiness, selfishness, etc. Parents' view of this subject Triplett found still different. Here wilfulness and obstinacy led all others with teasing, quarreling, dislike of application and effort, and many others following. The vast number of faults mentioned contrasts very strikingly with the seven deadly sins.

In a suggestive statistical study on the relations of the conduct of children to the weather, Dexter[7] found that excessive humidity was most productive of misdemeanors; that when the temperature was between 90 and 100 the probability of bad conduct was increased 300 per cent, when between 80 and 90 it was increased 104 per cent. Abnormal barometric pressure, whether great or small, was found to increase misconduct 50 per cent; abnormal movements of the wind increased it from 20 to 66 per cent; while the time of year and precipitation seemed to have almost no effect. While the effect of weather has been generally recognized by superintendents and teachers and directors of prisons and asylums, and even by banks, which in London do not permit clerks to do the more important bookkeeping during very foggy days, the statistical estimates of its effect in general need larger numbers for more valuable determinations. Temperature is known to have a very distinct effect upon crime, especially suicide and truancy. Workmen do less in bad weather, blood pressure is modified, etc.[8]

In his study of truancy, Kline[9] starts with the a.s.sumption that the maximum metabolism is always consciously or unconsciously sought, and that migrations are generally away from the extremes of hot and cold toward an optimum temperature. The curve of truancies and runaways increases in a marked ratio at p.u.b.erty, which probably represents the age of natural majority among primitive people. Dislike of school, the pa.s.sion for out-of-door life, and more universal interests in man and nature now arise, so that runaways may be interpreted as an instinctive rebellion against limitations of freedom and unnatural methods of education as well as against poor homes. Hunger is one of its most potent, although often unconscious causes. The habitual environment now begins to seem dull and there is a great increase in impatience at restraint. Sometimes there is a mania for simply going away and enjoying the liberty of nomadic life. Just as good people in foreign parts sometimes allow themselves unwonted liberties, so vagrancy increases crime. The pa.s.sion to get to and play at or in the water is often strangely dominant. It seems so fine out of doors, especially in the spring, and the woods and fields make it so hard to voluntarily incarcerate oneself in the schoolroom, that p.u.b.escent boys and even girls often feel like animals in captivity. They long intensely for the utter abandon of a wilder life, and very characteristic is the frequent discarding of foot and head dress and even garments in the blind instinct to realise again the conditions of primitive man. The manifestations of this impulse, if read aright, are grave arraignments of the lack of adaptability of the child's environment to his disposition and nature, and with home restraints once broken, the liabilities to every crime, especially theft, are enormously increased. The truant, although a cording to Kline's measurements slightly smaller than the average child, is more energetic and is generally capable of the greatest activity and usefulness in more out-of-door vocations. Truancy is augmented, too, just in proportion as legitimate and interesting physical exercise is denied.

The vagrant, itinerant, vagabond, gadabout, hobo, and tramp, that Riis has made so interesting, is an arrested, degenerate, or perverted being who abhors work; feels that the world owes him a living; and generally has his first real nomad experience in the teens or earlier. It is a chronic illusion of youth that gives "elsewhere" a special charm. In the immediate present things are mean, dulled by wont, and perhaps even nauseating because of familiarity. There must be a change of scene to see the world; man is not sessile but locomotor; and the moment his life becomes migratory all the restraints and responsibilities of settled life vanish. It is possible to steal and pa.s.s on undiscovered and unsuspected, and to steal again. The vagabond escapes the control of public sentiment, which normally is an external conscience, and having none of his own within him thus lapses to a feral state. The constraint of city, home, and school is especially irksome, and if to this repulsion is added the attraction of a love of nature and of perpetual change, we have the diathesis of the roadsman already developed. Adolescence is the normal time of emanc.i.p.ation from the parental roof, when youth seeks to set up a home of its own, but the apprentice to life must wander far and long enough to find the best habitat in which to set up for himself. This is the spring season of emigration; and it should be an indispensable part of every life curriculum, just before settlement, to travel far and wide, if resources and inclination permit. But this stage should end in wisely chosen settlement where the young life can be independently developed, and that with more complacency and satisfaction because the place has been wisely chosen on the basis of a wide comparison. The chronic vagrant has simply failed to develop the reductives of this normal stage.

Crime is cryptogamous and flourishes in concealment, so that not only does falsehood facilitate it, but certain types of lies often cause and are caused by it. The beginning of wisdom in treatment is to discriminate between good and bad lies. My own study[10] of the lies of 300 normal children, by a method carefully devised in order to avoid all indelicacy to the childish consciousness, suggested the following distinct species of lies. It is often a well-marked epoch when the young child first learns that it can imagine and state things that have no objective counterpart in its life, and there is often a weird intoxication when some absurd and monstrous statement is made, while the first sensation of a deliberate break with truth causes a real excitement which is often the birth pang of the imagination. More commonly this is seen in childish play, which owes a part of its charm to self-deception. Children make believe they are animals, doctors, ogres, play school, that they are dead, mimic all they see and hear. Idealising temperaments sometimes prompt children of three or four suddenly to a.s.sert that they saw a pig with five ears, apples on a cherry tree, and other Munchausen wonders, which really means merely that they have had a new mental combination independently of experience. Sometimes their fancy is almost visualisation and develops into a kind of mythopeic faculty which spins clever yarns and suggests in a sense, quite as pregnant as Froschmer a.s.serts of all mental activity and of the universe itself, that all their life is imagination. Its control and not its elimination in a Gradgrind age of cra.s.s facts is what should be sought in the interests of the highest truthfulness and of the evolution of thought as something above reality, which prepares the way for imaginative literature. The life of Hartley Coleridge,[11] by his brother, is one of many ill.u.s.trations. He fancied cataract of what he named "jug-force" would burst out in a certain field and flow between populous banks, where an ideal government, long wars, and even a reform in spelling, would prevail, ill.u.s.trated in a journal devoted to the affairs of this realm-all these developed in his imagination, where they existed with great reality for years. The vividness of this fancy resembles the pseudo-hallucinations of Kandinsky. Two sisters used to say, "Let us play we are sisters," as if this made the relation more real. Cagliostro found adolescent boys particularly apt for training for his exhibition of phrenological impostures, ill.u.s.trating his thirty-five faculties. "He lied when he confessed he had lied," said a young Sancho Panza, who had believed the wild tales of another boy who later admitted their falsity. Sir James Mackintosh, near p.u.b.erty, after reading Roman history, used to fancy himself the Emperor of Constantinople, and carried on the administration of the realm for hours at a time. His fancies never quite became convictions, but adolescence is the golden age of this kind of dreamery and reverie which supplements reality and totalizes our faculties, and often gives a special charm to dramatic activities and in morbid cases to simulation and dissimulation. It is a state from which some of the bad, but far more of the good qualities of life and mind arise. These are the n.o.ble lies of poetry, art, and idealism, but their pedagogic regime must be wise.

Again with children as with savages, truth depends largely upon personal likes and dislikes. Truth is for friends, and lies are felt to be quite right for enemies. The young often see no wrong in lies their friends wish told, but may collapse and confess when asked if they would have told their mother thus. Boys best keep up complotted lies and are surer to own up if caught than girls. It is harder to cheat in school with a teacher who is liked. Friends.h.i.+ps are cemented by confidences and secrets, and when they wane, promises not to tell weaken in their validity. Lies to the priest, and above all to G.o.d, are the worst. All this makes special attention to friends.h.i.+ps, leaders, and favorites important, and suggests the high value of science for general veracity.

The worst lies, perhaps, are those of selfishness. They ease children over many hard places in life, and are convenient covers for weakness and vice. These lies are, on the whole, judging from our census, most prevalent. They are also most corrupting and hard to correct. All bad habits particularly predispose to the lie of concealment; for those who do wrong are almost certain to have recourse to falsehood, and the sense of meanness thus slowly bred, which may be met by appeals to honor, for so much of which school life is responsible, is often mitigated by the fact that falsehoods are frequently resorted to in moments of danger and excitement, are easily forgotten when it is over, and rarely rankle. These, even more than the pseudomaniac cases mentioned later, grow rankly in those with criminal predispositions.

The lie heroic is often justified as a means of n.o.ble ends. Youth has an instinct which is wholesome for viewing moral situations as wholes. Callow casualists are fond of declaring that it would be a duty to state that their mother was out when she was in, if it would save her life, although they perhaps would not lie to save their own. A doctor, many suggested, might tell an overanxious patient or friend that there was hope, saving his conscience perhaps by reflecting that there was hope, although they had it while he had none. The end at first in such cases may be very n.o.ble and the fib or quibble very petty, but worse lies for meaner objects may follow. Youth often describes such situations with exhilaration as if there were a feeling of eas.e.m.e.nt from the monotonous and tedious obligation of rigorous literal veracity, and here mentors are liable to become nervous and err. The youth who really gets interested in the conflict of duties may reverently be referred to the inner lie of his own conscience, the need of keeping which as a private tribunal is now apparent.

Many adolescents become craven literalists and distinctly morbid and pseudophobiac, regarding every deviation from scrupulously literal truth as alike heinous; and many systematized palliatives and casuistic word-splittings, methods of whispering or silently interpolating the words "not," "perhaps," or "I think," sometimes said over hundreds of times to neutralize the guilt of intended or unintended falsehoods, appear in our records as a sad product of bad methods.