Ragged Schools-Their Seed-time and Harvest. 233 ART. V.-1. Seed-Time and Harvest of Ragged Schools; or a Third Plea, with new Editions of the First and Second Pleas. By Thomas Guthrie, D.D. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black. 1860. 2. Punishment and Prevention. By Alexander Thomson, Esq., of Banchory. London: Nisbet and Co. 1857. 3. On Juvenile Criminals, Reformatories, and the Means of rendering the perishing and dangerous Classes serviceable to the State. By Joseph Adshead. Manchester. 1856. 4. Reports of Ragged School Union. 5. Dr. Wichern and the Rough House. In 'Good Words' for July, August, and September. 1860. RAG AGGED schools have now existed a sufficiently long period to prove their success. They have been in more or less active operation during nearly twenty years, and have passed through their reformatory ordeal so many destitute and delinquent juveniles as to establish them among the philanthropic institutions of the age. We can now examine their history and reason upon their results, without being considered Utopian. What science has done with the wreck upon the sea-shore in transforming the outcasts of the ocean into valuable chemical substances, useful in the industrial arts, philanthropy has performed with the outcasts of society. The children of the drunken and the criminal, uncared for by their parents, and too long disregarded by the community, have, by means of ragged schools, been transformed into honest and upright characters, a blessing to themselves and to society. No philanthropic movement of the present day has wrought such results in so short a time, at such small expense, and on so extensive a scale. In those towns and cities where the system has been carried out in a way at all likely to meet the formidable evil with which it had to contend, the effects are now visible in the streets, in the policecourts, and in the prisons. Less than twenty years ago things were very different in streets, police-courts, and prisons. Juvenile delinquency was an alarming evil, rapidly increasing, and threatening to defeat all attempts at the reformation of the gaol and its occupants. Prison statistics showed that there was an annual supply, from the ranks of the young, of between 20,000 and 25,000 to our criminal population. Public thoroughfares presented at every step some ragged urchin soliciting charity. Police-courts had a large proportion of their cases from these mendicant children, many of whose heads scarcely reached as high as the dock in which they stood to be tried. In London, some 30,000 under sixteen years of age belonged to this class; and if the same proportion were applied to other large cities and towns, it would give a quarter of a million who were being Vol. 3.-No. 11. trained R trained to a life of beggary or crime, and supplying constant occupants for gaols, penitentiaries, and convict settlements, consuming a vast amount of public money in their punishment every year, and becoming a mass of moral corruption sufficient to destroy a country. The law punished them, and levied taxes to pay the cost; but few cared for the youths whose life-habits were forming, or thought that prevention of crime, by the reformation of the criminal, would be better than punishment. The causes of juvenile mendicancy and delinquency were various. Ignorance has been proved to have a very close connection with crime. Ninety per cent. of all prisoners could not read or write at all, or could do so in a manner so imperfect as scarcely to deserve credit for an ability to read. There were very few of the juveniles who had been taught. Mr. Horace Mann showed, in his valuable remarks upon our last census, that there were, in 1851, no fewer than one million of children not at school, who ought to have been there. These not being occupied with any good, for the most part, were in daily danger of forming habits of evil, and of becoming vicious. Vagrancy also added a considerable proportion to the juvenile delinquents. The children of those who had no industrial pursuit, or only the semblance of one, and whose migratory habits were ill-calculated to foster industry, generally became addicted to petty thieving. Our readers will scarcely anticipate the following fact, relative to one of the causes of juvenile delinquency. The Rev. J. S. Brewer, for many years chaplain to St. Giles's Workhouse, London, makes this declaration in one of the Practical Lectures to Ladies,' delivered some time ago: Turn to the police reports in our newspapers, or only watch for yourselves the boys and girls who join in the disorders of this metropolis, and fill our prisons-no longer prisons to them-and you will see how imperative it is that something should be done to rescue them. THEY ARE MAINLY THE PRODUCE OF THE WORKHOUSE AND THE WORKHOUSE SCHOOLS. Over them society has no hold, because society has cast them out from all that is humane. They have been taught to feel that they have nothing in common with their fellow-men. Their experience is not of a home, or of parents, but of a workhouse and a governor-of a prison and a gaoler, as hard and rigid as either.' Separated from domestic influence, inheriting the indolence, and mayhap the vices of their parents, and taught by incompetent instructors, they became an easy prey to temptation when sent forth to earn their own bread. Recent years, we believe, have witnessed considerable improvement in the management of work *Mr. Mayhew draws attention (in his 'Great World of London') to the fact, that the proportion of juvenile criminals in London is nearly double that in the rest of the kingdom. The number of persons in England and Wales under 17 is 7,056,699, and the number of criminals under that age 11,739, giving 166 criminals to every 10,000 of the population; but in London the persons under 17 number 839,057, and the criminals under 17 are 3,496, which is equal to 46 in each 10,000, or more than 24 times as many as in the whole country.-Thomson, p. 159. This refers to the convicted criminals only. house Causes of Juvenile Delinquency. 235 house children, and especially in their education. Since Government Inspectors have regularly visited these schools, and since education has risen in importance, the teachers of workhouse children have ceased to be mere inmates of the house, or even returned convicts. What could be expected of the unfortunate youth in unions when under the instruction of a pauper? Yet such was the case. And in one poorhouse school, an infirm old man, himself an inmate, and a returned convict, taught forty or fifty children! Illegitimacy sent its supply of neglected children to swell the ranks of the mendicant and criminal juveniles. Heartless parents, whose improvidence or vice led them to desert their offspring, were, as they are still, the means of adding to the number. Drunken parents, more than all others, crowded the streets with vagrants, who were often reduced to the necessity of stealing, when they could not beg their bread. On this point, the following is the testimony of a competent witness, the Rev. Dr. Guthrie, in his recent book : - This opens up a dreadful view; and I should fail in my duty if I did not state broadly that most of these children owe their ruin to drink-to the dissipated habits of their parents. Intemperance is the horrid Moloch, the ugly, blood-stained idol to which so many young victims are annually sacrificed. Drunkenness, directly or indirectly, supplies our ragged schools with scholars, and gaols with prisoners, and our poor-houses with by much the largest number of their tenants.' By this cause alone thousands upon thousands of children have been deprived of a happy and comfortable home, of the affection and care of parents, of the advantage of a common education, and of the very necessaries of life. Fifty-eight per cent. of youthful offenders are the offspring of drunken, and eighteen of ignorant and negligent parents. Can we wonder that they deemed friends, society, and God against them? Where love never fondled youthful hearts, and parental care made no provision for their daily wants, and where society spurned them from its door, it was not strange that criminal habits should take root, or that these neglected children began to live by plunder, deception, and begging. Or, still further, do we account it awful, that those who had no shelter but some common stair or shed, and no bread but what they wrung from charity or got by theft, should prefer at times the cell of a prison as a covering for their homeless heads, and the bread and water secured to them there, to the miseries which their freedom brought to them in the streets? But society paid dearly for this inhuman treatment of children whom their parents drove out of the sacred circle of home. To permit so many youth to be trained up as criminals; to allow them to practise their thefts; to submit to the losses caused by their depredations, and to the cost of their punishment, was a great error in a Christian people. It was more than bad economy. It was R 2 cruelty cruelty to our common flesh and blood. It was sin against our common Father in heaven. The annual cost of plunder in Liverpool is said to be not less than 700,000l. a year. The revenues of thieves are enormous. The following are authenticated data of the gains of fifteen individuals in a course of years: : One of these was seven times in prison, and was caught fifteen times more, but not convicted, by reason of insufficient evidence. The following are the statements of three years' work in public thieving of large sums only, by Flanagan :— 1838-39. : This is but a specimen of what the criminal youth of our land were being trained to do. Regular schools for training them to robbery from the person existed in London. Mr. Vanderkiste, in his Six Years in the Dens of London,' a book published eight years ago, states that one man had actually passed five hundred youth through his special instruction in the art of thieving. But punishment was also costly. Every man in gaol costs the community between 301. or 401. a year, and each one who is transported costs, ere the expenditure is terminated, some 3007. There is, besides, the large outlay required for prisons, police, and judges. Yet it is scarcely twenty years ago since a few individuals began to arrest the evil, and make an effort to prevent crime by the reformation of the dangerous and depredatory Arabs of the streets. It is not to be forgotten that some attempts had been made at an earlier date. JOHN POUNDS, the cobbler of Portsmouth, stands in the front rank as the Founder of Ragged Schools. He was a native of Portsmouth, and was born on 17th June, 1766. Till disabled, he laboured as a shipwright; but afterwards pursued the more sedentary occupation of mending shoes. Having a decrepit nephew, he attempted to teach him while he pursued his handicraft; but as it was solitary for his scholar to learn alone, Pounds gathered a few ragged children to share his humble instructions. He had small means, yet he did not weary. His stock of classbooks was old handbills and tattered volumes. His scholars were the worst boys Portsmouth could afford-boys who learned their lessons for the sake of the hot potato with which he bribed them. His apartment was scarcely four yards square. Yet with all his disadvantages, John Pounds rescued from misery, blessed with a good Christian education, and saved to society, in the course of his life, no fewer than five hundred boys. A similar attempt was made in Weimar by another philanthropist. He occupied a much higher position in society than Pounds. He was a councillor of the Prussian embassy at Weimar, a lyric poet, and an accomplished littérateur. |