SPOILING THE HOME BROOD

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18446, 6 January 1922, Page 9

SPOILING THE HOME BROOD

“Look after the boye -who commit their first crime and see why. I blame my father,” wrote a murderer from a Chicago prison, just before he went to the scaffold. The warning affords a text for a fresh outburst against pusillanimous parents who, lo ease their burden of responsibility, ‘spare the rod and spoil the child,” sometimes to his complete undoing. In the “absence of the birch behind the door,” say £otne students of criminology, lies the explanation of why so many, “young hopefuls” go wrong and end their days in prison, or as miserably as did this Chicago murderer. In further evidence of the justness of this verdict, a writer in the New York Herald quotes Judge Alfred J. Talley;, of the Court of General Sessions, New York, as saying that “there is just one kind of discipline that does work, and that is corporal punishment. Lax parents make boy criminals, and it ,s a general truth that modern American children are not brought up with the proper respect for parents, law, and order or constituted authority. The parents are to blame.” From ,the death-house comes ample confirmation of this view. Before he was hanged, the young Chicago murderer, who had killed two persons, wrote:—“The making of a criminal can be put in very few words. My case will fit 65 or 70 per cent, of the cases. First, there is the first crime of a boy. which may mean anything from stealing a bicycle to working with older crooks. Then comes arrest. The judge says: “I sentence you to the reformatory.” In the reformatory you meet older, harder crooks,' who are glad to educate you on the criminal line. . . . When a boy leaves a ‘school’ or a man leaves the ‘stir’ (penitentiary) give him a hdnd and •don’t let the police hound him from job to job.” Other critics, we read in The Herald, agree with Judge Talley in his stern condemnation of parental weakness, and so deeplv do some people feel the defects in the body politic, which thev ascribe to relaxation of discipline in the home, it is assorted, that they are inclined to urge the restoration of whipping-posts and other obsolete forma of punishment for minor delinquency. At an ealy age, an officer of the Brooklyn Children’s Court is quoted as saying, ‘‘a good sound ‘licking’ might not come amiss.” “This derogation of parental authority, which is general and increasing, is a cancer on the body politic,” said Judge Talley to the Herald writer. Physical punishment has gone out of fashion; “moral suasion has taken the place of a whipping.” But “what does one of the little fellows care about moral suasion? He would care a good deal about a sound thrashing.” As Judge Talley is further quoted: “ T see Uie results of this wrong way of bringing up children every day. Youths under twenty-one are brought before me on criminal charges who feci toward the law like hardened criminals. They began by doing- what they liked at home, staying out nights until their mates went home and defying their parents to keep them in. Yes, it even began earlier. At fourteen they tell their parents they are not going to school any more, and they don’t go. “ ‘ What happens? These boys become loungers on street corners. There they loiter from supper-time to ten or eleven at night and even later, mixing, as they must sooner or later, with older boys who are further on the way to becoming criminals. And the fathers say they can not do 'anything to prevent this association. In a couple of years these youths have fallen l foul of law and order; perhaps they appears as prisoners in the Children’s Court, where in the lighter cases they are remanded to the father’s care. But it’s too late; ho can’t do anything with his wayward boy because he abrogated his authority several years earlier. At nineteen or twenty that sort of boy becomes a thief or worse. . . . T speak of the boy, but with some differences the same essential things could bo said of the girl. She, too, needs discipline and doesn’t get it at home or at school. The weakly indulgent mother buys her the kind of clothes she demands in order to look like “other girls,” and the weakly indulgent mother can’t keep her_ from bad company even if she tries. It is because the girl, no less than the boy, started early in life to give orders to her mother. “ ‘The average age of penitentiary inmates, as shown bv statistics recently supplied by the New York State Prison Commission, is nineteen years. This means that they began their criminal careers at sixteen and seventeen, an age at'which no judge sends them to State prison. I do not think people generally realise this flowing tide of yputhful depravity, and those who do are despondent and even hopeless for means to stem it. But I believe the means is at hand in the home. There old-fashioned ideas of parental authority should be insisted on, and where it is resisted I see no better or surer way to enforce it than by judicious corporal punishment.’ ” A battery of _ drop hammers recently supplied by a British firm to the engineering workshops of a Chinese railway, possesses several interesting features. It includes three hammers, one of 30cwt, one of 15owfc,, and a third of 7cwt. All throe hammers are lifted by wheels on a single overhead shaft, driven by an electric motor through a closed gear box which reduces the speed. The ropes supporting the hammer blocks are raised on grooved drums, to which they are held by special friction blocks; at any desired moment the friction block is raised and the hammer falls. The mechanism of control is so simple that a child could operate the largest hammer with ease. Each hammer can be lifted to any height and allowed to fall, or it can be held stationary at any point. Before being installed the battery was subjected to the severest tests, all three hammers being hold suspended while the motor continued to run, but not the slightest tendency to overheating showed itself in the lifters. No other drop hammer, it is confidently stated, was ever subjected to so arduous a test. The microbe which causes the dread woolsorters’ disease, or anthrax, is a tiny fellow only one three-thousandth part of an inch in length. Rather more than six million could nestle comfortably side by side on the surface of a postage stamp. Ho multiplies, not by laying eggs, but by splitting himself into two. This spfitting process takes place one every half-hour, at the end of which time the single microbe has become two full-sized ones joined together like the links of a chain. The chain is still not a very long one; but let us see what would occur if nothing happened to stop its growth for a whole day. Doubling its length every half-hour, it would measure Ijiin in six hours. Fourteen hours would ■ see it a mile and a-half long; in 22£ hours it would stretch from the earth to the moon; while in 24 hours it would attain a length of 1,847,368 miles. Such an appalling rat© of increase is prevented in three ways—the microbes cannot find the huge masses of food necessary for fheir growth; they are destroyed by sunlight; and they prey upon each other.