Why the Young Go Astray.

Pelorus Guardian and Miners' Advocate., Volume 29, Issue 43, 5 June 1917, Page 2

Why the Young Go Astray.

GREAT HERITAGE OF THE

WANDERLUST.

Many mothers are frequently much worried over the tendencies of their boys to wander away from home. Sometimes these boys get to towns or cities far from home. Frequently they ship on boats for foreign lands. Cithers disappear for a while, return, and in the spring again disappear for months. Once in a while a boy will

disappear for ever. This nomadic or wandering impulse is natural to all healthy boys and

youths between twelve and eighteen years of age. It is an hereditary instinct, and cannot be successfully eradicated. It is generally kept under reasonable control by our educational methods, and, adds Dr. W. Lee Howard in the course of the very interesting paper- we publish, some--times unjust legal means-unjust because the boys are punished for acts whose motives come down to them from ancestral stock that was nomadic or wandering. All, animals, including men, have this impulse. We human beings spring from the stock of the primal apes. Don’t make the common mistake of thinking that ive sprang direct from the monkeys, for we did not.

Now, all the primates were wanderers, They had no fixed place of ihode. When primitive man branched oft to form a distinct race he carried through inheritance this wonderful impulse, just as he did hunger and other primal Instincts which we now possess. For hundreds of thousands of years he wandered, migrated from north to south, east to wc*t. Even during the dawn of

primitive civilisation and further into a state <4 domestic and economic rnlture be was a great wanderer. Only then it wo* by tribes and nation*. The invasions of the Huns, Vandals, Goths are examples. The f «U basic motive of Die Crusades the wandering instinct. This was why the Grusadw. appealed to tbe thousands of boys who died, starved, and suffered on the way to Jerusalem.

Individual impulses to move about,

to he going somewhere, to search lor aew lands and s»ek strange peoples, are expressions of this inherited instinct. And it is a very valuable inheritance. From this inherited trait there was caused to spring up a race of distinct nomads —the gipsies. Now keep in your minds the fact that this race of nomads roamed all over

Europe, and especially in England, even up to half a century ago. There was certain to be much of their blood scattered among the families not belonging to the various gipsy clans. The reason so many hoys become wanderers, some tramps, circus

followers ; girls run away from home to mix and be lost in the maelstroms of the cities—is because somewhere in their family inheritance there flows the blood of gipsies.

The craze of certain women to leave home and go uselessly shopping from morning to night is the gipsy instinct for bargaining and bantering. The same instinct further removed from the original is what sends them from tea-room to cinema hall, from funeral to funeral of people totally unknown to them ; in the country to run from neighbour to neighbour gadding, gadding, gadding, hating to return to home and domestic work. The United States Station for Experimental Evolution has made, and is making, intensive studies in heredity as part of this subject. The experimenters have shown - that the instinct to wander is ten times as great in adolescent youths as it is in girls. That is, ten boys have this impulse to one girl. But the experimenters have not taken into account this masked form of wandering now so prominent among girls and young women—shopping, gadding about, the feminist’s desire to be free to go and come at will, the unrest which makes girls crazy to become actresses and movie heroines, to travel with shows and circuses, and those ever ready to run off with the first man who captures their attention. All these and other present conditions are simply, modern expressions of the wanderlust which has broken through the former conventionalities by which women were held to the leash. But undoubtedly the desire in youths to wander away from home and restraint is a far more fixed and tangible trait than in women and girls. It really shows a sex link, that is, the instinct is connected

with the mating instinct of all ani-

mals, who about spring-time wander in search of mates. But, of course, in the case of the boy or girl this is an unconscious—a subconscious —condition. The desire to get away from home and school restraint and go where the new spirit moves them is the conscious motive.

Now we come to why all children bora of gipsy mothers or mothers with a taint of gipsy blood are always gipsies. Dr. Howard here uses the word “gipsy” in its broad sense

—«K rovers and reamers. Every '’’ofaiM of a woman of wandering instiaet inherits this instinct directly. 1! t’wo children are born of a domestic woman and a father with gipsy, or wandering spirit, in his blood, the girl will be a home-loving girl, the boy an incurable runaway. If your children are born-of the same kind of parents, two will bo r '•tented to remain by the fireside, I v will be nomade. On the other hand, ii mother is a gipsy or of gipsy blood, and 1 the Either a steady, home-loving man irom steady ancestors, every child born will inherit the mother’s wandering impulses. Whis implies, if it does not prove, that the proncipal instincts coming ft©vra from arboreal ancestors in the

female line are less changed in fundamental by evolutionary and civilising effects than those of the male. Going on sprees, certain forms of hysteria, where the girl wanders away and tells the police such wonderful tales of poisoned needles and abduction by dark-hued men-gipsies are a daxk-hued race, remember—are only forms of the suppressed impulse to get away and be care-free —to wander at will, sleep where the night finds them, to give free rein to primitive instinct and desire, mixed with the romance complex. The laws of man-made society, convention, too high culture pressure on unripe brains cause a riot of rebellion and the pushing of primal impulses, and the boy or girl flees the painful restraint. When a boy cannot. be kept at borne, when he is a chronic truant, try to get into his soul, his thoughts, his feelings. Don’t blame or punish him. Look into your own family history. The cause is somewhere in his mother’s family —'way, 'way back. The blood is in your lad, and unjust punishment will only sour him, and when the opportunity comes he will go away. ( Sometimes this inheritance has so long been suppressed that a man happily married and successful breaks out into a long spree. He is the one who loses for the time being his identity, wanders under another narfie, takes up jobs or does work entirely strange to his ordinary life, and when he comes to himself has no memory of his spree life—of his other gipsy self, It is due to the wander blood his mother transmitted to him. Of course, she did not know she had this blood in her veins. It had skipped several generations as far as she was concerned. But not entirely, for if the facts were obtainable it would be found that some of her immediate ancestors had been rovers in the world.

The development of what we are accustomed to call civilisation gradually forced men to abide in a community and settle there. The majority had the wander desire controlled, but not killed. Their wives and daughters were compelled, willy nilly, to stay by the distaff and fireside. Those who rebelled were sent to the convents or otherwise disposed of in an effective manner. Cut the desire to wander, be free, to live a nomadic life, was always smouldering, for many of these women were direct descendants of or themselves captives from wandering tribes. So now that individual freedom for the women is the rule, these ancestral female traits are breaking out in daughters not kept strictly under supervision and control. From 12 to 18 years of age is the dangerous age of the young woman —the only dangerous age for a normal woman. If during that period a girl is permitted licence, freedom, self-care, we may expect to see her wander from the fireside, perhaps never to return, or if so after she has ruined her life. On account of the uncertainty of really just what instincts a mother has endowed her daughter, it is necessary that the dangerous age for the impulse to become a modern nomad should he watched, governed, controlled.

Most of our reformatories for truant and runaway girls and boys are founded upon ignorance and total lack of appreciation of the power of primitive instinct in the young. To put a boy in a reform-school because he runs away from home and school is to admit total ignorance of that inherited trait which causes him to wander. Here we need the mental surgeon to act, understand, and try to place the instinct under contented self-control.

When understanding and kind appreciation of his psychological state fails to check the instinct, let the boy do the thing he likes to do. If going to sea, joining the army, or exploring expeditions is what he craves, let him go. It may break the mother’s heart for the time being, but any other course will break her heart for ever.

In other words, concludes Dr. Howard, we cannot entirely suppress these primitive instincts when they are strong _ enough to make the boy defy ordinary conventions or laws made to suppress these inborn impulses. They are too powerfully imbedded in his make-up, and any., other method except that of guiding them into useful channels means ruin to the boy for life.