WHAT IS A HOODLUM?

New Zealand Tablet, Volume V, Issue 244, 4 January 1878, Page 7

WHAT IS A HOODLUM?

The Springfield Republican defines the hoodlum with surprising accuracy : "He is simply the child of the people, sent to the public schools long enough to gain a smattering knowledge, and a distaste for work, and without a particle of moral backing at home to create character, inspire self-respect, or turn to industry." It is only in San Francisco that this peculiar product of our American civilisation gets the name of '• hoodlum," but his kind abounds in all cities. Where they go to for the most part after graduating from the public schools may be learned from following sentences of a report made recently by superintendent Vaiix of the Eastern Penitentiary of Pennsylvania, " I implore you, gentlemen of the Legislature, to look at our statistics. They show that our prison is occupied by unapprenticed convicts. Of all the young men under twenty-five years of age admitted to the prison, seventy-five per cent, are -without trade and ninety per cent, are educated" Nine-tenths, that is, of the criminals, of the State, have enjoyed the benefits of State. education. We observed the other day, in a speech made out West by a candidate for office, defending himself against the charge of having advocated the extrusion of the Bible from the public schools, that he had adopted this course because he had been assured by men of intelligence and observation, that if the Bible were once eliminated there would be a grand rush from the Catholic parochial schools to the public schools. " And I thought, that it would be a good thing to get those children away from their rosaries and crucifixes, into the pure, healthful atmosphere of these schools of the free." But, judging from the penitentiary reports, these State "schools of the free" seem to be only ante-chambers to the State prisons. When the State has done what it can toward training its youth in the way they should go, how are we to account for the fact that the way in question leads so often behind the bars ?