ing to stimulate this
sense too exclusively by means of direct governing and disciplinary
methods. The statement follows.
I think that the activities in the proposed reformatory should be
largely agricultural and industrial. So far as possible the young men
should be put into direct contact with realities and with useful and
practical work. An effort should be made to have all this work mean
something to them and not to be merely make-believe. It is fairly
possible to develop such a property and organization as will put them in
touch with real work rather than to force the necessity of setting tasks
in order to keep them busy.
Aside from the manual labor part of it, the background of the
reformatory should be such as will develop the feeling of responsibility
in the workers. This means that they must come actually in contact with
the raw materials and with things as they grow. When a young man has a
piece of wood or metal given to him in a shop, his whole responsibility
is merely to make something out of this material; he has no
responsibility for the material itself, as he would have if he had been
obliged to mine it or to grow it. One of the greatest advantages of a
farm training is that it develops a man's responsibility toward the
materials with which he works. He is always brought face to face with
the problem of saving the fertility of the land, saving the crops,
saving the forests, and saving the live-stock. The idea of saving and
safeguarding these materials is only incidental to those who do not help
to produce them.
It is important that the farm of this reformatory should be large enough
so that all the young men may do some real pieces of work on it. Such a
farm is not to be commercial in the ordinary farming sense. Its primary
purpose is to aid in a reformative or educational process. You should,
therefore, undertake such types of farming as will best serve those
needs and best meet the abilities of the inmates. A very highly
specialized farming, as the growing of truck-crops, would be quite
impracticable as a commercial enterprise because this kind of farming
demands the greatest skill and also because it requires a property very
easily accessible to our great markets and, therefore, very expensive to
procure and difficult to find in large enough acreage for an institution
of this size; and it is doubtful whether this type of farming would have
the best effect on the inmates. Of course, I should expec
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