risoners
there; bad company 97.60 per cent. The reformatory repeats the prison
chaplain's verdict, "weakness, not wickedness," in its own way:
"Malevolence does not characterize the criminal, but aversion to
continuous labor." If "the street" had been written across it in
capital letters, it could not have been made plainer. Less than 15 per
cent of the prisoners came from good homes, and one in sixty-six (1.51)
had kept good company; evidently he was not of the mentally capable.
They will tell you at the prison that, under its discipline, eighty odd
per cent are set upon their feet and make a fresh start. With due
allowance for a friendly critic, there is still room for the
three-fourths labelled normal, of "natural mental capacity." They came
to their own with half a chance, even the chance of a prison. The
Children's Aid Society will give you still better news of the boys
rescued from the slum before it had branded them for its own. Scarce
five per cent are lost, though they leave such a black mark that they
make trouble for all the good boys that are sent out from New York.
Better than these was the kindergarten record in San Francisco. New York
has no monopoly of the slum. Of nine thousand children from the
slummiest quarters of that city who had gone through the Golden Gate
Association's kindergartens, just one was found to have got into jail.
The merchants who looked coldly on the experiment before, brought their
gold to pay for keeping it up. They were hard-headed men of business,
and the demonstration that schools were better than jails any day
appealed to them as eminently sane and practical.

[Footnote 32: "Year-Book of Elmira State Reformatory," 1901. The
statistics deal with 10,538 prisoners received there in twenty-seven
years. The social stratum whence they came is sufficiently indicated
by the statement that 15.96 per cent were illiterates, and 47.59
percent were able to read and write with difficulty; 32.39 per cent
had an ordinary common school education; 4.06 per cent came out of
high schools or colleges.]

And well it might. The gang is a distemper of the slum that writes upon
the generation it plagues the receipt for its own corrective. It is not
the night stick, though in the acute stage that is not to be dispensed
with. Neither is it the jail. To put the gang behind iron bars affords
passing relief, but it is like treating a symptom without getting at the
root of the