ir evident improvement and individual circumstances fully bear them
out; and I believe them to be really serious in all they say, and truly
anxious to become honest and respectable. I attribute, in a great
measure, this salutary change to the effects arising in many respects
from the establishment of reformatory schools; but I have more
particularly found that greater advantages have emanated from those
institutions since the parents of the children confined in them have
been made to pay contributions to their maintenance; for it appears
beyond doubt that the effect of the latter has been to induce the
parents of other young criminals to withdraw them from the streets, and,
instead of using them for the purposes of crime, they seem to take an
interest in their welfare. And I know that many of them are now really
anxious to get such employment for their children as will enable them to
obtain a livelihood; and it is my opinion that the example thus set to
older and more desperate criminals, belonging in many instances to the
same family as the juvenile thief, has had the effect of reforming them
also; for many of them have left off their course of crime, and are now
living by honest labor. The result is that serious crime has
considerably decreased in this district, so much so that there were only
six cases for trial at the assizes, whereas, at the previous assizes,
the average number of cases was from twenty-five to thirty, which fact
was made the subject of much comment and congratulation by Mr. Justice
Willes, the presiding judge."

These remarks relate chiefly to the reformatory schools, but we know
that the prevention of crime by education is much easier than its
reformation by the same means. Indeed, it is the result of the
experience of Massachusetts that the necessity for reform schools has in
a large degree arisen from neglect of the public schools. It is stated
in the Tenth Annual Report of the Chaplain of the State Reform School
that of nineteen hundred and nine boys admitted since the establishment
of the institution, thirteen hundred and thirty-four are known to have
been truants. It is also quite probable that the number reported as
truants is really less than the facts warrant. It may not be out of
place to suggest, in this connection, that when a boy sentenced to the
Reform School is known to have been guilty of truancy, if the parents
were subjected to some additional burdens on that account, the cause of