PREVENTION OF CRIMINAL IDLENESS. 373 
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still to-day less amused and less talked to than the European child in the 
cradle, and this affects its habits in its seemingly passive condition. 
But observing the large, wondering eyes of our children, comparing, 
seemingly, one object with another, though resting for hours in a peaceful 
and undisturbed condition, proves them quite active in thinking ; and 
while their plastic features indicate restful, harmonious bodily develop- 
ment, their gain of knowledge by means of silent observation and evident 
self-activity is surprising. 
But with the power to walk and speak its condition is suddenly changed, 
and the combined forces of its mental and physical activities break forth 
without limit. The child wants to know and to do everything at once. 
His faithful teacher’s experimental activity and repetition of comparison 
and observation seem too slow now, and it is to the adult that he clings 
in his demands and expectations. What provision is in use to direct and 
satisfy these childish demands ? 
Our houses are not built with nurseries fitted to hold experimental toys ; 
18, for example, a rocking-horse, a nursery-swing, nursery gymnastic tools, 
Australian jumping-chairs, colored ellipsoids to sort and string, and, 
highly important, a sand-table. Neither, in most cases, are nurses often, 
and sometimes not even mothers, capable of answering the questions of 
the child. Our tenement-houses, our hotels, and our own single rooms 
preclude the child from running and jumping. There are very few clean, 
healthy, and attractive yards; no near-by parks where a mother may sit 
to sew while the children play around her knees, as seen in Europe ; no 
private parks open to them ; no school-gardens; no teachers engaged to 
take the truants, as in London, to the gymnastic apparatus found in the 
parks ; and to the museum or other places of learning and interest. 
There are only rare possibilities of excursions in field and forest, where 
seachers can make selections. 
What is the fate of these prevented activities? The children are per- 
verted ; they are driven into those highways of juvenile crime, our streets 
and by-ways, where by eager, idle, practical observation, with a dime novel 
mn each hand and a dime novel in each pocket, their wonderful gifts and 
activities are inch by inch turned into destructive activities, and gradually 
a contempt for labor grows into distorted views and vicious habits of life. 
How to regulate these inborn gifts, how to direct the efforts of the 
republic which is responsible for the prevention of crime as well as the 
cure of it, is the question that confronts us wherever we meet these unfor- 
tunate victims of indifference and neglect. Are there no helping hands 
for them ? Such hands have partly been found in our free kindergarten, 
and whoever doubts the educational value of labor should enter the embryo 
workshop in a well-regulated kindergarten. There is joy, no burden, as 
Professor Hall fears, in every movement of the muscles ; joy, and gradual 
success, and final mastery, and helpfulness and self-reliance, in control of