His mother, good hearted but woefully ignorant, made the best of things, taking in washing, doing odd jobs here and there, tending to her children, when opportunity offered, and at other times letting them run the streets.
"There," concludes the social scientist, "is the story of that boy's life. His only picture of manhood is an inefficient father who cannot earn enough to support his family; his concept of a mother expresses itself in good hearted ignorance; his view of society has been secured from the rear of a shabby tenement, the curb of a narrow street and a cell in the county jail. The seed bed has been neither prepared, watered, nor tended, and the young shoot has grown wild."
The social scientist has not been content with an analysis of social maladjustment; going further, he has transplanted the young shoots from the defective seed bed to better ground. Dr. Bernardo organized a system for taking the boy criminals out of the slums of English cities, and sending them to farms in Australia, South Africa and Canada. Nearly 50,000 boys have been thus disposed of. Though in their home cities many of them had already entered a criminal life, in their new surroundings less than two per cent. of them showed any tendency to revert to their former criminal practices. A little tending and transplanting into a congenial environment, proved the salvation of these boys, who would otherwise have thronged the jails of England.
Careful analysis has convinced the social scientist that, in the absence of malformation of the brain, or of some other physical defect, the average man is largely made by his environment. As serious physical defect is quite rare, being present in less than five per cent. of the population; and as only a small percentage of the population, perhaps two or three per cent., is above the average in ability, more than nine-tenths of the people remain average--shaped by their environment; capable of good or of evil, according as the good or evil forces of society influence their youth and early maturity.
The eighteenth century philosophers had embodied the same conclusion in the doctrine that all men are created free and equal. Victor Hugo, in the first half of the nineteenth century, based most of his inspiring novels on the theory that in every man there is a divine spark--a conscience--which will be developed by a good environment or crushed and blackened by a bad one.