PRODIGAL SONS AND DAUGHTERS

“Because of fathers’ sins the cost
Is counted in the children’s blood;
They starve where once they might have stood
Content and strong as bird or bee.” H.H.

“The primary function of social science is to interpret men’s
experience in passing from stage to stage in the evolution of
human values.” ALBION W. SMALL.

“Every wrong-doer should have his due. But what is his due? Can we measure it by his past alone, or is it due any one to regard him as a man having a future as well? As having possibilities for good as well as achievements in bad?” JOHN DEWEY.

“Judge not, that ye be not judged. He that is without sin among
you, let him first cast a stone.” JESUS.

“The Sage is ever the good Saviour of men; he rejects none. For the good men are the instructors of other good men and the bad men are the material for the good men to work upon. The good I would meet with goodness, the not-good I would meet with goodness also.” LAO-TSZE.

“The good man is apt to go right about pleasure and the bad man is apt to go wrong. It is only to the good man that the good presents itself as good, for vice perverts us and causes us to err about the principle of action.” ARISTOTLE.

“I cannot but think that the extreme passion for getting rich, absorbing all the energies of life, predisposes to mental degeneracy, to moral defects, or to outbreaks of insanity in the offspring.” MAUDESLEY.

“Nothing can possibly be conceived in the world or out of it which
can be called good without qualification except a Good
Will.” KANT.

“The object of moral principles is to supply standpoints and methods which will enable the individual to make for himself an analysis of the elements of good and evil in the particular situation in which he finds himself,” JOHN DEWEY.

“I call that mind free which resists the bondage of habit, which does not live on its old virtues, which does not enslave itself to precise rules, but which forgets what is behind, listens for new and higher monitions of conscience, and rejoices to pour itself forth in fresh and higher exertions.” CHANNING.

Who Should Hear Sermons on the Prodigal Son? -  A young woman deeply interested in social service was asked by the warden of a prison to address its fifteen hundred inmates on a Sunday morning when they should be all assembled in Chapel. Hesitating at undertaking such a difficult task, she asked the warden what he would think she should talk about. “Anything you like,” he said, “except this: don’t speak on the prodigal son, for the last fourteen ministers and speakers have read that parable and talked about it.” “Indeed, no,” answered the young woman, “that parable is not for them. They should be taught what is justice to the elder brother and preached to from the text, ’Work out your own salvation.’” It is really a bit difficult to find just the right audience for a preachment on that appealing parable. The harsh-natured fathers who most need its lesson are not likely to be in church when it is read and the tender fathers often need to be stiffened up to work with all the rest of society to make the prodigal behave better; and the elder brothers, the hard-working “sons of Martha,” who have to save in order to pay the taxes for the institutions and agencies that take care of the prodigal, should not have the fact that their sacrifice and service are usually taken as a matter of course unduly emphasized when they meet their fellows.

The fact is that the prodigal, like the genius, is often one who takes life’s practical affairs so lightly that until he is really hungry in the far land whither he has taken himself for pleasures denied at home, he seldom considers how his behavior affects the rest of the family. Moreover, the prodigal is often such a charming and engaging creature that all is forgiven him many times more than is good for his soul, and who, therefore, has many fatted calves set before him in renewed festivals over his repeated home-comings.

Yet, when all is said in the way of caution against overindulgence of the wayward, the one thing about parental love that marks it as the supreme type of affection is the fact that it holds all its own in permanent bond whatever the character of the child or his return for devotion.

Distinction Between the Mentally Competent and Defective in Criminal Class. -  The parent who has a prodigal son or daughter to-day has the benefit of much social wisdom and much educational treatment of the wayward, unknown in the past. In the first place, we are learning to sort out in the criminal and vicious classes those who are mentally responsible and those who may be supposed to be the helpless victims of their instincts and tendencies. If it is true, as one has said, that “the test of sound moral character is that it possesses coherence under liberty and has learned those various arts of adaptation to ever-varying circumstance which make it a working quality, constant, rational, and automatic,” we must perceive the intimate connection between mental power and moral competency. In point of fact, we now know that the overwhelming majority of criminals and constantly vicious persons, in ordinary times when no social hysteria of recent war gives a “crime wave,” come from the mentally feeble or perverted types.

The draft examinations in the Great War gave a shock to all students of social conditions in their revelation of the widespread deficiencies, physical and mental, of young men of our country. Mr. Henry Wysham Lanier, writing on this topic, shows “that out of a total of fifty-four millions of men twenty-six millions were either in the Army or Navy or registered and ready for call,” and that of these “three millions out of thirteen were unfit to serve their country as soldiers.” Nearly three-quarters of a million had some mechanical incapacity, defects in bones, joints, etc. About one-half million had imperfections of sense organs and nearly as many serious troubles of the circulatory system. A third of a million showed nervous and mental incapacity for the soldier’s work. About 300,000 had tuberculosis or severe venereal disease. About the same number had skin or teeth ailments. Altogether, the first severe examinations weeded out as unfit for the service nearly one-third of those who were drafted.

In addition to the revelation of physical and mental defects in the average young manhood of our country, it was found by further examination that five and a half millions of our young men were illiterate. These facts show that in the mass of people from which criminals and vicious people are recruited, large numbers have defects of body, mind, or education, which handicap them in pursuit of an honest living or in the search for helpful pleasures. The step to be taken in order to help the family to deal justly and humanely, but with due response to social duty, with the prodigal sons and daughters, may be briefly outlined as follows:

First and foremost, the weeding out from every field of competitive life those manifestly incapable of holding their own in self-protection and self-support. The unemployable among the unemployed, the hopelessly criminal and vicious who cannot be rescued from their condition, the more permanently backward among the school pupils, the incompetent among parents, and the dead weight of the “born paupers,” all these must somehow be socially carried with least expenditure of social force and at least cost to family stability and family well-being. We have not yet learned to do this, but in every field of social effort the primary need is to see what is the right thing to do. When the ideal is accepted we are already a long way toward learning the lesson of the method to be pursued to carry out the ideal.

Moral Invalids. -  In the second place, when we have really ascertained who among criminals and the habitually vicious, and who among the recipients of “material relief” who are constantly returning for more aid, and who among the unmarried mothers, and who among the dependent children are really feeble-minded or morally imbecile, we must segregate these as fast as we are able to supply the right artificial environment for their weakness and treat them as incurable moral and mental invalids. We must cease to deal with such as with responsible human beings, who might do better if only they would. The “indeterminate sentence” is a step toward such treatment, but it is often rendered wholly futile by being mixed with “reward of shortening term for good behavior in prison.” Good behavior inside prison walls gives no proof of ability to take good care of one’s self outside those walls; it may be only a proof that the moral weakling has to have an external conscience and a strict watch in order to be amenable to even simple rules. The parole system is also liable to great misunderstanding and serious social dangers when it is used without the most scientific knowledge of the mental power of the man or woman concerned, and without utmost care in selection of work-place and living conditions of the paroled prisoner. The essential thing in all social effort to do justice to the wayward is to find out about them and manage for them the essentials of environmental influence. If, as many think, after careful study of large groups of wayward and criminal, more than half, almost two-thirds of those who come before the law for punishment are of less mental capacity than normal children of twelve years of age, then we must take social care of them as we would undertake to do if they were really under twelve. And the parents of prodigal sons and daughters must help with all the might of their parental affection in inspiring and supporting a public opinion to that end.

Rehabilitation of the Competent. -  In the third place, for the one-half to one-third of criminal and habitually vicious left after the mentally incompetent are given proper care, we must use all the rehabilitation methods that society has devised and be more ingenious than we have yet been in adding to them. When such methods as Thomas Mott Osborne used fail, they generally fail because they are applied to those whom we should put under perpetual care, those indicated above as incompetent to life’s demands. To try and make over a nature too weak in fibre to have anything of will or determination to “stitch to” is to have a response only when under constant supervision, and inevitable backslidings follow as soon as self-control is called for.

It is true, however, that many who have gone far wrong make good and reach to a high attainment of character. They are the “occasional criminals,” the “fallen” who met with extraordinary temptation, the too hardly used by fate, the too early exposed to evil influences, the wild natures too strictly curbed by mistaken methods of control, the orphans without parental love and guidance, the victims of broken family life, the “under-dogs” that could not make a way out to successful vocation or to happy human companionship. These occasional criminals among men, and the women or girls leading to sex temptations, may be often saved if so as by fire, and live to help all others to a stronger and better life than they have known. As this book is written the news comes of the death of such a woman in Chinatown of New York slums, a girl who had descended to the depths of vice but who came up at the call of the Salvation Army and spent the life left to her in helping others, such as she had once been, to hear and obey that call. Some men show such power of moral recovery as to put to shame those never tempted to a fall. These prove that mental power and the raw material of character, even after many untoward experiences, may take a fresh start and enable men and women to “rise on stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things.”

The Right Use of Leisure Time. -  In the fourth place, the agencies of social protection of child-life must cooeperate with all parents, whether those parents are wise or foolish, strong or weak, in preventing occasional criminality and preventable vice.

The helpful use of leisure time is a vital factor in the prevention of vice and crime. The pioneer study of “Public Recreation Facilities” in the Annals of the Academy of Political and Social Science of March, 1910, indicates lines of social service in this particular which have been followed to great social advantage.

The Moving Picture. -  The influence of the “movies” is the strongest, the most all-compelling influence to which children have ever been subjected. There has never been an agency that so appealed to all the senses, especially to the eye with its supreme registry of impressions, and we have so far let it play upon child-life with little direction from the educative process. What it is right and helpful to read is not always right and helpful to put upon the stage, with the more vivid and popular appeal to eye and ear and with the lessened opportunity of the drama to explain and soften and balance the presentation of tragedy and evil. What the drama may safely give to the smaller and generally older audiences which it draws may not be suitable from any point of view, either of art or of moral influence, for the coarser and more pronounced representation of the moving picture. There is a place for film presentation that is unique and it may easily become the greatest educational agency in all recreational life. That place, however, seems self-limited to pictures of life that can be imitated without social harm, insofar as very young children are concerned.

Needed Supervision. -  Although much will inevitably be given in the moving pictures which contains incidents that any wise person would not take part in for themselves, the main ideal and the outcome of the situations must be such as to leave a tendency toward good and not toward evil, if children and youth are safely to receive its strong impressions. This is understood by those who are “trying to elevate the moving picture,” but too often the reformers and the educators are so far removed from the main sources of control of any business or art centre that they only brush the outskirts of the agencies that purvey to public amusement and fail to reach any citadel of real control. There is a general uneasiness, however, among many people of all classes, even those usually very easy-going about any social influence, as they read the tales of children testifying in the courts as to their “hold-ups” and their burglaries that they did them “like the movies” they had seen. It is surely true that the next thing we must do is to tame these “movies” and make them work in social harness for the better, and not the worse, in the lives of children and youth. What line of cleavage may be drawn between what the elders may see and what should not be allowed so vividly to impress the younger minds, no one can predict. The recent public announcement of a determination to cleanse and uplift the moving picture business from within its own management is a most hopeful sign. But surely no parent can throw all the blame of any evil influence of a film exhibit upon the managers of a theatre! Where are the parents, and what are they about, that they do not know what pictures their children see and how often they go to any place of amusement?

The Automobile and Its Influence. -  The same thing is true of the automobile, that now so often takes the youth of the well-to-do classes too swiftly away from necessary social safeguarding. The inventors and makers of these machines are not responsible that criminals use them for unprecedented escape from arrest, and boys and girls go to destruction of honor and purity in a whirl of wind and dust. As in all the new inventions and discoveries, we have gained more control over material things than we have yet learned how to use for either our physical or moral good. We shall sober down, no doubt, and learn to wholly profit by the new wonders of motion and of recreation.

Parents Need Social Help in Moral Training of Children. -  Meanwhile, the parents who are trying to make the right atmosphere and secure the right influences for their children have a more difficult task than in any previous time; for the young can so much more easily take on all the new appliances as a part of their daily life and can so swiftly change from old ways to the unaccustomed. Some of the most selfish and cruel of the prodigal sons and daughters of our time find it easy to escape from any parental appeal in the air or by the whirling wheels of the machine or in any of the various ways by which space and time are now annihilated. And “out of sight, out of mind” is true of their psychology. All of which makes it clear that to-day, as in no previous time, we must all stand or fall together. The old home privacy is for the most part gone, the old home isolation wholly departed. All recreation is more and more in the open and appeals at one and the same time to all youth. The standards have to be raised for all or they cannot be held firm for the favored few. Democracy, which aims to make all better, may work to make all cheaper in taste, more vulgar in language, less capable of fine expression of noble ideals, unless a social conscience and a social intelligence take command of the common life.

It is, therefore, to-day, not enough to call upon parents to try and keep their own sons and daughters from the prodigal life, it is a necessity, stronger than ever before, to make the influences which all must share what all careful and wise parents wish for their own children.

This is a mighty task, one that in the United States of America, with its cosmopolitan population, and its multitude of people with a smattering only of education or culture but with economic ability to gratify their undeveloped tastes, is more vast and more pressing than any nation has yet tried to accomplish. While we are working at it we may well comfort ourselves by remembering that each generation has to meet new problems, and that somehow, even when the young start wrong or meet with overwhelming temptations or fail to get at the right time the impulse toward the best which they need, life has them in hand and teaches by experience much which helps them onward. The tendency of life is toward strength and health and goodness and idealistic aims and choice of the best each person knows. It is true, and the best thing in human experience, that what parents cannot do for those they love, life itself does for them, perhaps with needless suffering that the wise and loving parent would have saved them had they but heeded, but with a thoroughness which experience alone can give.

Parental Love for the Black Sheep. -  The attitude of parents toward the black sheep who does not change his ways of evil and does not become a comfort but remains always a burden and sorrow, is one of the saddest and one of the noblest of human exhibits in sympathy and affection. A woman of the finest nature who as a girl was captured in imagination by a man of brilliant quality but of peculiar cruelty and wickedness of nature, and guilty, after their marriage, of many crimes, had two sons. One was like herself and became a man honored by all, and of the greatest help to his mother. The other seemed the image of his father in all ways, personal beauty, brilliant talent, and a naturally depraved character. He landed in prison, sentenced for many years for forgery and long-sustained robbery of a bank. His mother said with truth that she never had had a moment’s relief from the most wearing anxiety until he was safely behind prison bars, where he could no longer torture his young wife or hurt anyone else by his wrong actions. Yet that mother, when he was breaking her heart by his actions and most willing to do it, never failed in love, in patience, in deep understanding of his moral twist and incapacity.

A girl born of ordinarily intelligent and moral parents became a prodigy of sex perversion and the accomplice of thieves and murderers. She gave untold misery to all her family, but the father never gave up his search for her when she left the home and never failed to give her succor and the most tender care when she came back worn and ill, and at last left all other interests in life to snatch her away from bad companions and try to establish her in a new place and a better surrounding.

The story of the prodigal son was taken from life itself; it is the moving story of the one greatest affection of the family bond, that for the bone of bone and the flesh of flesh, the child that needs most the tenderness of the parent, the child that has worn out all other patience and lost all other consideration and has only the claim of its deep need to insure its parent’s service.

Children’s Courts. -  Society has lately become wise and humane enough to establish Children’s Courts for Juvenile Delinquents. These, beginning merely in “Separate Hearings” in Boston Courts, and assuming definite and autonomous form in Chicago, have become more widespread and more inclusive in character. Now we are securing, as by a recent State Law in New York, the County Courts for children, in which the limitations of local sentiment and neighborhood reluctance to testify of family conditions are surmounted and yet the near-at-hand interest in the children is preserved.

All modern philanthropy tends toward dealing with wayward boys and girls as those who need and should have not punishment but education, necessary but kindly restraint, protection from bad surroundings and training toward self-support. To this we are adding Domestic Relations Courts dealing with juvenile delinquents not, as some one has said, “so as to punish parents for the wrong-doing of their children,” but rather as indicating the recognition of the fact that one member of the family cannot be “saved” without an effort to save all the other members, and that in the family relationship there are permanent bonds that courts should recognize and seek to enforce and make more helpful to every individual concerned.

Domestic Relations Courts. -  When the history of cases coming before either Children’s Courts or Domestic Relations Courts is studied, certain facts of social condition stand out prominently as causes for juvenile delinquency. First of all, the broken family, one in which there has been separation of father and mother, is a cause of child-neglect and consequent wrong-doing. The death of either parent, also, is often the cause of such unhappiness or privation in the home as to induce disobedience to law and bring the child before a court. The lack of employment by the father or his too low wages, which reduces the family income dangerously and makes the mother attempt to be both breadwinner and care-taker of the home, and hence lessens family comfort and sends the children on the streets for amusement, is also a cause often appearing as a reason for delinquency. The evils of housing congestion, too many families living in one building or in one neighborhood without chance for privacy, choice of companionship or household arrangements conservative of domestic virtue or happiness, these evils constitute a heavy indictment of society in the returns of Children’s Courts. The complex problems which the immigrant faces, with his children early learning the language of the country to which he has come, while it is to him a sealed book, are responsible for much juvenile delinquency. Jacob Riis has told us, in compelling description, the story of the evolution of the “gang” and of the “tough” from the children of parents who, well-meaning and in their own ancestral land capable of parental control, here lose command of the family life because the children have to become the interpreters and representatives of the family in the new country to a degree that reverses the natural order of dependence and direction in the family life, and gives the children undue power of leadership in family affairs. As Professor Cooley wisely says, “It is freedom to be disciplined in as rational a manner as you are tit for.” We might give the converse of this truth in the statement that it is not freedom but dangerous tendency toward anarchy and disaster to be called upon for rational decisions in advance of our intelligence and will-power, and a tragedy to lose the habit-drill of parental control in the period of life when that is a necessary foundation for wisdom in independent choice. The child of the immigrant often lands in the Children’s Court not because he is bad or stupid or even mischievous by nature, but because he is too early forced by circumstances into a position of command and of unrestricted choice in action, due to the ease with which the young can learn new ways and the difficulty of the old in mastering strange language and manners.

Dangerous Rebound from Ancient Family Discipline. -  Again, the Children’s and the Domestic Relations Courts bear testimony to the fact that to-day we are in a rebound from inherited forms of discipline of children and youth which have given to all, immigrant and native-born alike, a feeling that society exists for their benefit and that they owe nothing to society in return. The very standardization of child-care by public demand, in matters of health and education, of free books and free recreation and free music and free parks and playgrounds and even free lunches in schools, and free baths and medical and nursing care all that is increasingly called for and provided out of the public purse for the nurture and development of child-life tend toward giving children and youth the idea that the world belongs to them.

The old crushing and often cruel pressure of older life upon the young is happily gone. The new ideals of education, within the school and the home, which emphasize the right of each human being to its own development into a unique, a free and a happy personality, are ideals that must grow in realization more and more if we are to have fit people for making democracy work toward the rule of the best. It is, however, profoundly true that we have gone farther in demand for and effort toward individual freedom than we have in any translation of the old social pressure upon the individual conscience and life to assume social obligations and bear them worthily and usefully. There is a dry rot at the core of any class or any nation which turns its inmost psychology toward what it can get from life without regard to what it should give back to life. Too many children and youth in conditions in which, happily, the old despotism of age is outgrown, have unhappily missed the old sense of obligation and old call to service which the earlier forms of family and school discipline implanted in all responsive natures.

Do Modern Youth Need New Community Disciplines? -  There is abundant evidence that William James was profoundly right when he suggested a need in youth for some required devotion to “the collectivity that owns us,” some “moral equivalent for war” and the military drill of older forms of civic order. When the Athenian youth took his oath of devotion to the city of his birth, he signalized his coming of age and expressed the ideal of service of each to all and all to each. This is not the place for detailed discussion of what is lacking in modern training of American Youth analogous in spirit and effect to this classic custom. It must be insisted, however, as we discuss the conditions that make for juvenile delinquency, among the children and youth otherwise normal and capable of useful life, that we have not done all that democracy demands when we have made children healthy, sent them to tax-supported schools, prevented them from too early earning at “gainful occupations,” and instituted all manner of recreative and stimulating provisions for their free use. We must also give them some sense of what Seneca meant when he said, “We are all members of one great body; remember that each was born for the good of all.” We must also burn deep into the consciousness of youth in some fashion that shall be through our modern mechanisms as effective as were the old “Fraternities” of primitive life, and as are still the outworn but persistent forms of military discipline, that idea of subordination of private whim to public well-being which lies at the base of all true and ordered social advance. The Children’s Courts are a response to the effort of society to give each child a fair chance in life. There are needed, also, devices of education and of compulsory social service and social obedience which may tend to give society a fair deal from every adult.

Prodigal sons and daughters, therefore, who are abnormal, weak, morally invalid, must be cared for in the way easiest and best for the social whole. Parents must help and not hinder in that task.

Prodigal sons and daughters who are normal save for some accidental divergence from legal or actual right-doing must be helped to come back into the line of social usefulness. And, above all, the facts of juvenile delinquency should give us impetus, strong and intelligent, toward a social and family discipline that shall make freedom and happiness of childhood a way to social order and never a pathway toward social degeneracy or personal wrong-doing.

QUESTIONS ON PRODIGAL SONS AND DAUGHTERS

1. What has been the general trend of social ideal and practice in the treatment of the criminal and the vicious?

2. What part has the family played in restraint of evil tendency or in responsibility before the law for offences against social order?

3. What part should the family now play in these vital social matters?

4. What is "sentimentality" and what is "justice" in dealing with the prodigal?

5. What can be done through physical and mental examinations, by experts, of all children, to prevent development of criminality, vice, and waywardness?

6. In 1724 the English law held any one legally responsible for action subversive of law and order unless he was "totally deprived of his understanding and memory and doth not know what he is doing, no more than an infant, than a brute or a wild beast." Since 1843, the criterion of responsibility under the law is "knowledge of what is right or wrong in the particular case." Following the same line of change, our statutes now ask, in addition, if the person on trial is generally competent to understand and to obey social rules of conduct. Is this trend toward the lessening or toward the increase of crime and vice?

7. What does social well-being require shall be done for and with those proved incapable of social habits?

8. Head "The Socially Inadequate; How Shall We Designate and Sort Them?" by Harry H. Laughlin, Carnegie Institution, Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, in American Journal of Sociology, July, 1921. This is an attempt to introduce a blanket term under which feeble-minded; insane; criminalistic, including delinquent and wayward; epileptic; inebriate, including drug habitues; diseased, including tuberculous, lepers, and others with chronic infectious diseases; blind, including all of seriously impaired vision; deaf, including those with seriously impaired hearing; deformed, including the crippled; and dependent, including orphans, old folks, soldiers and sailors in "homes," chronic charity-aided folk, paupers, and ne'er-do-wells, may be listed. This article attempts to make a classification inclusive, yet subject to minute subheading, which may make reports more definite in listing human beings.

Is such an attempt wise, and if so, how would each member of this group classify the "socially inadequate?"