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Page 3
The Jukes rarely married foreign-born men or women, so that it may be
styled a distinctively American family. The almost universal traits of
the family were idleness, ignorance, and vulgarity. They would not work,
they could not be made to study, and they loved vulgarity. These
characteristics led to disease and disgrace, to pauperism and crime.
They were a disgustingly diseased family as a whole. There were many
imbeciles and many insane. Those of "the Jukes" who tended to pauperism
were rarely criminal, and those who were criminal were rarely paupers.
The sick, the weak, and goody-goody ones were almost all paupers; the
healthy, strong ones were criminals.
It is a well-known fact in sociology that criminals are of three
classes: First, those who direct crime, the capitalists in crime, who
are rarely arrested, who seldom commit any crime, but inspire men to
crime in various ways. These are intelligent and have to be educated to
some extent. They profit by crime and take slight risks.
Second, those who commit heroic crimes and find some satisfaction in the
skill and daring required. Safe-breaking, train robbery, and some types
of burglary require men of ability and pluck, and those who do these
things have a species of pride in it.
Third, those who commit weak and imbecile crimes, which mark the doer as
a sneak and a coward. These men rob hen roosts, waylay helpless women
and old men, steal clothing in hallways, and burn buildings. They are
always cowardly about everything they do, and never have the pluck to
steal chickens even until they are half drunk. They often commit murder,
but only when they are detected in some sneaking crime and shoot because
they are too cowardly to face their discoverer.
Now the Jukes were almost never of the first or second class. They could
not be criminals that required capital, brains, education or nerve. Even
the kind of pauperism and crime in which they indulged was particularly
disgraceful. This is inevitably true of all classes of people who
combine idleness, ignorance, and vulgarity. They are not even
respectable among criminals and paupers.
There is an honorable pauperism. It is no disgrace to be poor or to be
in a poorhouse if there is a good reason for it. One may be manly in
poverty. But the Jukes were never manly or honorable paupers, they were
weaklings among paupers.
They were a great expense to the state, costing in crime and pauperism
more than $1,250,000. Taken as a whole, they not only did not contribute
to the world's prosperity, but they cost more than $1,000 a piece,
including all men, women, and children, for pauperism and crime.
Those who worked did the lowest kind of service and received the
smallest wages. Only twenty of the 1,200 learned a trade, and ten of
those learned it in the state prison. Even they were not regularly
employed. Men who work regularly even at unskilled labor are generally
honest men and provide for the family. A habit of irregular work is a
species of mental or moral weakness, or both. A man or woman who will
not stick to a job is morally certain to be a pauper or a criminal.
One great benefit of going to school, especially of attending regularly
for eight or ten months each year for nine years or more, is that it
establishes a habit of regularity and persistency in effort. The boy who
leaves school to go to work does not necessarily learn to work steadily,
but often quite the reverse. Few who graduate from a grammar school, or
who take the equivalent course in a rural school, fail to be regular in
their habits of effort. This accounts in part for the fact that few
unskilled workmen ever graduated from a grammar school. Scarcely any of
the Jukes were ever at school any considerable time. Probably no one of
them ever had so much as a completed rural school education.
It is very difficult to find anyone who is honest and industrious, pure
and prosperous, who has not had a fair education, if he ever had the
opportunity, as all children in the United States now have. It is an
interesting fact developed from a study of the Jukes that it is much
easier to reform a criminal than a pauper.
Here are a few facts by way of conclusion. On the basis of the facts
gathered by Mr. Dugdale, 310 of the 1,200 were professional paupers, or
more than one in four. These were in poorhouses or its equivalent for
2,300 years.
Three hundred of the 1,200, or one in four, died in infancy from lack
of good care and good conditions.
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