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Page 31
What is true with respect to destitution is that it compels women to
remain in the deplorable life they have adopted, but it seldom or
never drives them to take to it. Almost all the best authorities are
agreed upon this point. No one has examined this social sin in all its
bearings with such patience and exhaustiveness as Parent Duchatelet,
and his deliberate opinion, after years of investigation, is that its
origin lies in the character of the individual, in vanity, in
slothfulness, in sex. It does not, however, follow that a person
possessing these characteristics in an abnormal degree is bound to
fall. If such a person is protected by parental care, no evil results
need necessarily ensue. It is when low instincts are combined with a
bad home that the worst is to be feared. This fact was clearly and
emphatically brought to light by the parliamentary inquiry which took
place in France a few years ago. M. Th. Roussel, one of the highest
authorities on the committee, the man, in fact, from whom the inquiry
derived its name, thus sums up some of its results: "However large a
part in the production of prostitution must be allowed to the love of
pleasure and of finery, to a dislike of work and to debased instincts,
the cause which, according to the facts cited, appears everywhere as
the most powerful and the most general, is the want of a home, the
want of maternal care." Here are some of the facts on which M. Roussel
bases his general statement. "At Bordeaux, out of 600 'filles
inscrites' 98 were minors. Of the latter, 44 appear to have fallen
through their own fault alone. The remaining 54 grew up under
abnormal, domestic conditions; 14 were orphans, without father or
mother, 7 had only one parent, 32 had been abandoned or perverted by
their parents."
In England it would be impossible to conduct a parliamentary inquiry
on the lines of the "Enqu�te Roussel," but it is very probable if such
an inquiry were instituted it would reveal a condition of things very
similar to what exists in France. The scattered and fragmentary
information we do possess points to that conclusion, and the
conclusion, it must be admitted, is not at all a hopeful or comforting
one. Supposing that all the homeless and deserted female children we
have now in our midst were immediately placed under the protection of
the State (as a matter of fact, most of them are), it does not follow
that they will grow up to lead regular lives. According to the
thirty-second report of the Inspector of Reformatory and Industrial
Schools, the authorities are unable to account satisfactorily for the
character of more than four fifths of the inmates of girls' industrial
schools who have left these institutions on an average for two or
three years. That is to say, it is probable that about twenty out of
every hundred girls go to the bad within two or three years of leaving
an industrial school. The proportion of girls discharged from
reformatory schools, whose character is bad within two years of their
discharge, is still larger than in the case of industrial schools.
This is only what might be expected, for it is the worst cases that
are now sent to reformatory schools. "Since the passing of the
Elementary Education Act," said Miss Nicoll of the Girls' Reformatory,
Hampstead, at the Fourth Conference of the National Association of
certified Reformatory and Industrial Schools, "a great change has
gradually been made in the character and age of the inmates of our
reformatories on admission. The School Boards in the country, and more
especially the School Board of London, by enforcing compulsory
attendance of all the children of the poor between the ages of five
and thirteen, have swept into what are termed Truant Schools all the
neglected and uncontrollable children who were formerly sent to
certified industrial schools--these latter being now retained in a
great measure for children who, besides being neglected and beyond the
control of their parents, have either taken their first steps in a
course of crime, or have, by association with vicious companions,
become familiar with it. The industrial schools have thus intercepted
the very class from which our numbers were usually drawn, leaving, as
a rule, for reformatories, girls about fifteen, who, though nominally
under fifteen, are sometimes a good deal older when admitted. Young
persons, as these are termed in the Summary Jurisdiction Acts of 1879,
are of a much more hardened character than before, and in addition to
having been guilty of acts of petty larceny, have frequently been
prostitutes for some time anterior to their admission. This being so,
it can hardly be wondered at if the success of reformatories is not so
marked as it was when they were first instituted."
Seeing that reformatories for girls, on account of the more hardened
character of their inmates on admission, are not so successful as
industrial schools, it is certainly within the mark to say that at
least one-fourth of the cases discharged from these institutions
become failures in the space of two years. If the proportion is so
high at the end of two years, what will it amount to at the end of
five? It is then that the young person enters upon what is _par
excellence_ the criminal age, and when that age is reached, I fear
that the proportion of failures increases considerably. In any case we
have sufficient data to show that the protection of the State, when
extended, as it is in the United Kingdom, to helpless and homeless
girls, does not in many instances suffice to keep them on the road of
virtue. Deep-seated instincts manage to assert themselves in spite of
the most careful training, the most vigilant precautions, and until
the moral development of the population, as a whole, reaches a higher
level, it will be vain to hope too much from the labours of State
institutions, however excellent these institutions may be.
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