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Marked success from a Reformatory point of view has attended this study, and the men enthusiastically enter upon a new and broader life. The late Prof. S. R. Monks, for twelve years Lecturer at the Reformatory, says: "But does such education contribute to the reformation of the criminal and the protection of the public?" Unqualifiedly and unhesitating I answer, Yes.
At the request of his wife I dined at their house with twenty-five young culprits, whom J.S. has in his Reformatory at Stoke, near Bromsgrove. They came in a van with horses to spend the day. They are all such as have been once or twice in prison, mostly for theft.
In some of the States reformatories have been established to which convicts have been sent under a sort of sliding sentence; that is, with the privilege given to the authorities of the reformatory to retain the offender to the full statutory term for which he might have been sentenced to State prison, unless he had evidently reformed before the expiration of that period.
Whole companies of men have been known to sleep while on the march during an arduous campaign. Cavalrymen and frontiersmen have slept soundly in the saddle during the exhausting campaigns against the Indians. According to the Annual Report of New York State Reformatory, for 1896, drunkenness among the inmates can be clearly traced to no less than 38 per cent of the fathers and mothers only.
The reformatory repeats the prison chaplain's verdict, "weakness, not wickedness," in its own way: "Malevolence does not characterize the criminal, but aversion to continuous labor." If "the street" had been written across it in capital letters, it could not have been made plainer.
Perhaps the greatest longing of all is to be trusted, to feel the strong grip of a hand and hear a voice vibrant with encouragement and assurance say, "I know you can do it." If the greatest successes in reformatory work come today through loving confidence in the one who has started wrong, who can measure the energizing power of such confidence in a life already striving toward the best?
If a man, despairing of work and gaunt with hunger, helps himself to food, it is to the same reformatory agency that he is forthwith subjected. The rough and ready surgery with which we deal with our social patients recalls the simple method of the early physicians.
In each county there might be found, at least, one woman who would write for the papers of that county, or send selections concerning the work, better if one such be found in each union. Very often incidents occur in the reformatory phase of the work the publication of which may have a greater effect on the public mind than the closest reasoning.
Was the editor's inner vision really so curiously astigmatic? "I look at it this way," he said, in a slow, controlled voice. "The Post has said again and again that this legislature must establish a reformatory. That was the burden of a long series of editorials, running back over a year, which, as I thought, had your entire approval.
In all reformatory and benevolent enterprises, especially in the Temperance, Missionary, and Sunday-school departments of Church-work, their success is marvellous, and challenges our highest admiration. Happily no question of competency or worthiness is involved in the question of their eligibility as delegates.
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