CRIPPLED AND DEFORMED CHILDREN.

BY DR. W. B. PLATT, BALTIMORE, MD.

In the wards of the Robert Garrett Hospital for Children in Baltimore we have treated during the past five years over eleven hundred children suffering with various diseases. About one-third of that number were in the hospital for the treatment of some disabling deformity; spinal caries, hip-joint disease, "white swelling," and club-foot being the most frequent. This is in addition to something over eleven thousand visits made to the dispensary connected with the hospital.

Every one of these diseases, as long as it is progressive, disables the patient. He becomes temporarily dependent upon others, often beyond the time when he might be earning the meagre living which suffices for the laboring classes. If his disease or deformity is not cured, he frequently becomes a permanent charge upon the taxpayers of the State.

The direct annual cost of a patient at the public charge is not less than $80 per year for proper care. The real loss is far greater

than this, since we must consider the value of his labor to the State, which is entirely lost, and the value of the labor of those who are employed in caring for him, and who would otherwise be adding to, and not consuming, the resources of the State. Apart from the standpoint of political economy, the crippled and deformed should. especially appeal to the good offices of the State as among the most promising of all its wards.

The great majority of these patients are children, with the possibilities of a good or evil career still open; and the direction of their course is determined by the attitude of the public toward them. If early and proper attention be given, a good subject may result; if not, probably a pauper, perhaps a criminal.

During the period they are under hospital observation they may be brought under good moral influences with great ease, and taught the excellence of earning their own support, the beauty of truth for its own sake, the meanness of lying and deception, and the desirability of personal cleanliness.

These things may be taught so as to leave an indelible impression with practical results.

All kinds of people ought not to have access to dependent children in public institutions. A chosen few, blessed with tact, character, and inherent goodness, should have the entire supervision of such instruction, after which the catechism may be added, but not before.

The well-meant efforts of religious teachers is supposed to comprehend all these; but the practical results show them to be ineffective by themselves in making self-supporting, self-controlled, and respectable citizens. The State should provide special means for educating the crippled and deformed, who are necessarily unable to keep up in their studies with healthy children, although they are able to go about to some extent. This should be done by a corps of paid visiting teachers, to give such instruction as these children are able to receive while still in the hospital undergoing treatment.

In this way the two years or less which are spent in institutions for treatment might be much less an absolute loss of time than it is at present. The younger children could all be taught to read and write, and the older ones learn the rudiments of accounts, taught sewing, typewriting, shorthand, and telegraphy, sedentary occupations for which they are best fitted by reason of their physical disability. A most important item is some provision by the State for orthopedic appliances; and a sum not to exceed $20 per year for two years should be allowed for each patient, to be drawn upon by proper vouchers, to provide such apparatus and appliances for the treatment of their deformities, and for the necessary repairs which must be made.

XIII.

Delinquent Children.

THE DUTY OF THE STATE TO DELINQUENT

CHILDREN.

ABSTRACT OF ADDRESS, BY P. CALDWELL,

SUPERINTENDENT LOUISVILLE INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL OF REFORM.

The separation of the delinquent from the dependent child, for purposes of classification under existing plans of this Conference, I must confess involves some difficulty to me. I have accustomed myself to regard the child generally classed as delinquent as singularly and pitifully dependent. I have had many nominally dependent children under my care, who possessed all the characteristics of the so-called delinquent.

If there be such a difference between these two classes of children as to cause this Conference to consider them under two separate heads for public discussion, is it not important and natural to ask, What is the difference? Is the difference one of months or years, or is it only a legal one, or is it a physical or a moral difference? When the State puts the child into the scales, what is it that turns the balance, and marks the one a delinquent and the other a dependent child?

I do not hold childhood or youth responsible for its moral condition unless it has had the advantage of proper moral direction. An educated conscience must exist as a condition precedent to the condition of delinquency.

Coincidentally, a baby prince and a gutter child are born. What grand possibilities are embraced in these unshaped characters! They know nothing experimentally of the evils of sin or blessedness of virtue. In their uncorrupted innocence they stand for all we here below ever have of heavenly foretaste. The one is a child ar

rayed in raiment of exterior loveliness, the other a little neglected urchin of the gutter. How disposed we are to bestow admiration on the tinsel and contribute our share to the neglect of the neglected! Take that child for a moment from the hands of its white-capped nurse and uplift the other from the gutter, with sweet tenderness of touch and word, and place them side by side, and you shall surely see a heavenly likeness of mutual innocence. Who shall nominate the line of division between two such children in their ultimate relation to society? The one returns to the care of its nurse, the other to the neglect of which it is the victim. The nurse and parents, with such time as they can spare from important social functions, care for the one. Who cares for the other? Who should care? Surely, the aggregated assemblage of individual units which constitute society. Does it care? If at all, quite inadequately.

Meet the two children presently, and you shall see a shocking and startling change of conditions. The one, with nurse still attending, will be a goody-goody little fellow; and the other, despoiled of all those precious Heaven-bestowed endowments which are so essential to a career of future usefulness and prosperity, is now a veritable little tough of the slums, who, in defiant protest against non-understandable differences, snatches an apple from the fruit-stand, and runs off with it into the arms of a policeman, and presently to the reform school. Where was the gutter child's nurse during all the time leading up to this event? Oh, it was there all the time, there in its character and title as a State,- a State preferring to await opportunity to punish rather than embrace a chance of prevention.

And so, as the separating years between innocence and maturity elapse, the one naturally drifts into college, and the other quite as naturally into the reform school or the penitentiary. And then people begin to care, and organize themselves into societies for his scarcely possible reformation.

They are the same people who passed him by in the street with supreme non-recognition when, as a toddler, he dabbled his little. feet in the gutter with a larcenous intention against the apple-basket of the grocer across the street. Oh, why cannot the world awake to the claims of childhood? The world needs good men and good women so much. We have the material for their development always with us. Why, then, can we not have universal and con

centrated efforts for the protection of all children by the State, when neglected by natural guardians?

The problem of the delinquent child will only be really solved when organized society is taught to understand that actual cash economy, wholly apart from moral considerations, is better achieved by the expenditure of one hundred dollars for a child's intellectual and moral betterment than by the direct and indirect outlay of thousands for its detection and punishment.

No person practically familiar with criminal statistics will be found to maintain that either the reform or suppression of the vicious bears any reasonable ratio to the lavish expenditures annually made for these purposes, or that attained results by any means approximate the possible ones.

In whatever measure this discrepancy between effort and achievement exists, statesmanship has failed in its most important direction.

Since the combined police, judicial, and correctional systems, each sustained by all the wealth and power of the State, fail to accomplish much more than the overcrowding of rapidly multiplying prisons, penitentiaries, workhouses, and reformatories, it is evident that they alone are unequal to the great social problem. Where, then, are we to seek for the point of fatal weakness and deficiency?

To my mind, the best, most needed, and effective remedy is wellconsidered and wisely executed measures to properly control and direct the training of juveniles evidently or probably destined to criminal courses through vicious inheritance, environments, and lack of suitable guardianship.

The primary line of endeavor must certainly be with neglected and evil-associated children. No student of penology will deny that, while merchants and mechanics, inventors and scholars, bankers and doctors, lawyers and preachers, may find their way into prisons, they are mainly tenanted by the offspring of the slums, the recruiting ground and training place of all sorts of vice.

The world to-day needs a mighty apostle of the gospel of childsaving,― John the Baptist, crying in the wilderness, with a purpose and a power to teach the people that the cost of child-saving, however great, is an investment at compound interest, continuing through all coming time. Society must be taught that the comprehensive, all including care of its youth is the permanent means, by which alone its well-being and general interest can be secured.