e been reared amidst evil surroundings whose influence
you could not resist, you are a criminal, an outcast from society, you
must be punished by being locked up in a school of crime in the hope
that it may inspire you to live a better life. The sentence of the court
is ..." And society endorses this attitude!

The evil influence of bad surroundings is well exemplified by an
instance recorded by Viscount D'Haussonville in his work "L'Enfance a
Paris":--"Some years ago a band of criminals were brought before the
jury of the Seine charged with a terrible crime, the assassination of an
aged widow, with details of ferocity which the pen refuses to describe.
The president of the court having asked the principal, Maillot, called
'the yellow,' how he had been brought to commit such a crime, he
replied:--What do you wish that I should tell you Mr President? Since
the age of seven years I have been found only on the streets of Paris. I
have never met anyone who was interested in me. When a child, I was
abandoned to every vicissitude--and I am lost. I have always been
unfortunate. My life has been passed in prisons and gaols. That is all.
It is my fate. I have reached--you know where. I will not say that I
have committed the crime under circumstances independent of my own will,
but finally--(here the voice of Maillot trembled) I never had a person
to advise me. I had in view only robbery. I committed robbery but I
ended with murder."

The following description of the manner in which parents may defeat the
work of the juvenile reformatory or industrial school was given by
Senator Roussel at the Fourth International Prison Congress:--"The
pernicious influence of parents relative to minors is manifest in two
ways and at two periods of the child's life. First in extreme youth,
when he is only a burden, his parents neglect him. He is left without
proper care, often without proper food and subjected to all the hazards
of the streets; he is forced to be a vagabond and a beggar, and this
situation continues until a violation of the law places the little
unfortunate in the hands of justice. Later, everything is changed. When
by maturity of age and good effects of penitentiary education, the child
instead of being a burden can be a source of profit, we see those same
parents, who had abandoned him in his infancy, and apparently had
forgotten him altogether, go to him and win him back to them by their
entreaties, and finally on his dischar