Crime and Education

I offer no apology for entreating the attention of the readers of
The Daily News to an effort which has been making for some three
years and a half, and which is making now, to introduce among the
most miserable and neglected outcasts in London, some knowledge of
the commonest principles of morality and religion; to commence their
recognition as immortal human creatures, before the Gaol Chaplain
becomes their only schoolmaster; to suggest to Society that its duty
to this wretched throng, foredoomed to crime and punishment,
rightfully begins at some distance from the police office; and that
the careless maintenance from year to year, in this, the capital
city of the world, of a vast hopeless nursery of ignorance, misery
and vice; a breeding place for the hulks and jails: is horrible to
contemplate.

This attempt is being made in certain of the most obscure and
squalid parts of the Metropolis, where rooms are opened, at night,
for the gratuitous instruction of all comers, children or adults,
under the title of RAGGED SCHOOLS. The name implies the purpose.
They who are too ragged, wretched, filthy, and forlorn, to enter any
other place: who could gain admission into no charity school, and
who would be driven from any church door; are invited to come in
here, and find some people not depraved, willing to teach them
something, and show them some sympathy, and stretch a hand out,
which is not the iron hand of Law, for their correction.

Before I describe a visit of my own to a Ragged School, and urge the
readers of this letter for God's sake to visit one themselves, and
think of it (which is my main object), let me say, that I know the
prisons of London well; that I have visited the largest of them more
times than I could count; and that the children in them are enough
to break the heart and hope of any man. I have never taken a
foreigner or a stranger of any kind to one of these establishments
but I have seen him so moved at sight of the child offenders, and so
affected by the contemplation of their utter renouncement and
desolation outside the prison walls, that he has been as little able
to disguise his emotion, as if some great grief had suddenly burst
upon him. Mr. Chesterton and Lieutenant Tracey (than whom more
intelligent and humane Governors of Prisons it would be hard, if not
impossible, to find) know perfectly well that these children pass
and repass through the prisons all their lives; that they are never
taught; that the first distinctions between right and wrong are,
from their cradles, perfectly confounded and perverted in their
minds; that they come of untaught parents, and will give birth to
another untaught generation; that in exact proportion to their
natural abilities, is the