476 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
lent acts are likely to be injurious. Fellow-feeling for comrades may prompt to crimes, collusions, and public disorder.
The same may, properly, be said of prescriptive moral max- ims, generally, and of the possible effects of personal entreaty. Also effort, such as is commonly made to induce a habit of moral introspection, is believed to be a mistaken policy. The state standard of practical reformations is not the product of inward moral contrition; more naturally contrition is consequent on reformation. When reformation is accomplished contrition is useless and often harmful. It was deemed not an encouraging indication when, as occasionally happened, a prisoner on his ad- mission to the reformatory, answering interrogatories, flippantly said: "I am going to reform;" not encouraging, because it showed no real purpose or some vague diverting notion of ref- ormation quite aside from the real thing. The most hopeful response was felt to be when a desire was expressed or felt to learn some trade or income-giving occupation.
Moral suasion and religion are recognized as reformative agencies in our prison system, but no particular niche is pre- scribed for them such as is assigned to other agencies. Moral tone and the religious consciousness are a flavoring quality im- mediately penetrative. It is a savory attribute inherent in and emanative from the humblest as the noblest effort and exercise intended for any betterment.
CONCLUSION
Neither punishment nor precept nor both combined consti- tute the main reliance; but, instead, education by practice — edu- cation of the whole man, his capacity, his habits, and tastes, by a rational procedure whose central motive and law of development is found in the industrial economies.
This is a reversal of the usual contemplative order of effort for reformations — the building of character from the top down, to the modern method which builds from the bottom upward, and the substratum of the structure rests on work.
This better order of procedure is in accord with the method of human development foreshadowed by the allegorical scriptural
