In few aspects of this theme do conceptions of and practises in regard to adolescence need more radical reconstruction. A mere accident of circumstance often condemns to criminal careers youths capable of the highest service to society, and for a mere brief season of temperamental outbreak or obstreperousness exposes them to all the infamy to which ignorant and cruel public opinion condemns all those who have once been detected on the wrong side of the invisible and arbitrary line of rectitude. The heart of criminal psychology is here; and not only that, but I would conclude with a most earnest personal protest against the current methods of teaching and studying ethics in our academic institutions as a speculative, historical, and abstract thing. Here in the concrete and saliently objective facts of crime it should have its beginning, and have more blood and body in it by getting again close to the hot battle line between vice and virtue, and then only, when balanced and sanified by a rich ballast of facts, can it with advantage slowly work its way over to the larger and higher philosophy of conduct, which, when developed from this basis, will be a radically different thing from the shadowy phantom, schematic speculations of many contemporary moralists, taught in our schools and colleges.
[Footnote 1: Problematische Kindesnaturen. Eine Studie für Schule und Haus. Voigtländer, Leipzig, 1889.]
[Footnote 2: Die pädagogische Pathologie in der Erziehungskunde des 19 Jahrhunderts. Bertelsman, Gütersloh, 1893, p. 494.]
[Footnote 3: Peculiar and Exceptional Children. Pedagogical Seminary, October, 1896, vol. 4, pp. 3-60.]
[Footnote 4: La Puberté. Schleicher Frères, Paris, 1902, p. 72.]
[Footnote 5: Home and School Punishments. Pedagogical Seminary, March, 1899, vol. 6, pp. 159-187.]
[Footnote 6: A Study of the Faults of Children. Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1903, vol. 10, p. 200 _et seq._]
[Footnote 7: The Child and the Weather, by Edwin G. Dexter. Pedagogical Seminary, April, 1898, vol. 5, pp. 512-522.]
[Footnote 8: Psychic Effects of the Weather, by J.S. Lemon. American Journal of Psychology, January, 1894, vol. 6, pp. 277-279.]
[Footnote 9: Truancy as Related to the Migrating Instinct, by L.W. Kline. Pedagogical Seminary, January, 1898, vol. 5, pp. 381-420.]