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 discharge regain him by virtue of parental authority. This indiscretion of evil parents ... is the way that the first-fruits of correctional or charitable education are corrupted and that a great many minors who would have become useful members of society, are definitely lost to it." It may be heresy to criticise our public school system but it is more than an open question whether we are not producing a generation of badly educated people who are not aware of their own ignorance, who see no dignity in labour and who prefer to make their living by speculation rather than by work. The fault largely consists in estimating the efficiency of a school or a teacher solely by the results obtained at examination and making the children work for this end and this end only. Their memories are taxed to the uttermost but no attempt is made to develop them into reasoning, enquiring and labour loving beings. The difficulty with which children in the sixth and seventh standards follow the simplest arguments is simply amazing. The teachers, moreover, have no opportunity for cultivating the art of pedagogy. Their whole time is taken up preparing matter to pour into the child's mind. The bad salaries that are paid can also have but one result, viz., the depriving the State of the services of the most manly and most noble teachers and having the work committed to those of the genus prig. Bad homes, bad schools and playgrounds only once removed from cattle yards, will be, in this country, the most potent factors in producing crime.