The great mistake committed in most of the attempts which have
been made to introduce a spirit of industry, where habits of
idleness have prevailed, has been the too frequent and improper
use of coercive measures, by which the persons to be reclaimed
have commonly been offended and thoroughly disgusted at the very
out-set.--Force will not do it.--Address, not force, must be used
on those occasions.
The children in the house of industry at Munich, who, being
placed upon elevated seats round the halls where other children
worked, were made to be idle spectators of that amusing scene,
cried most bitterly when their request to be permitted to descend
from their places, and mix in that busy crowd, was refused;--but
they would, most probably, have cried still more, had they been
taken abruptly from their play and FORCED to work.
"Men are but children of a larger growth;"-- and those who
undertake to direct them, ought ever to bear in mind that
important truth.
That impatience of control, and jealousy and obstinate
perseverance in maintaining the rights of personal liberty and
independence, which so strongly mark the human character in all
the stages of life, must be managed with great caution and
address, by those who are desirous of doing good;--or, indeed,
of doing any thing effectually with mankind.
It has often been said, that the Poor are vicious and profligate,
and that THEREFORE nothing but force will answer to make them
obedient, and keep them in order;--but, I should say, that
BECAUSE the Poor are vicious and profligate, it is so much the
more necessary to avoid the appearance of force in the management
of them, to prevent their becoming rebellious and incorrigible.
Those who are employed to take up and tame the wild horses
belonging to the Elector Palatine, which are bred in the forest
near Dusseldorf, never use force in reclaiming that noble animal,
and making him docile and obedient. They begin with making a
great circuit, in order to approach him; and rather decoy than
force him into the situation in which they wish to bring him, and
ever afterwards treat him with the greatest kindness; it having
been found by experience, that ill-usage seldom fails to make him
"a man-hater," untameable, and incorrigibly vicious.--It may,
perhaps, be thought fanciful and trifling, but the fact really
is, that an attention to the means used by these people to gain
the confidence of those animals, and teach them to like their
keepers, their stables, and their mangers, suggested to me many
ideas which I afterwards put in execution with great success, in
reclaiming those abandoned and ferocious animals in human shape,
which I undertook to tame and render gentle and docile.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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