Jukes-Edwards: A Study in Education and HeredityWinship, Albert E. (Albert Edward)
History
Jukes-Edwards: A Study in Education and Heredity
Winship, Albert E. (Albert Edward)
Edwards family; Heredity; Juke family
Now the Jukes were almost never of the first or second class. They could
not be criminals that required capital, brains, education or nerve. Even
the kind of pauperism and crime in which they indulged was particularly
disgraceful. This is inevitably true of all classes of people who
combine idleness, ignorance, and vulgarity. They are not even
respectable among criminals and paupers.
There is an honorable pauperism. It is no disgrace to be poor or to be
in a poorhouse if there is a good reason for it. One may be manly in
poverty. But the Jukes were never manly or honorable paupers, they were
weaklings among paupers.
They were a great expense to the state, costing in crime and pauperism
more than $1,250,000. Taken as a whole, they not only did not contribute
to the world's prosperity, but they cost more than $1,000 a piece,
including all men, women, and children, for pauperism and crime.
Those who worked did the lowest kind of service and received the
smallest wages. Only twenty of the 1,200 learned a trade, and ten of
those learned it in the state prison. Even they were not regularly
employed. Men who work regularly even at unskilled labor are generally
honest men and provide for the family. A habit of irregular work is a
species of mental or moral weakness, or both. A man or woman who will
not stick to a job is morally certain to be a pauper or a criminal.
One great benefit of going to school, especially of attending regularly
for eight or ten months each year for nine years or more, is that it
establishes a habit of regularity and persistency in effort. The boy who
leaves school to go to work does not necessarily learn to work steadily,
but often quite the reverse. Few who graduate from a grammar school, or
who take the equivalent course in a rural school, fail to be regular in
their habits of effort. This accounts in part for the fact that few
unskilled workmen ever graduated from a grammar school. Scarcely any of
the Jukes were ever at school any considerable time. Probably no one of
them ever had so much as a completed rural school education.
It is very difficult to find anyone who is honest and industrious, pure
and prosperous, who has not had a fair education, if he ever had the
opportunity, as all children in the United States now have. It is an
interesting fact developed from a study of the Jukes that it is much
easier to reform a criminal than a pauper.
Here are a few facts by way of conclusion. On the basis of the facts
gathered by Mr. Dugdale, 310 of the 1,200 were professional paupers, or
more than one in four. These were in poorhouses or its equivalent for
2,300 years.
Three hundred of the 1,200, or one in four, died in infancy from lack
of good care and good conditions.
There were fifty women who lived lives of notorious debauchery.
Four hundred men and women were physically wrecked early by their own
wickedness.
There were seven murderers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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