13 JUNE 1903, Page 10

THE CHILD CRIMINAL.

THE case of the ten-year-old boy, Patrick Knowles, who stands charged with the murder of a fifteen-months-old baby is a striking and hideous story, although doubtless not

unique in the annals of the Criminal Courts. According to the report, the boy was arrested in the act of taking another baby, aged nineteen months, to the banks of a stream, with the presumed object of drowning her; and since his arrest he has confessed that he is guilty of the murder with which he is charged. He says that he took the first-mentioned child to a heap of loose sand on the site of some old iron-works on the outskirts of the town of Stockton-on-Tees, and buried him alive. " I pulled the dirt on to him with my hands. He was crying and kicking. He tried to get up, and I put some bricks on him and a big piece of stone. I then left him and went home." That is the boy's confession, made seemingly with all candour and without realisation of what it all means.

There appears to be no valid reason for doubting the truth of the boy's statement. If that statement is true, he, at the age of ten years, has deli berately taken human life without, apparently, any other motive than the desire to kill. How can such a thing happen ? How does it come about that an English boy, at an age when most children think about very little that is not innocent, can have been urged by so devilish an impulse as to take pleasure in the death of a helpless baby?

That is the hideous part of the case,—the suggestion of the gratification of a terrible desire, which compels the idea of mania. For it is only the mind of the maniac to which such desires present themselves. It is true that many young boys at the age of fourteen or fifteen behave in a manner quite at variance with the characteristics noticeable before or after that age. Naturally honest and straightforward boys have been known at the age of fourteen or fifteen to lie and to steal ; and nearly all boys in this transition stage of their lives are more cruel, both to animals and to their fellow-creatures, than when they were younger or have become older. But that tendency towards cruelty works out, as a general rule, in what may be called normal directions. The body is growing faster than the mind, and with the increasing growth of the body the animal side of the boy's nature is insistent. When the growth of the body is slow, or when it is matured, the tendency of the mind is to be gentler in proportion.

What view, then, is to be taken of exceptional cases such as this ? Should the fact that a ten-year-old boy is charged with the crime of deliberate murder be regarded merely as an extraordinary fact to be chronicled in the notebooks of criminologists ? Should the boy be sentenced to imprison- ment of some kind ? and when once sentence has been passed, should the community decide that all has been done which ought to be done ? There is surely a broader and a nobler answer to the question than that. The fact that a young English boy can commit a diabolical murder is an indict- ment of the community itself. It is, comparatively speaking, an unimportant matter to decide precisely what amount of moral blame attaches to the boy, and what should be his punishment. The main fact is that, while it is inconceivable that a ten-year-old child born and brought up under healthy, happy, and safe conditions would ever desire to commit murder—what self-respecting English parent would admit that it could be possible for his own child to be guilty of such a crime ?—a boy born and brought up under other conditions confesses that he has murdered deliberately. And what are, or what may have been, those other conditions ? They are not, unfortunately, difficult to realise, hard as it may be to grasp the possibility of their reaction in so horrible a manner upon a young mind. The boy Patrick Knowles was a match- seller, and got his living in the streets. Whether or not his parents are known, or exercised any kind of authority over him, has not been made evident,—those details, of course, do not form a subject for present discussion. But it is im- possible that attention should not be drawn once more with insistence—the difficulty of the whole question may be ad- mitted, but the crying necessity for reform is periodically emphasised by cases such as this—to the surroundings in which the poor of our crowded cities live, and the miserable education in crime literally enforced on their children. Whole families crowded into single rooms, eulogised if described as piggeries; lack of proper food, want of air, disregard of any form of cleanliness or proper sanitation; the cursings of the street brawler underneath the windows ; probably a drunken father, perhaps a drunken motber,—what chance has the city child born and brought up under conditions such as those of becoming a decent and useful citizen ? To any one, indeed, contrasting the conditions under which the children of the very poor live and move during the most impressionable stage of their existence with the care with which richer and more fortunate parents try to protect their children from evil, the thing to wonder at must he that there is not more crime and worse crime prevalent among them, and that so many of the children of the very poor do grow up into good men and women. To take but one answer that can be given to-day to the question : " Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth ? "—there is the record of battlefields abroad. Many British generals have had less cause to be proud of their troops than those who have led into action regiments recruited from the slums of London.'

That thought suggests at least one remedy for some of the worst evils caused by the crowding into the towns of the men and women who in other days would have lived happier, if more ignorant, on the land that is still waiting for their return. It may not be possible to bring into effect, or even to suggest, drastic measures to solve the problem of insufficient housing for the poor of the towns. The rookeries and the piggeries are there, and men and women wanting to live near their daily work crowd into them ; it takes time to pull them down, and time to rebuild, and when the pulling down and the rebuilding have been completed, still the men and women who used to crowd the rookeries are not yet properly housed. They cannot afford to be properly housed ; when one rookery is pulled down they merely go to another, if they can find it, and a better class of workers and wage-earners takes their place. But still the fact remains that they are to be found somewhere ; and still the question remains insistent whether, if nothing, or very little, can be done for them in their homes, something cannot be done for them away from their homes. Surely it can. The children have to go to school. " Man does not live by bread alone," but neither does he live alone on the knowledge that comes from books, imparted to him as a child by his school-teachers. The law lays down that he must be taught to read and write ; it takes care of his mind. Wliy not of his body ? The law cannot, of course, under present condi- tions, provide that he should be well and properly fed, and it would be shifting the responsibility belonging to his parents on to the wrong shoulders if that were ever attempted by the State. But at least there is one thing that could be done ; the children could be drilled. It is physical exercise with good food that turns the slum-bred " special" into the soldier un- afraid of the lead-swept hill. Physical exercise could be given to the children of the poor in the form of some kind of military drill. There is nothing of militarism in the suggestion ; nothing more than a simple form of gymnastics. And compulsory drill means medical inspection. Degenera- tion in body or mind—and the two usually go together— would he detected, and when once it was detected, special measures in special cases could be taken. Under a thorough system of properly enforced physical exercise for children in English schools, it might be made impossible for a child afflicted with mania to be at large. It is not impossible to-day, and for that reason any proved case of murder by one child of another must be considered as an indictment of the whole community.