OUR " LARRIKINS."
NIT E recommend those philanthropists among us who are in earnest, and are searching about for objects of benevolence, to consider gravely the problem which underlies the Regent's Park murder, and which in England, as in the Colonies, is becoming one of the gravest importance. What is to be done to discipline the hobbledehoys of the working classes P In all our great cities, more especially in London, there are now thousands, in some cities tens of thousands, of lads between fifteen and twenty who, the moment hard work is over, have, in practice, no possible mode of recreation except wandering through the streets in gangs, horse-play, fighting, or evading the police. They are not criminals except in comparatively rare cases—though the total of rare cases shows large—they have all learned the three R.'s ; they are all apprentices, journeymen, or learners of one sort or another; and they are all rough, rough sometimes from mere health and strength and the tumult of the blood natural at that age, rough at other times from the craving for physical exertion which the rich expend upon a hundred games, rough always from want of the self-restraint which is the first, some philosophers say the only, gift of continuous civilisation. These lads, boiling over with physical life and energy, un- restrained by any etiquettes and unfettered by any operative opinion, naturally seek society, and find it of both sexes with an ease which, to the class just above them, is a subject of never-ceasing surprise. If they like the other sex, there are one hundred and fifty-seven thousand factory-girls in London—which looks as if it had no factories—all released from work about the same hour, and they wander about in pairs and groups, making the sweet evenings hideous to the cultivated, but most pleasant to themselves, with horseplay and noise and continuous laughter. Slapping with them is a flirtation, and a forced rush of a quarter of a mile a significant and most amiable attention. Sometimes harm happens to the girls, but more often it does not, half-civilised young women having their own methods of protecting them- selves, and ignorance being comparatively rare ; but always the sexes wandering in the streets, without supervision or the possibility of it, saying what they please, and romping at dis- cretion, roughen instead of softening one another. Morals are no worse than in small places, better perhaps than in villages—though no two villages are in the least alike in this respect, a clergyman, Nonconformist minister, or influential man of any kind sometimes disciplining a whole generation —but civilisation is lower, more savage-like in tone, less bound by anything like healthy rules. If it were not so, the Bank-Holidays would not be so dreaded as they now are by all who have much to do with the young, the dread increasing, we notice, with the hard sense of those who express it Many of the lads, however, and those by no means the best, avoid female society, and perambulate the streets in gangs of boys only, in search of some amusement which shall give their physical energies some scope. That, in the lower or less- watched neighbourhoods, usually ends in what always seems to the more refined, and often is, an explosion of ruffianism. Horse-play among each other soon pails; there are no regu- lated. struggles possible, like a game at football; and the gangs or groups either fight one another with a fierceness and con- tinuousness such as we attribute to Irish factions, or turn upon the passers-by. The fighting is sometimes serious, though the use of the knife, as in the Regent's Park case, is unusual, and the attacks on passengers constantly call for the interposition of the police. Women are insulted, men are knocked down, a war with the police commences, and in a s-hort time the line which divides roughs from criminals is over-passed, and we see a report of a grave complaint before the Magistrate that such-and-such a gang, usually with some half-comic name, must be put down, or shops in the neigh- bourhood will remain unlet. Then half-a-dozen young men and boys are punished, and "order is restored," only to be broken again in a more violent way a few weeks after. In the year, thousands of lads, not much worse than the average of their kind, appear before the Magistrates, or get into chronic quarrels with the police, or, which is worst of all, fall into half- criminal ways, from which the last step into the positively criminal ranks seems to themselves like an accident. They have come across the law, in their own judgment, as if it were a packthread stretched wilfully across their paths.
The evil is just as rampant in America and the Colonies. " The Continent seems to be preserved from it in most places, partly by the greater strictness of the police, but chiefly by the sudden disappearance of those who would be the leaders in disorder, the youths from nineteen to twenty- -three, who are caught with an iron grip by the conscription, and emerge from the barracks grown men, with a habit of order and a sense of responsibility. We rarely. however, take -up an American paper, and never an Australian one, without -seeing some lament over the disorderliness of the "hoodlums," or the impossibility of bringing the " larrikins "—is this latter a diminutive of Larry, or an aboriginal word ?—into obedience, or reading a multitude of police cases with members of the two classes as their avowed heroes. American feeling, we fancy, will not stand overt insult to women ; but in Melbourne and Sydney, as in our own Northern towns, the complaints of -minor outrages on girls, and of the use of obscene language merely to annoy respectable women, are incessant. They -are summarily dealt with, but this particular evil never -seems to abate, and the disorderliness verging on crime, but seldom quite crossing the line, is apparently tolerated as incurable. So it is here in all but the most respectable thoroughfares, to the infinite evil of the lads themselves ; yet it is most difficult to know what plan ought to be -pursued, as an improvement on the present laxity. Im- prisonment, till knives are drawn or a policeman is seriously hurt, is a very doubtful expedient, for one-half the mischief "in the lads is cubbishness, the desire for physical excite- ment such as used to produce the "town and gown" TOWS of a rougher day, and the faction-fights which even now go on in England between the remoter villages. There are "bad lots" in every rough street; but the majority, as 'they attain manhood, grow quiet enough, and confine their demonstrations to rough gibing, but little injurious to any one, ' though its roughness is sometimes inconceivably repulsive. Our people, compared with Orientals, Southern Europeans, and even some classes of Germans, cannot swear at all, lacking alike the inventiveness and the evil relish for profanity ; but when satirically inclined, their brutal directness of speech is sometimes extraordinary. A lad once imprisoned is spoiled; and except on grave occasion—and any display of a knife -ought to be treated as a grave occasion—it is a pity to destroy a man who might, if given time, become a useful as well as decent member of society. The hard struggle of life will very soon discipline him if he is capable of that bene- ficial treatment. Still, " eivilitas," ,which is not civility, -but that quality of self-restraint essential to sweeten the -life of great towns, in which the packing must always be close, is not only a grace, but the basis of many virtues ; and we would sacrifice a small per-centage of our rough lads, if we could be sure that the remainder would be imbued with it. But what is the course to pursue ? It is of little use to institute evening-classes or things of that kind, for, though they do endless good, sometimes quite unexpected good, they only " draw " those who have a proclivity that way, and leave the average " larrikin," with his wild desire to expend his physical energies, to go. his own way, a little the worse because the "studious lot" have been so carefully weeded out of his ranks. What he wants is clear enough,—rough horse-play made useful, or, in other words, gymnastics directed to an end ; but then, how are we to get that P The Germans have it, and the Northern Italians, and some places in America ; but there is nothing approaching it in England, at least so as to be attainable 'without expense and under rigid control from opinion. If we had any system of military training at all, however inchoate or imperfect, we could have the gymnastic training too, and the one would popularise the other; but, alas the first whisper of the kind would raise a storm of oppo- sition, and perhaps a cry that the conscription was at hand. Our democracy is too suspicious as yet even to amuse itself, far less put itself in training; but perhaps the day will come. Meanwhile, muscular Christians of all kinds, especially the philanthropic kind, might, we fancy, do worse than try if they cannot give our hobbledehoys something more attractive to do than imitating garrotters on the pavement, waging private wars in organised gangs, or making the lives of the police a burden too hard to be borne without "refreshment."
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