#dangerous classes

*The mine metaphor and similar images—the fuse and the dynamite bomb, the spark and the tinder box—expressed the fears of the establishment generated by the ease with which bombs could be made with newly invented dynamite. Other versions of a feared eruption also proliferated. According to Wilbur P. Miller, by the 1860s, “the image of a volcano under the city became a cliche’ (Cops and Bobbies [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977], p. 141). Writing in 1859, Samuel B. Halliday warned, ‘We are sleeping under a volcano, from which already there are irruptions [which] . . . are comparatively mild premonitions of the more terrible irruptions that are certain by and by to belch forth with an all-consuming power” (Lost and Found; or, Life among the Poor [New York: Blakeman & Mason, 1859], p. 332). The impact of the Paris Commune greatly impressed Charles Loring Brace, who wrote in 1872, ‘‘Let the law lift its hand from them for a season or let the civilizing influences of American life fail to reach them, and, if the opportunity offered, we should see an explosion from this class which might leave the city in ashes and blood” (The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years Work among Them [New York: Wynkoop & Hallenbeck, 1872], p. 29).

These anxieties, constantly refueled by a febrile press, as well as by ministers’ sermons based on a biblically rooted apocalypticism, contributed to the strengthening of stereotypes that reflexively identified industrial conflict with violence by its worker participants and screened out evidence to the contrary." This fear syndrome attributed to the immigrant worker a central role in labor disturbances and stamped him with a “brand of unworth.”’

The image of worker violence that came to dominate popular perceptions of industrial conflict was powerfully reinforced by the deployment through employers’ instigation of state militias and federal troops in such conflicts. The fact that the soldiery was called out in itself served as proof that workers and their allies had once again disturbed the public order and in a manner beyond the control of local authorities. Further, such call-outs brought resentment among the respectable citizenry against workers for blemishing the fair name of their city.

Perhaps the most important stimulus in the development of the violence myth was the ‘‘agitator,’” cast as the prime instigator of violence. The agitator became the scapegoat for unrest; it was his rabble-rousing talents alone that sparked a crowd into a riotous mob. That this troublemaker alone had manipulated an otherwise contented work force was demonstrated by the fact that he was an ‘outside agitator” (or alternatively a ‘‘professional agitator’). And this identification was plausible since eloquent anarchists and Wobblies were sometimes recruited from outside to charge up crowds—literally to agitate them—in conflict situations.

The fear of crowds (‘‘contentious gatherings’’ in Charles Tilly’s formulation) and the scapegoating of the agitator were linked to the thesis, inherited from the past and rationalized in the Progressive Era by Gustave Le Bon, that crowd behavior was inherently disorderly and that the anonymity afforded by mass meetings encouraged the participants to shed rational restraints and to give expression to hidden violent proclivities without fear of détection. This view was challenged by liberals and reformers of the time, who used the Hyde Park safety-valve model to support the contention that the frustration and resentments of the lower classes could be defused by setting apart public areas for unrestrained speech and assembly."

"INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL. HAD SUCCESSFUL YEAR," Toronto Star. June 10, 1912. Page 15. ---- Chief Inspector Hughes Spoke in Favor of Superintendent Ferrier. ----- OFFICERS WERE ELECTED ---- Heredity and Environment the Cause of Ninety-Five Per Cent. of the Cases. ---- Supt. Ferrier, of the Victoria Industrial School, was warmly championed by Chief Inspector Archibald, of the Police Department, at the annual meeting of the Industrial School Association on Saturday afternoon. Referring to the investigation of the ill-treatment charges laid against Mr. Ferrier and the adverse criticism of his methods of maintaining discipline in the school, the chief inspector said:

"There is not a man in Ontario better fitted for the position of superintendent of the Victoria School than Mr. Ferrier. I challenge any man in the Province to put his finger on any act in the past twenty years. during the time I have known Mr. Ferrier, of which he or his friends need be ashamed."

Inspector Archibald congratulated the chairman of the association on his refusal to "sidetrack" Superintendent Ferrier because of some adverse criticism. An attempt had been made "by some small, adverse creatures to criticize the noble work done by Mr. Ferrier."

The stamp of approval was placed on Inspector Archibald's praise of Superintendent Ferrier by the hearty applause from the majority of those present.

The cause of trouble at the school, Inspector Archibald declared, was the change made by the Government of Ontario when the maximum age for boys at the Victoria School was raised from fourteen years to sixteen in order that boys might be transferred from the closed-up reformatory at Penetanguishene to the Victoria School.

Praised By Another. Mr Wilson Fenton also spoke briefly in praise of Mr. Ferrier. "Critics are often not well informed," said Chairman Fergusson in touching on the trouble at the school. Encouraging reports were presented at the meeting, which was held the grounds of the Alexandra School for Girls, off the Kingston road. Superintendent Ferrier's report stated that during the year 170 boys had been admitted, 150 handled or transferred; highest attendance 325, average attendance 300. Boys on parole still under the guardianship of the school numbered 480.

Miss Brooking, superintendent of the Alexandra School, stated in her report that on May 1st there were 105 girls in the school, 50 had been admitted during the year, and the average age was fourteen and a half years in most cases, two or three years too late for the best results. Seventy-eight girls had been paroled. The superintendent referred to the splendid work done by Miss MacCowan in her teaching of eighty girls, whose equipment ranged from absolute illiteracy up to entrance standing. They had to be handled in the one class and under the greatest difficulty, nevertheless five out of seven pupils passed the entrance last June, and similar success was expected this year. Five of the older girls had also been given a business course under Miss Gray.

Music Students Did Well. The classes in music Miss Brooking said, had been most successful. Attendance at them was a privilege to be secured only as a reward of merit and very seldom did a girl lose her place after she had once secured it. Laundry work, housemaid's work, dining room work, kitchen work. and sewing were also taught, though the management is much hampered by lack of room, the laundry built for 45 row accommodating 125.

In closing, the superintendent said: "Speaking roundly, 35 of our cases were the result of gross neglect, and 15 of evil companionship, in many cases following bad heredity. Evil heredity and often worst environment are responsible for ninety per cent of our cases - and fully sixty-five per cent have had absolutely no fighting chance. And this is what the Alexandra Industrial School exists for - to give, if it may be, to these young human creatures, upon whom is thrust the terrible responsibility of life, a decent fighting chance, to implant sweetness and light. and the beauty of holiness in these young lives, which are or have been barren of every influence, but that which is evil, never forgetting that, in the mud and scum of things, there, always, always, something sings, and that it is ours to find that 'something." and set it free, and develop it, till at last it becomes something fit to grace the garden of the Lord."

The Officers Elected. The election of officers and directors of the Industrial School Association was announced as follows: Mr. G. Tower Fergusson, chairman; Mr. Beverly Jones, treasurer: Mr. W. J. Hendry, secretary; Mrs. Robert Kilgour, directress of the Alexandra School: Directors. Messrs. W. G. Jaffray, F. J. Stewart, D. J. McKinnon. Wm. Houston, W. Foster, J. J. Eaton. Mrs. Sandford Alley. Dr. Skinner Gordon, Mesars. W. J. Davis, W. F. Chapman, Mrs. S. Caldecott. Mrs. Davis, Mrs. Wilson Fenton, and Mr. George L. Robinson.

“By the late 1910s juvenile justice reformers' optimism had flagged. New players, notably medical doctors and psychiatrists, raised alternative theories about Toronto's boy problem and argued the necessity of psychiatric involvement in juvenile justice. Of the three major social welfare inspired programs that addressed the boy problem during the late 19th and early 20th centuries the eugenics strategy has received the least amount of attention in the juvenile justice literature. Perhaps because eugenicists tried desperately but eventually failed to gain a permanent foothold in Toronto's juvenile justice system they have been overlooked. However, early proponents of eugenics, such as C.K. Clarke and Helen MacMurchy, conferred considerable attention on the problem of working-class juvenile delinquency in Toronto as a social evil intimately tied to biology. Although eugenics discourse and policy did not achieve the same level of success in the juvenile court as it did in other spheres, many of its strategies and diagnostic techniques continued to influence investigative procedures.78 Intelligence testing and body measurement, for example, continued to be used by Court appointed psychologists well after eugenics lost momentum during the 1950s. 

Throughout the early 20th century a new set of relations between the governors and the governed unfolded. Not only were important elements of juvenile deviance reconceptualized along psychiatric lines, but professional experts in mental science also claimed an important role in the adjudication of juvenile delinquents - a state of affairs that would continue well into the 1970s. The first phase of organized psychiatric involvement in juvenile delinquency can be located in the period between 1914, when the Toronto psychiatric clinic was organized at the Toronto General Hospital in conjunction with the Social Service Department for the diagnosis of feeble-mindedness, and Clarke's death in 1924. According to C.K. Clarke, "true, amateur social reformers have found this unknown world a rich soil in which to cultivate speculative theories; [which were] valueless, unless supported by facts which cannot be contraverted." Clarke and others found the explanations offered by 19th-century reformers of no significant value. University trained experts in the burgeoning mental sciences increasingly cast their gaze toward the problem of the working-class bad boy and questioned whether smoking, truancy, the street, the family, and delinquent peers were essential to understanding the boy problem, or whether they were merely symptoms of much deeper deficiencies situated in delinquent boys' minds and biology. There were two basic differences between the elite reformers of the late 19th century who defined boys' deviance in relation to learned behaviour and the eugenics professionals of the 1910s and 20s who were convinced inferior breeding was the foundation of deviant outcomes. First, accompanying the rise of psychiatric dis course and its subsequent involvement with juvenile justice practice was the proliferation of trained experts. ' No longer were volunteers and well-meaning elites central to attempts at reforming the delinquent character of bad boys. Christianity, class position, and respectability were not the defining qualifications for work in the field. University trained experts largely replaced the interested philanthropist. The second distinction centres on what elite reformers and eugenicists understood as the underlying cause of the "boy problem." Instead of depraved circumstances and corrupting role models, eugenicists were certain the mind and biology were the essential elements for understanding and solving the delinquency problem. Psychiatric experts inspired by late 191 Os eugenics knowledge argued that bad boys were not the product of role models and life circumstances that could be re built, but were the result of mental deficiency that could not be cured. According to Clarence M. Hincks, an apprentice of Clarke's and medical inspector of schools, feeble-mindedness was: 

condition of brain defect which renders the affected individual incompetent to earn a living, and incapable of conducting personal affairs with ordinary prudence. The defect is present in childhood and usually demonstrates itself by marked backwardness in learning to walk, to talk and to obey simple commands... Heredity is the chief disposing factor. 

Along with Hincks, Clarke founded the mental hygiene and eugenics movements of Ontario. Clarke's emphasis was on hereditary factors and the whole thrust of the early mental hygiene movement was directed toward containing the problems which arose from feeble-mindedness. Dr. Helen MacMurchy, chief of the Division of Child Welfare, joined Clarke in his efforts to incapacitate those with defective minds. MacMurchy's understanding of the problem was cultivated in her experience as Inspector of the Feeble-Minded in Ontario. In this capacity she studied the problems that resulted from defective youth being at liberty and advocated their identification and permanent segregation in order to prevent what she thought would be inevitable racial decline. As Inspector of the Feeble-Minded she grew increasingly concerned about the obvious connection between mental deficiency and juvenile crime. Together MacMurchy and Clarke laboured to exclude mental defectives from entering Canada, warned that feeble-minded children should be sterilized lest they produce offspring with similar deficiencies, and successfully linked feeble-mindedness with juvenile delinquency. Feeble-minded offenders were considered a greater nuisance than a threat to the public's physical safety. Some experts placed an upper limit on the criminal ingenuity of the "truly" defective. Noted English psychiatrist Cyril Burt, for example, concluded that defective youth were only capable of certain crimes: "He seldom forges; for he can scarcely write and barely spell. He seldom embezzles; for the arithmetic of all but the simplest transactions in money lies wholly beyond his reach. Fraud too, where it rises above verbal misrepresentation requires planning and resource." 

“Smoking was another problem turn-of-the-century child savers like Kelso and institutional officials like Chester Ferrier, the longest serving superintendent of the Victoria Industrial School, linked to boys' deviant character. A careful study of the boys under his charge led Ferrier to believe that tobacco use was overrepresented among delinquent boys. According to the Superintendent, 60 per cent of the in mates of the Victoria Industrial School were smokers. Ferrier objected to the use of tobacco by boys since he was convinced it had detrimental effects for what he called their "moral power." Tobacco use was, in his words, "destroying, and making criminals of more of this class of boys than the saloons. It weakens the moral power of the boy, so that the cigarette fiend readily yields to temptation."

Like truancy, the deception associated with smoking worried justice officials most. According to the Committee Appointed to Investigate the Present Juvenile Reformatory Schools of Ontario, "younger and older, they [would] commit acts of deceit or theft for the sake of a smoke - even a butt." Ferrier thought the level of dishonesty allied with tobacco use would inevitably lead deviant youth down a path of habitual criminality. He argued that the various stages smokers passed through in concealing and furthering a smoking habit contributed to their deviance:

Deception [was] resorted to in the incipient stages of this habit. He must hide from his parents, for a time at least, this harmful indulgence. He takes his first smoke in secret. For this purpose he finds companions who are already addicted to the habit and have taken their first downward step. He thus becomes deceitful and untruthful.

Ferrier continued to moralize about the evils of tobacco long after boys were paroled from the Victoria Industrial School. For example, Tom M. was a former in mate whom Ferrier worried would be brought back to the institution as a result of his smoking habit. Tom was fifteen when admitted to the School for vagrancy. Staff described him as a robust boy who was illiterate. Ferrier received word that after being released from the institution Tom was wasting his hard earned money on tobacco. Concerned that smoking would lead to Tom's return to the institution, the superintendent wrote a letter to him warning of its dangers:

There is one habit which you have very badly and which will be against you so long as you indulge in it, and that is the use of tobacco. In a statement that Mr. U furnished some months ago as to the money he had spent for you, there was an item of $4.50 for tobacco. That seems such an extraordinary thing that I could scarcely credit it.

But the cost of smoking was not the only pitfall Ferrier saw for paroled boys. The use of tobacco also brought boys into contact with other smokers who were invariably undesirable characters from the dangerous classes. Ferrier told Tom he was, "very much afraid that if [he] came to Toronto and still continue[d] [to smoke he would] very soon get into trouble." To break boys of their deviant habit Kelso offered them substitutes for cigarettes and rewards for quitting. While traveling to Toronto a delinquent boy who was destined for a foster home incessantly begged Kelso for a cigarette. Not wanting to contribute to the boy's delinquency, Kelso stopped at a local store and purchased a supply of chewing gum as an alternative. After six months Kelso bragged the boy had not returned to smoking. When placed in a foster home, Kelso reported, another of his charges promised he would not go back to smoking or chewing tobacco. For discontinuing his smoking habit this boy was rewarded with a watch. Kelso and Ferrier lamented, not the harmful chemical effects of nicotine on the body, but the injurious impact smoking had for the character of youth. Since scientific inquiry into the ills of tobacco on the body was still several decades away, Kelso and Ferrier were concerned with other injurious elements of consumption. Smoking was a bad habit or vice that was a precursor to immoral character: habitual tobacco consumption brought boys into contact with deviant others; to support their habit they whittled away their income; and deception was required to conceal their conduct from parents.

Although the smoking habit was lamentable, newsboys created even greater anxiety among the elite classes. Their visibility on city streets contributed to their centrality in schemes of regulation. According to C. S. Clarke in his expose Of Toronto the Good, "you can scarcely walk a block without your attention being drawn to one or more of the class called street boys." Kelso, in testimony before Commissioners Appointed to Enquire into the Prison and Reformatory System of Ontario in 1891, stated "the profession of selling newspapers is in my opinion pernicious right through." Older newsboys held considerable influence over younger more impressionable ones. When selling papers was not sufficient, Kelso explained, these boys would persuade younger boys to: "break a window or unfasten doors, and would steal silk handkerchiefs and any fancy article of clothing that could always be disposed of." In this way, newsboys were dangerous and visibly posed a number of problems Kelso and others found particularly unacceptable.

Increasing rates of criminality among working-class boys during the late 19th century were not only the result of dramatic increases in youth crime and truancy, but rather incidences of deviance were amplified by greater vigilance brought about by Toronto's police morality department. Increased police attention to juvenile crime helped to create the perception of a "boy problem." The Toronto Police were active during the late 19th century in hunting out the newsboys and dangerous bad boys who refused to attend school. In early November of 1896 the police incarcerated 30 newsboys because, in the words of a Saturday Night writer named "Mack," they "had abused the means of education which the authorities, in their wisdom, ha[d] provided for them." Questioning the wisdom of such coercive police tactics, Mack asked: "who will venture to say that the boys have been reformed by the punishment they have received?" The journalist agreed with Howland and Kelso that incarcerating newsboys in local gaols would have little reformative value To these boys, being held in jail would have been quite a lark. The boys, Mack reasoned, "had grown up wild and [would] readily adjust themselves to such a hard and fast system." Like Howland and J.J. Kelso, writers like Mack worried about this unique class that required special attention, had keen observation, and possessed an extensive knowledge of the social world, but lacked formal education. These dangerous working-class boys posed a threat to the established social order that needed to be checked. "Society should uplift" newsboys, "Mack" reasoned, if for no other reason than "in self defense." Evidently, threats to the gentry and established class hierarchy were met with stiff opposition. In response, elites assembled and disseminated strategies of control that subjected dangerous youth to such "uplifting" (read capricious and demeaning) penalties as confinement in adult prisons, deportation, and sterilization.

Perhaps Kelso and Howland were less concerned with boys selling newspapers and smoking, and more preoccupied with the potential problem city streets presented for children and the risk street children posed to the respectable mode of life. They understood selling newspapers to be an initial foray into a life that could eventually spiral into habitual criminality. As Howland testified before the Royal Commission on the Relations of Labour and Capital: "there are hundreds of things in street life that attract children." Associations encountered on the streets were considered criminogenic for young boys. David Archibald, staff inspector of the Morality Department of the Toronto Police Force, argued boys' criminal propensities were developed through "the associations that they form in the streets ... They learn gambling, tossing coppers and they get into all sorts of vice."

Not only did children learn the intricacies of deviant conduct from peer associations, but the street economy also permitted them access to the theatre. Rapidly expanding commercial amusements in early 20th-century cities were magnets for boys. For ten cents they could view a drama - albeit from the cheapest seats. The type of drama boys chose to view worried Kelso and others concerned with regulating the excesses of dangerous youth. To their dismay, boys wanted to attend only the lowest theatre, which troublingly happened to be Irish, working-class, and lewd. But perhaps the greatest problem associated with this crass entertainment was the potential effect it had on young minds. J. Edward Starr, who in 1912 be came the first Commissioner of Toronto's Juvenile Court, feared the number of movies that depicted, in his words, "leering villains, gun play and crime, not to say revenge and wanton love," giving impressionable young minds a false and unreal view of life. Kelso was concerned that boys would not only imitate the villain's character, but would, once hooked on the excitement of such drama, use illegal means to gain admission. Low theatres, Kelso reasoned, had a "baneful influence on growing boys." Boys who congregated around the theatre were known to use profane language and purposefully annoy pedestrians. Starr considered the city space adjoining theatre entrances "to be the breeding places of disorderlies."

Friendships developed on city streets also allowed boys to find excitement and financial gain. In addition to newspaper boys, Toronto's moral crusaders were concerned about gangs of "young hoods" who roamed the streets with seemingly no purpose other than to cause general mayhem. According to former Mayor Howland in testimony before the Royal Commission on Labour and Capital: "They were systematically organized as a general thing, the head of the gang being a boy who was convicted once or twice before the Police Court. They were systematic gangs, organized for all kinds of mischief, and in a great many cases indulged in petty steal ing." Howland thought gang relationships were a significant contributor to Toronto's problem of social disorder and considered the influence of deviant friends to be among the primary causes of juvenile deviance.”

In the 1860s founders of institutions and programs for boys' control, like the PAA, began to tackle the problem of (predominantly) dangerous working-class male youth disrespecting adults, not attending school, associating with deviant peers, and, in their idleness, offending privileged standards of morality. Deviant boys set themselves apart from their middle-class counterparts through their actions, family context, location in the city, and by the companions they kept. Even their bodies were deemed deviant. Doctor P. Spohn, a physician at the Penetanguishene Reformatory, testified before the Commissioners Appointed to Enquire into the Prison and Reformatory System of Ontario in 1891 how wayward boys were "different in physique." He added, "boys of the criminal classes were not so well developed as a rule"; they were "often quite scrofulous."

Elite reformers during the late 19th century were convinced truancy was the precursor to juvenile deviance. A. Ainger, a teacher in the city of Toronto, argued that truancy was a "first step in the downward career of those who, at length constituted the criminal class." To combat bad boys' predilection for shirking their educational duties the Free School System was created. The problem, however, was that those boys most in need of education and preventative intervention were the least likely to hear the lessons imparted by school teachers. One magistrate who was frustrated by the increasing numbers of truant boys appearing before him lamented to a mid 19th century Grand Jury that, "the classes most in want of instruction, and the most dangerous to society, are always those on whose ear the invitation to come and be taught falls unheeded." In this respect, elites considered a lack of commitment to education destructive with significance that went beyond the mere act of truancy. Truancy was a precursor to criminality and, as a result, was threatening to the well being of "society," defined as a property-right of the middle and upper classes.

While many of Toronto's elite were proud of their accomplishment of establishing Common Schools for youth, they were gravely concerned about the number of boys who refused to attend, and, as a result were deprived of the lessons of respectability. According to Alexander Topp, these boys were, "growing up in ignorance, familiar with vice in its most degrading forms, trained to crime, and gradually, year by year, filling [the] gaols and reformatories." To ameliorate the "ignorant" conditions of Toronto's dangerous working-class boys, Magistrate Hagarty was convinced that education should be forced upon those who refused to attend. He argued that there was no more important topic than "the possibility of ex tending the healthy influence of education to the class of children by whom our streets are infested and our jails burdened."

Industrial schools, such as the Victoria Industrial School located in Mimico, Ontario (a short distance west of Toronto), were promoted by elites as the panacea to Toronto's truant boy problem. The class and religious backgrounds of industrial school promoters betray the underlying rationale for these institutions. For exam ple, W.H. Howland, the group's most vocal supporter, was the eldest son of a wealthy Toronto banker (Sir William Pearch Howland). Other Industrial School backers came from similarly privileged backgrounds: William Proudfoot was professor of law and vice-chancellor at the University of Toronto and Goldwin Smith was publisher of the Toronto-based Week. Clearly, institutions like the Victoria Industrial School were at the heart of elite efforts to control dangerous youth and, in the process, solidify privileged class position.

Many working-class boys preferred the freedom of the streets to the restraints of the schoolroom. In addition to providing opportunities for illicit conduct, street life was a site to demonstrate, learn, and assert their masculinity. Ainger argued that all bad boys wanted to demonstrate manly competency among their friends. In his words, "the boy desires to show his prowess; on the streets he can do it in a way natural and spontaneous." Classrooms, however, provided few such opportunities. In school, boys gained credit from teachers or fellow pupils only as they grasped curriculum material. Establishing their masculinity in school was difficult for the truant since excelling required qualities many did not possess. According to Ainger, truants dwelled on jokes, companionship, excitement, and not the steadiness, self-repression, and plodding industry required of successful students. Of course, Ainger continued, the truant failed in school and continued to fail. The restrained and obedient masculinity demanded by middle-class teachers differed in form and function from traits held in high regard by street companions.

Masculinity is stratified along a number of structural lines including class. Although some sensibilities regarding appropriate manliness were shared, they were, for the most part, class bound. Working-class boys who eschewed the class room in favour of the street flouted middle and upper-class masculine norms of educational attainment. Instead of learning numbers and skills to apply to a future occupation, many truants established their streetwise masculinity in association with like-situated boys. Male youth often took tests of toughness and prowess in deviant conduct on the street more seriously than math examinations. The injurious influence of negligent parents was considered by commentators on truancy to be the fundamental reason boys did not attend school. Kelso, for example, was certain home circumstances held the secret as to why so many young children went astray. In 1895, Reverend S. Card, protestant Chaplain of the Ontario Reformatory for Boys at Penetanguishene, reported the results of a study he conducted on the character and disposition of deviant boys. After visiting inmates' homes, having conversations about their parents, and communicating with their neighbours he concluded: "not one of those boys had come from a home where parents were Christians and the family discipline was what it ought to be." They lacked what Card thought was essential to the formation of manly habits of industry and obedience central to respectable working-class existence.

Many other individuals who worked among juvenile offenders were convinced that poor parents were frequently negligent in their duty of raising law abiding citizens because of their refusal to ensure sons' attendance at school. In the minds of many elite reformers, hapless children were the consequence of derelict working-class parents. According to a letter sent from University of Toronto Professor Wilson to the editors of the Journal of Education, parents of vagrant children could not be counted on to send their children to school. Wilson was certain that compulsory education legislation was not sufficient to, in his words, "meet the case of the hungry, ragged children of the poor and often vicious parents... [who could] be turned to account, to hawk, to beg, and perchance to steal." J.J. Kelso was also dismayed by the fact that boys would be thrust into the world of work as newsboys and to beg on the street in an effort to earn money for the negligent working-class family. When building trades were suspended during the winter months a great number of men were suddenly unemployed. To keep the family fed, Kelso claimed, "and the parents in drink, many children, girls as well as boys, were sent on the street to sell newspapers and peddle laces and pencils and other trifles - a form of begging in disguise."

Begging on the streets or selling newspapers became a fundamental part of some boys' lives. Kelso suggested that sending boys to the street to earn money for the family at the expense of their attendance at school was an example of the evil influence of wicked parents. From his considerable experience with deviant boys, an Assize Court Judge argued that, "parental authority is the greatest evil to which these poor children are exposed." He thought many boys were "dispatched upon their daily errand of crime to bring home to worthless parents, to be dissipated in drunkenness what they may lay their little pilfering hands upon." The judge was convinced that many male youth of the dangerous classes attempted to extract charity from the wealthier citizens of Toronto through tales of orphanage or some imaginary calamity that suddenly befell them. For boys involved in such deviance, at least one commentator believed, "instruction in fictions of misery is all that they receive at home." Immorality among these children, Kelso reasoned, was exceedingly common.

However, Kelso and Wilson failed to recognize working-class families' social and economic reality. Many were recent immigrants who had difficulty providing for their families and therefore were forced to depend on their sons as additional breadwinners. In answer to his question, "who goes to school?" Michael Katz found that indeed lower socio-economic status was the greatest predictor of who would not be found in the school yard. Katz found the one exception to this rule was working-class parents with very young children. l Poor families found prioritizing their sons' voluntary attendance at school difficult when juxtaposed with their earning potential. But to suggest that the main reason boys eschewed school was because their parents required their labour power is to deny the spirit of youth for adventure and deviance. That bad boys did not like their teacher (or the teacher did not like them), or were frustrated by the work, or that distance to the school was too great, or that they considered it a waste of time since education was not a prerequisite for employment, are certainly other plausible reasons for non attendance. These reasons were lost on elite reformers.

Along with truancy, Toronto's opinion leaders loathed disrespect and disregard for authority in deviant youth. Deviant boys, one editor commented, had "no respect for adults as such. They feigned none." When a group of boys were playing ball near your windows, the editor lamented, and "you, not wishing to spoil their sport, say to them: 'Boys watch those windows,' one of the boys was sure to retort, 'how long do you want me to look at them?" Or, as the editorial continued, if a boy on his way to school was rebuked by an adult for abusing his younger brother, he would almost certainly turn and say: "'Aw, what's chewin' you -- mind your own business!" G.W. Allan while speaking at the First Annual Conference on Child Saving bemoaned the fact that one of the most distinguishing features of er rant youth was their almost complete lack of respect. He, along with Kelso, was certain that: "when you find a boy who is utterly devoid of any respect for those who are in authority over him, or who are older than himself, you may be sure it will not be very long before he is into trouble."

During the 19th century citizens of Ontario encountered demographic, social, and economic transformations that threatened social cohesion and eroded retributive governance. A consistent theme in literature concerned with the growth of social welfare is how the development of cities, a result of urbanization, industrialization, and immigration from Western Europe during the 19th century, contributed to the constant wearing away of what Joey Noble calls "petty commodity capitalism." To many reformers, the city symbolically embodied the worst features of modern industrial life and was certainly no place for innocent children. Its slums were the source of dangerousness that corrupted, tarnished, and otherwise debased the young. By contrast, the country was "healthful and therefore good for the boys both morally and physically."

Lured by the promise of abundant jobs and preferable social conditions, immigrants from Ireland and Western Europe began populating Canadian cities. How ever, the growth of cities and developments in social welfare were not uniform across Ontario. Toronto, for example, grew from a population of 56,092 in 1881 to 208,040 in 1901. Other cities, such as Montreal and Hamilton, were experiencing similar growth, but not to the same extent as Toronto. By 1910 the growth of light industry and the burgeoning manufacturing sector had made Toronto Canada's premier economic city.

As Canadian urbanization transformed the landscape of class relations between 1860 and 1930, the population of the urban poor expanded significantly. While the growth of the economy may have meant jobs for the respectable working classes, it also insured that the most socially and economically disadvantaged attracted intense scrutiny from an increasingly insecure gentry. Their lack of a regular connection to the labour market helped to constitute the poor as a dangerous class, which reinforced their isolation and justified intrusive forms of governance. Historians have drawn critical attention to how, during the 1890s, dangerous and fringe populations (single women, prostitutes, and homosexual men) were at the centre of an urban reform project designed to create healthier, cleaner, and safer streets. Toronto's elite reformers and social commentators were convinced that the debauchery of dangerous working-class parents would certainly be transferred to their children. They were eager to find intervention strategies that would minimize the likelihood of this "hereditary" debasement.

The apparent upsurge in numbers of delinquent, truant, and vagrant children roaming the streets was frequently noted in Royal Commission reports and news papers. Alexander Topp, a Presbyterian minister at Toronto's Knox Church, argued in 1868 that "one of the most important subjects affecting the social and moral well being of our country [was] the condition of the neglected, unfortunate young boys." Through their conduct and derelict family relations these boys of the dangerous class threatened the existing class order and were a drain on the resources of the emerging country. Topp's fears were not entirely groundless, as a significant percentage of all reported offences between 1882 and 1892 were committed by juvenile offenders. During this ten-year span, 31.6 per cent of all criminal convictions in the province were for youth (boys and girls) under the age of 21. The majority of such offences, however, were non-violent, property related, and often violations of moral codes. Significantly, a high proportion of offenders were boys - well over 90 per cent of juveniles convicted of indictable offences. The dramatic rise in youth crime that was evident in the late 19th century can be attributed to a combination of factors including an emerging police morality department, growing attention to policing morals offences among Toronto's working class, and greater middle-class insecurities. The increase in both visibility and incidence of deviance among boys provided elite reformers with evidence that (non) labouring youth were out-of-control and in immediate need of regulation. Solutions designed to manage this dangerousness resulted in a heightened campaign of governance that meant increasing numbers of working-class boys were subject to sometimes arbitrary and degrading punishment.

Prison statistics did little to attenuate middle and upper-class fears. Many magistrates were unwilling to commit children suspected of wayward behaviours to the juvenile reformatory prison at Pentanguishene in favour of sentencing and detaining them in local gaols; between 1860 and 1864 nearly 600 children were commit ted to the Toronto lock up. Prison reformers objected, arguing that jailing young males with seasoned and hardened offenders created more problems than it solved. While detained awaiting trial they were indiscriminately mixed with an array of of fenders representing varying experiences in criminal or otherwise deviant enterprises. According to prison inspector Andrew Dickson, incarceration provided boys with the opportunity to speak with the "most profane language without a check, form associations, lay plans for future crime, get more confirmed in idle habits, gambling, smoking, and, in many cases drinking." In other words, conventional approaches to punishment only exacerbated the boy problem, particularly because the number of dangerous working-class boys in jail rose over the mid 19th century.

Prison reform groups, such as the Prisoner's Aid Association (PAA), considered the environment of local jails to be the breeding grounds for future criminals. The group argued in 1884 that prisons created an environment where "a terribly dangerous class to society [was] under our paternal system being actually developed." Cramming boys into cells alongside the lumpenproletariat did little to fortify the elite classes' societal position. In the long term, since these boys would eventually be released, this practice aggravated the problem and put the elite at greater risk. "Seize an individual on his first descent into crime," a newspaper article proclaimed in 1887, and "clap him into gaol among veteran scoundrels, cover him with vermin, bathe him in slush, hold him until completion of his term, and then turn him helpless upon the world, and all the chances are that he will become a professional criminal." If only young criminals could be dealt with intelligently, the PAA stated in 1884, how "many restorations to the right path might be achieved among those who have but little more than stepped aside?" Like other reform minded groups, the PAA viewed the mid 19th century system for managing way ward boys to be "criminally defective" and the "most prolific propagator of crime."