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.