It may appear strange to those unacquainted with social organization in France and Belgium to learn that the latter country has left the former decades behind in the curing of crime. While France is only just waking up to the necessity of coping with the appalling crimes, daily reported, of youthful criminals and with the cases of cruelty to young children by their natural protectors—a factor which partly accounts for the first evil—Belgium has for over twenty years tackled the question of the protection of childhood and the proper provision for caring for and re-educating deficient and abnormal children. The efforts being made to rescue children from the almost inevitable career of crime and degradation to which vicious surroundings and congenital infirmities have driven them is one of the most admirable examples of practical idealism in the present age, and places Belgium in the front rank as a civilizing agent of humanity.

From the period of the crêche to the kindergarten stage, the dossier of every child rescued by the Oeuvre de la Protection de l'Enfance and its various co-operating organizations is carefully preserved with the report of any necessary curative or corrective treatment applied. When the period of school education arrives (compulsory from the age of 8 to 14), the process of segregation is virtually accomplished; the normal and the abnormal child are separately classified. The latter is assigned to a special class, the classe des anormaux, which is attached to the great public schools and conducted’ by teachers trained for that particular purpose.