It is only lately that we are beginning to find out anything about the origin and nature of man. Laws have come down to us from old customs and folk-ways based on primitive ideas of man's origin, capacity and responsibility. It has been generally assumed that man was created different from all the rest of animal life; that man alone was endowed with a soul and with the power to tell good from evil; that in the beginning man was perfect but yielded to temptation, and since then has been the subject of an everlasting contest between the powers of light and the powers of darkness for the possession of his soul; that man not only knew good from evil, but was endowed with "free will," and had the power to choose between good and evil; and that when he did wrong he deliberately chose to do so out of an abandoned and malignant heart; and that all men alike were endowed with this power and all alike were responsible for their acts.
The old indictments charged that: "John Smith, being a wicked, malicious and evil disposed person, not having the fear of God before his eyes, but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the devil etc." It followed, of course, that John Smith should be punished or made to suffer, for he had purposely brought all the evil on himself. The old idea is still the foundation of the world's judgment of men, in court and out. Of course this idea leaves no room for mercy and understanding. Neither does it leave any chance to give the criminal the proper treatment for his defects which might permit him to lead a normal life.
As a matter of fact, every scientific man knows that the origin of life is quite different from this; that the whole current conception of the individual and his responsibility is a gross error; and that no correct judgments can be based on the old foundation; that no sane treatment of crime can follow this assumption of man's origin and nature; that the result of this foundation is almost infinite injustice and cruelty to a large and constantly growing number of men and women; and that it tends to endless injury and evil to society. The conception of man and the treatment of crime and criminals by the courts is not better nor more scientific than was the old-time doctors' treatment of physical ailments by magic, incantations and sorcery.
The origin and development of all animal life is the same. In fact, the development of plant life is on a similar pattern. The origin of a human being is a simple cell, an egg. This cell is fertilized and through growth after fertilization begins dividing and building and taking on the form and semblance of a human being. All children have the same origin, the same development and the same pattern, yet no two are alike. Each has a distinct and different equipment from any of the others. The size of the body, real and potential; the size and fineness of the brain; the delicacy and sensitiveness of the nervous system; the innate instincts upon which conduct mainly rests; the emotions which control action and which flow from the structure—in short, the degree of perfection and imperfection of the machine is all hidden in the original cell. No well-informed person now thinks of questioning the fact that the main characteristics of the human being, as of every other animal and plant, are hidden in the germ or seed from which it sprang.
The laws of growth and development which govern organic matter were not made for man and do not except man. Life begins with the cell and evolves according to pattern. If the cell is that of a human being, it will be black or white, male or female, tall or short, intelligent or stupid, sensitive or stolid; it will develop a large or a small brain, a fine one or a poor one, a sensitive nervous system or a defective one; it will be ruled by instincts that are all-powerful and controlling, and even the color of the hair and eyes are in the pattern. The whole structure, potentially, is in the original cell, and infinite knowledge could tell how the structure would respond to sensations as it passed through life.
It is obvious that the kinds and differences of human structures are infinite. It is no more possible for all men to respond equally to the same stimulus, than it is for all machines or all animals to respond alike. It is apparent that not one of the structures can ever work perfectly, and that from the best down to the poorest structures are infinite degrees of perfection, even down to the machine that has no capacity for any kind of work.
No ordinarily intelligent farmer doubts for a moment that all of this is true in the breeding of stock. He would never expect the same results from various breeds of cattle or even from all cattle of the same breed.
There is no exception to the rule that the whole life, with every tendency, is potential in the original cell. An acorn will invariably produce an oak tree. It can produce no other tree, and it will always develop true to its own pattern. The tree may be larger or smaller, more or less symmetrical, stronger or weaker, but always true to the general pattern of the oak. Variations will be certain, due in part to heredity and in part to environment.
That the baby had nothing to do with its equipment will readily be admitted by everyone. The child is born with a brain of a certain size and fineness. It is born with a nervous system made up of an infinite number of fine fibers reaching all parts of the body, with fixed stations or receivers like the central stations of a telephone system, and with a grand central exchange in the brain. If one can imagine all of the telephone wires in the world centered in one station, he may have some sort of a conception of the separate nerves that bring impressions to the brain and send directions out from it, which together make up the nervous system of man. None of these systems is perfect. They are of all degrees of imperfection down to the utterly useless or worse than useless system. These nerves are of all degrees of sensitiveness and accuracy in receiving and transmitting messages. Some may work well, others imperfectly. No one is much surprised when an automobile, equipped with a mechanism much simpler than the nervous system, refuses to respond properly.
The child is born without knowledge but with certain tendencies, instincts, capacities and potential strength or weakness. His nervous system and his brain may be good or bad—most likely neither very good nor very bad. All of his actions both as a child and as a man are induced by stimulation from without. He feels, tastes, sees, hears or smells some object, and his nerves carry the impression to his brain where a more or less correct registration is made. Its correctness depends largely upon the perfection of the nervous system and the fineness of the material on which the registration is made. Perfect or imperfect, the child begins to gather knowledge and it is stored in this way. To the end of his days he receives impressions and stores them in the same manner. All of these impressions are more or less imperfectly received, imperfectly conveyed and imperfectly registered. However, he is obliged to use the machine he has. Not only does the machine register impressions but it sends out directions immediately following these impressions: directions to the organism as to how to run, to walk, to fight, to hide, to eat, to drink, or to make any other response that the particular situation calls for.
Then, too, stimulated by these impressions, certain secretions are instantly emptied from the ductless glands into the blood which, acting like fuel in an engine, generate more power in the machine, fill it with anger or fear and prepare it to respond to the directions to fight or flee, or to any type of action incident to the machine. It is only within a few years that biologists have had any idea of the use of these ductless glands or of their importance in the functions of life. Very often these ductless glands are diseased, and always they are more or less imperfect; but in whatever condition they are, the machine responds to their flow.
The stored-up impressions are more or less awakened under stimulation. As life goes on, these stored impressions act as inhibitions or stimulations to action, as the case may be. These form the material for comparisons and judgments as to conduct. Not only are the impressions imperfect and the record imperfect, but their value and effect depend on the brain which compares and considers the impressions. From all this mechanism, action is born.
That man is the product of heredity and environment and that he acts as his machine responds to outside stimuli and nothing else, seem amply proven by the evolution and history of man. But, quite aside from this, logic and philosophy must lead to the same conclusions. This is not a universe where acts result from chance. Law is everywhere supreme. Every process of nature and life is a continuous sequence of cause and effect. No intelligent person would ever think of an effect in the physical world which did not follow a cause or causes. It has taken man a long time to find this out. The recurrence of the seasons, the seed-time and harvest, the common phenomena of Nature, were once supposed to be outside the realm of cause and effect and due to the whim of some powerful being. But the laws of matter are now coming to be understood. Chance, accident and whim have been banished from the physical world. The acts of men alone are supposed to be outside the realm of law. There is a cause for the eternal revolution of the earth around the sun, for the succession of seed-time and harvest, for growth and decay; but not for the thoughts and actions of man.
All the teaching of the world is based on the theory that there is no free will. Why else should children be trained with so much care? Why should they be taught what is right and what is wrong? Why should so much pains be taken in forming habits? To what effect is the storing of knowledge in the brain of the child, except that it may be taught to avoid the wrong and to do the right? Man's every action is caused by motive. Whether his action is wise or unwise, the motive was at least strong enough to move him. If two or more motives pulled in opposite directions, he could not have acted from the weakest but must have obeyed the strongest. The same motives applied to some other machine might have produced an opposite result, but to his particular structure it was all-controlling. How any special motive will affect any special machine must depend upon the relative strength of the motive and make of the machine. It is for this reason that intelligent people have always taken so much pains to fortify the machine, so that it would respond to what they believed was right. To say that one could ever act from the weakest motive would bring chaos and chance into a world of method and order. Even punishment could have no possible effect to deter the criminal after release, or to influence others by the example of the punishment. As well might the kernel of corn refuse to grow upward to the sunlight, and grow downward instead.
Before any progress can be made in dealing with crime the world must fully realize that crime is only a part of conduct; that each act, criminal or otherwise, follows a cause; that given the same conditions the same result will follow forever and ever; that all punishment for the purpose of causing suffering, or growing out of hatred, is cruel and anti-social; that however much society may feel the need of confining the criminal, it must first of all understand that the act had an all-sufficient cause for which the individual was in no way responsible, and must find the cause of his conduct, and, so far as possible, remove the cause.
The acorn will inevitably produce the oak tree and it will grow true to its pattern. All seeds and cells will do likewise. Still if the acorn is planted in good soil, where it is properly nourished and in a spot where it is sufficiently sheltered, the tree will be more likely to become large and symmetrical, than if it is planted in poor soil or in an exposed spot.
In one sense heredity is the seed, and environment the soil. The whole structure and pattern and inherent tendencies and potentiality are in the seed and cannot be changed. The child has nothing to do with its early environment during the period when impressions sink the deepest and when habits are formed. It is then that the meaning of facts is interpreted. At this time the child is fashioned by the teachings and environment in which it is placed. As the child receives its first impressions, and all along through its development, it is forming habits from those about it. These habits come to be strong, dominating forces in its life. Very few people, if any, can trace definite views of conduct or thought to their conscious effort, but these are born of their structure and the environment that formed their habits after birth.
The fact that an individual's political and religious faith depends almost entirely on his place of birth and early youth, shows the strength of environment in forming and shaping opinions and beliefs.
As the child grows and develops, it is influenced by all that surrounds it. The human machine moves in response to outside stimulation. How it will move depends upon two things, the character of the stimulant and the machine to which it is applied. No two machines will act exactly alike from the same stimulus. Sometimes they act in diametrically opposite ways. For instance, under the same stimulation, one may run and another may fight, depending perhaps on the secretions that the ductless glands empty into the blood.
No machine can act except according to its make-up. Even an ignorant person, who finds that the same stimulant produces different results on different machines, would know that the structures are not the same.
Endless discussions have been devoted to the relative importance of heredity and environment in human conduct. This is a fruitless task. In a sense, each one is of supreme importance in the outcome of a life. It is obvious that some structures are so perfect that almost no environment will overcome them. Instances of strong men developing out of poor environment are not rare. Many of these may be subject to doubt as to whether the heredity caused the strength, for the smallest particle of luck at some special or vital time may make all the difference possible in the outcome of a life. While some heredities withstand a poor environment, others are so poor that, no matter how good the environment, the machine cannot survive. An idiot is an illustration of one whom environment cannot change. No heredity will overcome the hardest environment. The old saying, "every man has his price," is true in this sense, that every machine will stand just so much and no more. Some machines reach the breaking point soon and some later, but all have their limit. Most people have a heredity that is not the best nor yet the worst. Given an imperfect machine, they are thrown into a certain environment, and then up to the capacity of their machines the outcome depends entirely on the environment. Given an environment easy enough they will succeed, or at least "get by." Given a hard environment they will fail, or "go down." Tens of thousands of men live in a comparatively easy environment and pass their lives as useful citizens with no taint of criminality to their names, who under a hard environment would be found in prison. On the other hand, perhaps most of the inmates of prisons would have lived as respected citizens if their environment had not been so hard. Heredity has everything to do with making the machine strong and capable, or weak and useless; but when the machine is made and thrown on the world in its imperfect shape, environment has everything to do in determining what its fate shall be.
Most people live a narrow existence. Perhaps the great majority of men and women find their safety in this kind of a life. The adjustment of heredity and environment is not an easy task to one who lives an unsheltered life. The ordinary person, thrown on his own resources, is poorly equipped for existence. His opinions on most matters are not sound. He uses poor judgment as to how he shall spend the little money he gets. He is generally driven by debts and harassed in all his efforts to get a living. A large family adds to his trouble and his existence is a constant struggle with what, to him, is an almost hopeless fate.
Industrial conditions for the most part are relentless and hard. The poor man is thrown into competition with his fellows for work. He may get along when work is easy to get and wages are good, but in dull times he falls behind, and is in hopeless trouble. His life is a long, hard struggle to make adjustments to his environment, and it is not strange that he goes down so often before the heavy task. Failure to make proper adjustments directly and indirectly often means prison to him.
Again, the ordinary and especially the weak man is hopelessly puzzled by his environment. It must never be overlooked that man has a lowly origin. The marks of his humble birth are in his whole structure and life. His make-up has been the work of the ages. He is a late development of a life that knew nothing of law, as law is understood today. His ancestors were hungry and went out after food, they killed their prey and took their food by main strength whenever they had the power. They were subject to certain customs which were very strict, but which were few and did not seriously complicate life. They knew only the law of force. Their existence was simple and primal, and they were governed by no "rights," except such simple ones as were made by might and custom.
Civilization is a constant building-up of limitations around heredity; a persistent growth of environmental control as it progresses, or at least moves along. This structure, especially the legal structure, is built by the more intelligent and always by the strong men. It is always shifting and moving, and it is impossible for the inferior man to adjust his emotions and his life rapidly to the changes. Things which are not condemned by his feelings of right and wrong are condemned by laws that meet with no response from his emotions and moral ideas. To him at least these are not different from the things that are done by others with impunity and without rebuke. Especially is this true of the rapidly growing class of property laws that have had no counterpart in the early history of man. This list has grown so fast that it is beyond the power of a large class of men to find in their feelings any response to many of these criminal statutes. The ever-growing social restrictions are of the same modern growth, and it is equally impossible to feel and understand them. What we call civilization has moved so fast that the structure and instincts of man have not been able to become adjusted to it. The structure is too cumbersome, too intense, too hard, and if not breaking down of its own weight, it is at least destroying thousands who cannot adjust themselves to its changing demands. Not only are the effects of this growing body of social and legal restrictions shown directly by their constant violation, generally by the inferior and the poor, but indirectly in their strain on the nervous system; by the irritation and impatience that they generate, and which, under certain conditions cause acts of violence.
No one can understand conduct without knowing something of the psychology of human action. First of all, it must be understood that reason, which so many have idealized and placed in control of the human machine, has little to do with the actions of men. It is a common habit with most men to find fault with and bewail the fact that human beings do not act from reason. However much the truth is impressed upon us, we never seem to realize that the basis of action is in instinct and emotion. It is really useless to quarrel with Nature. Whether it would have been better to have made man some other way is not worth discussing. He has been evolved in a certain way and we must take him as he is. Our impatience with the method that Nature has provided for influencing human conduct is largely due to our idea of the meaning of life.
Man has fancied himself in a position in the animal world that facts of life and nature do not sustain. We seem to feel that man has some high calling; that he should make something of himself which cannot be accomplished; that he should form some sort of a perfect order that he never can reach; in short that man has a purpose and a mission. It is manifest that all we know is but a mite compared with the unknown, and it may be that sometime a purpose will be revealed of which man never dreamed. Still from all that we can see and understand, Nature has but one desire, and that is the preservation and perpetuation of life. This is its purpose or, rather, its strongest urge not only with men but with all animal life. Sometimes to create one fish a million eggs are spawned. Nature is profligate both in spawning life and compassing its destruction. In the human species the capacity for life is immeasurably beyond its fruition. A large portion of those who are born die an early death. And that human life shall not be extinct, Nature plants the life-giving desire deep in the constitution of man. The creation of life comes from an instinct so profound and absorbing that it carries a train of evils in its wake. Many are overweighted by the sex instinct to their positive harm. Nature somehow did not trust such a fundamental duty as the preservation of the race to reason. If intellectual processes were responsible for life, the world no doubt would soon be bare of animate things. Neither could the care of the young be trusted to anything but the deep-seated instinct that causes the mother to forget her own life in the preservation of the life of her child.
The functions of body, on which life is founded, do not depend upon reason. The heart begins to beat before birth; it continues to beat until the end of life. The reason has nothing to do with the heart performing its function. Man goes to sleep at night confident that it will still be beating in the morning. The blood circulates in the veins independent of the thoughts of man. The digestive processes go on whether he sleeps or is awake. Many of his muscles never rest from birth to death. Life could not be preserved through the intellectual processes.
Human action is governed largely by instinct and emotion. These instincts and emotions are incident to every living machine and are the motor forces that impel the organism. They do not think. They act, and act at once. All the mind can do is to place some restraint on such instincts and emotions through experience, education and settled habits. If the actions are never inhibited, the machine will tear itself to pieces. If too easily inhibited, it will do no work. It is manifest that the perfect machine does not exist.
Man is moved by his instinct of flight and his emotion of fear, which are set in motion by apprehended dangers and by unaccustomed sights or sounds. Terror sometimes becomes so intense that it prevents flight and brings convulsions and death. It is idle to reason with one in terror. It is idle to reason with a mob in terror or a nation in terror. One might as well expect to calm a tempestuous sea with soft words.
The instinct of repulsion brings hatred and dislike and, combined with the instinct of pugnacity, may lead to crimes of violence. When these instincts are strong enough, the weak and superficial barriers cannot stand against them. An electrical flash showing the scaffold with the noose above it would have no force to stop an instinct and emotion fully aroused. Through seeing, feeling, hearing, tasting or smelling, some instinct is called into action. Many times several conflicting instincts are aroused. The man is like a tree bent back and forth by the storm. If the storm is hard enough, sooner or later it will break. Which way the tree falls has nothing to do with the consciousness of the tree, but has to do only with the direction of the prevailing and controlling force.
The instinct of gregariousness draws animals or men together into communities and close relations. This is one of the strongest instincts and not only preserves life but is fundamental to those human associations that are the basis of civilization. Except for this, animals would live a lonely life and probably perish from the earth. Through this instinct, man builds his villages and cities and organizes his states and nations. With the gregarious instinct and the parental instinct drawing men together, and the instincts and emotions of flight, fear and pugnacity, repelling and pushing them apart, conflict is inevitable. All that can be done is to create and cultivate as strong habits, customs and laws as possible to stand against the power of instinct and emotion in time of need, and to remove the main inciting causes so far as man has the intelligence and power to remove them. It is evident that this can never be complete. There are too many weak machines, too many defective nervous systems, too many badly organized brains. Accidents are inevitable, and some accidents are called "crimes." When the accident is international or world-wide, it means war. Those who believe that there is any power to stop all the harmful manifestations of man's instincts, either individually oren masse, do not understand the fundamental nature of man.
Many and probably all instincts work both for good and ill. Flight, pugnacity, repulsion, sex—all are life-preserving or life-destroying, as the case may be. A certain degree of excitation brings life and pleasure. A stronger or weaker may bring calamity and death. The parental instinct, with the instinct of reproduction, is fundamental to life. It is the basis of tenderness and sympathy, and is likewise the foundation of jealousy and often of hatred and pugnacity. At one time it may mean the deepest and most abiding pleasures of life, and at another it may bring death. Life cannot exist without it, and yet, that it may persist, Nature seriously overloads many machines with disastrous results. History is replete with the helplessness of reason and judgment in dealing with these emotions. Neither when they act for good nor for ill can reason and judgment have the slightest weight when these instincts and emotions are stirred to the depths.
The emotion to acquire and keep property is very strong and perhaps at the base of the deep desire for wealth. This emotion is probably of a comparatively late growth, but today it seems to have taken its place as one of the strongest that move men. This emotion, like all others, prompts man to get what he wants. It of course does not suggest the way, but is simply an urge to acquire and possess. It is modified and hedged about by customs and habits but, like all instincts, its strength is always seeking ways to accomplish results regardless of the rules laid down and thus urging their violation. With weak machines and imperfect systems, where not only are the restrictions imperfect, the habits not well defined, but where it is impossible to satisfy the instinct under the rules laid down, there can be but one result; a large number will take property wherever and however they can get it.
The instinct for acquisition is so strong that men are constantly contriving new and improved methods for getting property. Often the new methods come under restraint of the law. The enactment of the law does not give man the feeling that a thing is wrong which before was right and many continue their ways of getting property, regardless of the law. The instinct is too strong, the needs too great, and the barriers too weak.
Instincts are primal to man. He has inherited them from the animal world. Their strength and weakness depend on the make-up of the machine. Some are very strong and some abnormally weak, and there are no two machines that emphasize or repress the same instincts to the same degree. One need but look at his family and neighbors to see the various manifestations of these instincts. Some are quarrelsome and combative and will fight on the slightest provocation. Others are distinctively social; the gregarious instinct is pronounced in many people. These are always seen in company and cannot be alone. They readily adapt themselves to any sort of associations. Others are solitary. They choose to be alone. They shrink from and avoid the society of others. In some the instinct at the basis of sex association is over-strong; they like children; they are generally sympathetic and emotional, and the strength of the instinct often leads them to excesses. Others are entirely lacking in this instinct; they neither care for children nor want them; they habitually avoid association with the other sex. The difference is constituent in the elements that make up the machine.
Everyone is familiar with the varying strength and weakness of the instincts of getting and hoarding as shown by his neighbors and acquaintances. Some seem to have no ambition or thought for getting or keeping money. Some can get it but cannot keep it. Some have in them from childhood the instinct for getting the better of every trade; for hoarding what they get, and accumulating property all their lives. In this, as in all other respects, no two individuals are alike. History is filled with examples of men who had the instinctive power of getting money combined with the instinct for keeping it. Their names are familiar, all the way from Midas and Croesus down to the prominent captains of industry today. It is common for them and their adherents who criticise new schemes of social organization to remark with the greatest assurance that before wealth can be equal, brains must be equal. The truth is that brains have little to do with either the making or accumulating of money. This depends mainly, like all other activities, on the strength or weakness of the instincts involved. One's brain capacity cannot be measured by his bank account, any more than by the strength of his body or the color of his hair. His bank account simply shows his innate tendencies. There is no doubt that brain capacity as well as physical perfection adds to power, but it is the instinct that determines the tendency and strength of the activity.
To say that the one who gets money the most easily and keeps it the most safely has the best brain is no more reasonable than to say that the foxhound is more intelligent than the bull-dog because it can run faster. Nature formed one for running and the other for holding on. The brain power is not involved.
There are manifold ways of gratifying all these instincts. The desire for property calls simply for getting it and keeping it. It does not involve the method to be used. The way is determined by other faculties, by education, by opportunities, by the strength and weakness of inhibitions. It does not follow that all legal ways are morally right and all illegal ones morally wrong. Society in its development has established certain ways in which it may be done. These ways are easy for some, they are hard for others, and for many quite impossible.
Still the instinct for getting is always present, leading and urging to acquire and to keep. Endless are the ways that men have contrived to gratify this instinct. If, perchance, a law stands in the way, means are always sought to get around the law. Every desire is always seeking its own gratification or satisfaction. This means life. Most men believe that the way they adopt for getting money or gratifying other instincts is really no worse than some other person's way. The man who uses the confidence game contends with great assurance that his methods are like other business methods; that all men are using every means to get the largest return for the least effort, and one way is no better than another. A considerable portion of society has always supported him in these ideas. The law is full of shadowy lines which divide legal acquisition from the illegal, some of which are so fine that no one can see more than a technical difference. For instance, under an indictment for obtaining money by false pretenses, one may make all sorts of statements as to the quality, value, style and desirability of the article sold, if he does not make a specific statement of a fact regarding the material contained in them or the amount, number, quality or the like. He may lie, but to be safe he must know the kind of lie the law permits. Many lies pass as "puffing goods" and are within the pale. A trader is not expected to tell the truth. What he can and cannot say may be determined only by a careful examination of the law, and not always then.
Infinite are the reasons men give for doing the things that their instincts bid them do. All depends upon the strength of the instinct and the character of the machine; the restrictions and habits formed; and many other factors of which the man knows nothing. In fact, all depends upon his endowment and the outside forces that move to action, and for none of these is he in any way to be praised or blamed.
Society seems to be almost oblivious to the emotional life of man. The great masses of men have no capacity or chance to prepare a proper environment in the intense commercialism and mad rush of today. The laws of trade and commerce give most men food, clothing and shelter but nothing more. There is no beauty in their homes or surroundings; no music or art; no adventure or speculation. Existence is a dead thing, a dreary round. To many such people crime furnishes the only chance for adventure. Take away emotions and life is hopelessly dull and commonplace. The emotions of men must be fed just as the body must be fed. To many religion has furnished this emotional life. Churches have provided some art and some music. But aside from the Catholic Church almost none of this is for the poor. To many if not most people religion cannot take the place of joy. Dogma and creed deaden and cannot appeal to the reason of man. Still they have furnished a large part of the emotional life to great masses of men, without which existence would hold no hope or joy. But this is not enough to fill most lives. The element of joy is largely lacking. To many it makes no appeal, although music and art and beauty do. In no country has society so utterly neglected and ignored the emotional side of man as in America. This has led many men to a life of adventure that for them has been possible only in crime. Many others found this life in the saloon, mixed with influences not conducive to a normal life. The closing of the saloons has added to the already serious need of providing for the innate feelings of men. This is all the more important for America, as a large part of our population has come from lands where beauty and art and music have for generations been made a part of the common life of all.
Those who have had no experience in the courts and no knowledge of what is known as the "criminal class" have a general idea that a criminal is not like other men. The people they know are law-abiding, conventional believers in the State and the Church and all social customs and relations; they have strict ideas of property rights, and regard the law as sacred. True they have no more acquaintance with law-makers and politicians in general than with the criminal class, which, of course, is one reason why they have such unbounded confidence in the law. Such persons are surprised and shocked when some member of the family or some friend is entangled in the courts, and generally regard it as a catastrophe that has come upon him by accident or a terrible mistake. As a rule, they do all in their power to help him whether he is acquitted or convicted. They never think that he and everyone else they know is not materially different from the ordinary criminal. As a matter of fact, the potential criminal is in every man, and no one was ever so abandoned that some friend would not plead for him, or that some one who knew him would not testify to his good deeds.
The criminal is not hard to understand. He is one who, from inherited defects or from great misfortune or especially hard circumstances, is not able to make the necessary adjustments to fit him to his environment. Seldom is he a man of average intelligence, unless he belongs to a certain class that will be discussed later. Almost always he is below the normal of intelligence and in perhaps half of the cases very much below. Nearly always he is a person of practically no education and no property. One who has given attention to the subject of crime knows exactly where the criminal comes from and how he will develop. The crimes of violence and murder, and the lesser crimes against property, practically all come from those who have been reared in the poor and congested districts of cities and large villages. The robbers, burglars, pickpockets and thieves are from these surroundings. In a broad sense, some criminals are born and some are made. Nearly all of them are both born and made. This does not mean that criminality can be inherited, or even that there is a criminal type. It means that with certain physical and mental imperfections and with certain environment the criminal will be the result.
Seldom does one begin a criminal life as a full-grown man. The origin of the typical criminal is an imperfect child, suffering from some defect. Usually he was born with a weak intellect, or an unstable nervous system. He comes from poor parents. Often one or both of these died or met misfortune while he was young. He comes from the crowded part of a poor district. He has had little chance to go to school and could not have been a scholar, no matter how regularly he attended school. Some useful things he could have learned had society furnished the right teachers, surroundings and opportunities to make the most of an imperfect child. Early in life he does some desultory work in casual occupations. This of course is not steady, but he picks up what he can and keeps the job for a short time, sometimes quitting work because he is discharged and sometimes because, like most boys and men, he does not like to work. His playground is the street, the railroad yards or vacant lots too small for real play, and fit only for a loafing place for boys like himself. These gather nightly and talk of the incidents that interest most people, mainly the abnormal things of life and generally the crimes that the newspapers make so prominent to satisfy the public demand. He learns to go into vacant buildings, steals the plumbing, and he early learns where to sell it. From this it is only a short step to visiting occupied buildings at night. In this way he learns to be a burglar as other boys learn to play baseball or golf.
Naturally he has no strong sense of property rights. He has always had a hard time to get enough to eat and wear, and he has grown up unconsciously to see the inequality of distribution and to believe that it is not fair and that there is little or no justice in the world. As a child he learned to get things the best way he could, and to think nothing about it. In short, his life, like all other lives, moves along the lines of least resistance. He soon comes to feel that the police are his natural enemies and his chief business is to keep from getting caught. Inevitably he is brought into the Juvenile Court. He may be reprimanded at first. He comes again and is placed on probation. The next time he goes to a Juvenile Prison where he can learn all the things he has not found out before. He is known to the police, known to the Court, known to the neighbors. His status is fixed. When released from prison, he takes his old heredity back into his old environment. It is the easiest to him, for he has learned to make his adjustments to this environment. From fifteen to twenty-five years of age, he has the added burden of adolescence, the trying time in a boy's life when sex feelings are developing, when he is passing from childhood to manhood. This is a very difficult time at best to the type of boy from which a criminal grows; he meets it without preparation or instruction. What he knows he learns from others like himself. He gets weird, fantastic, neurotic ideas, which only add to his natural wonderment.
Every person who has not inherited property must live by some trade or calling. Very few people in jail or out choose their profession. Even if one selects his profession it does not follow that he has chosen the calling for which he is best adapted. So far as a person can and does follow his desires, he generally means to choose the calling which will bring him the greatest amount of return for the least exertion. He may have strong inclinations in certain directions, as, for instance, to paint or to write or to investigate or to philosophize, but, as a rule, he does not make his living from following these ambitions. If he does, it is generally a poor living. But usually his aim is to make money at something else so that he can give free rein to his real ambitions.
Most men start to make a living as boys from the ages of fifteen to eighteen. They have no idea of what they ought to do or even of what they want to do. Usually, so far as they have an ambition, it is to do something more or less spectacular that seems to have an element of adventure and not too disagreeable or hard; something like the work of a policeman, a chauffeur, or an employee in a garage. Still, first and last, most boys and most men have no opportunity for choosing an occupation. In fact, the boy is told that he is a man and must get a job long before he knows that he is a man or begins to feel responsibilities, while he still has all the emotions and dreams of a boy.
When he is told he must go to work he looks for a job. He does not wait until he can find the one that fits him. He cannot afford to wait and if he could, he does not know what job would fit. He takes automatically the first place he can get, hoping to find a better one, which generally means an easier one, before very long. It is hard for a boy to stick to work; too many things are calling him away. Every instinct and emotion is urging him to play. New feelings and desires are coaxing him from work. His companions and the boy life in which he has a place urge him to leave his task. Usually he keeps his job no longer than he can help and later looks for something else. The chances are great that he will never find what he wants; that he has not had the preparation or training for a successful workingman's career, whatever that might be. He is a doer of odd jobs and of poorly paid work all his life.
He must have some calling and takes the easiest one, which is often a life of crime. From this start comes the professional criminal so-called. He may make a business of picking pockets. If this comes to be his trade it is very hard for him to give it up. There is so strong an element of chance—he never knows what a pocket will contain—it gratifies a spirit of adventure. Then it is easy. The wages are much greater than he could get in any other calling; the hours are short and it never interferes with his amusements. It is not so dangerous as being a burglar or a switchman, for he can find an excuse for jostling one in the street-cars or in a crowd and thus reaching into a pocket.
The burglar is not so apt to be a professional; his is a bolder and more hazardous trade; if he is caught he is taken from his occupation for a longer time. The great hazard involved in this trade and also the physical strength and fitness of those who follow it lead to its abandonment more frequently than is the case with a pickpocket or a petty thief. Robbery is seldom a profession. It is usually the crime of the young and venturesome and almost surely leads to early disaster. Murder, of course, is never a profession. In a broad way it is the result of accident or passion, or of relations which are too hard to endure.
In prison and out, I have talked with scores of these men and boys. I am sure they rarely tried to deceive me. I have very seldom seen one who felt that he had done wrong, or had any thought of what the world calls reformation. A very few have used the current language of those who talk of reform, but generally they were the weakest and most hopeless of the lot and usually adopted this attitude to deceive. In almost every instance where you meet any sign of intelligence, excuses and explanations are freely made, and these explanations fully justify their points of view. Often too they tell you in sincerity that they believe their way of life is too hard and does not pay; that while they cannot see how they could have done any differently in the past, they believe their experience has taught them to stick by the rules of the game.
The boy delinquent grows naturally and almost inevitably into the man criminal. He has generally never learned a trade. No habits have been formed in his youth to keep him from crime. A life of crime is the only one open to him, and for this life he has had ample experience, inclination and opportunity. Then too for this kind of young man the life of a criminal has a strong appeal. Life without opportunity and without a gambler's chance to win a considerable prize is not attractive to anyone. The conventional man who devotes his life to business or to a profession always has before him the prizes of success—to some honor and glory, and to most of them wealth. Imagine the number of lawyers, doctors and business men who could stick to a narrow path if they knew that life offered no opportunity but drudgery and poverty! Nearly all of these look forward to the prizes of success. Most of them expect success and many get it. For the man that I have described, a life of toil offers no chance of success. His capacity, education and environment deny him the gambler's chance of a prize. As an honest man, he may raise a family, always be in debt, live a life of poverty and hardship and see nothing ahead but drudgery and defeat. This is why so many mediocre men are found in the mountains and oil fields prospecting for hidden wealth. With the chance of a fortune just before them, and no other opportunity to win, they spend their lives without a family or home, urged on by the hope of luck.
The man grown from boyhood into ways of vice and crime sees this hope and this hope only to make a strike. He has no strong convictions and no well-settled habits to hold him back. The fear of the law only means greater caution, and after all he has nothing to lose. In his world arrest and conviction do not mean loss of caste; they mean only bad luck. With large numbers of men crime becomes a trade. It grows to be a business as naturally as any other calling comes to be a trade.
There are other criminals who do not come from the class I have described, but the habitual visitor to criminal courts knows that they are very few. Of the others, some are born of parents who could care for them and have done their best and yet, in spite of this, they have repeatedly been entangled in the law; these are often the only ones of a large family who have not lived according to the rules of the game. They are different from the other members of the family. For the most part they have some specific congenital defect, or an unstable system that prevents the correct registration of the experiences that produce safe habits, or makes them unable to withstand temptation or suggestion.
Everyone knows how easy it is, especially for children, to react to suggestion. The whole life of a child is a response to suggestion. This is about all there is to education. Even older men constantly and readily yield to suggestion. The results gained by quack doctors, lightning-rod agents, promoters and dealers in oil stocks, mining stocks and an endless number of other stocks, show that the right kind of suggestion is bound to produce results. The dressing of the windows of department stores and the writing of catchy advertisements are a constant recognition of the power of suggestion. So well known is this weakness of human character that schools of salesmanship are regularly organized and promoted to teach the art of getting victims to part with money for things they do not want or need.
Every right-feeling person does everything in his power to educate the child. He is ever watchful through the child's youth and early manhood to equip him with the capacity to make a living. He seeks to build up around him and within him the strongest kind of habits and beliefs. He carefully teaches the child that the only way to live is to observe all the rules laid down by experience and custom, so that he may not react to the temptations that life holds out at every step. Every wise person feels almost certain that if his children are reared without education, without discipline, without training or opportunities, they will almost inevitably swell the ranks of the criminal classes. And it is especially certain that if one of his children is defective or has an unstable nervous system, such a child should never be left without protection and care.
There are professional criminals of a different grade, like the forger and the confidence man. Both of these have generally had some education and a fair degree of intelligence, and have had some advantages in life. The forger, as a rule, is a bookkeeper or an accountant who grows expert with the pen. He works for a small salary and sees nothing better. He grows familiar with signatures. Sometimes he is a clerk in a bank and has the opportunity to study signatures; he begins to imitate them, often with no thought of forging paper. He does it because it is an art and probably the only thing he can do well. Perhaps some hard luck or an unfortunate venture on the Board of Trade, or in a faro bank, makes him write a check or note. He easily convinces himself that he is not getting the salary he earns and that less worthy men prosper while he is poor. Then too his business calls for better clothes and better surroundings than those of the workingman, and gives him many glimpses of easy lives. For a time he may escape. If the amount is not too large it is often passed by without an effort to detect. Sometimes it escapes notice altogether. Some business men write so many checks that they take no pains at the end of the month to figure up their account and examine every check, and never notice it unless the balance given by the bank is so far out of the way that it attracts attention. After a forger grows to be an expert, he can move from town to town. If he is taken and put in prison and finally released, he is hard to cure. Forgery is too easy and he knows of no other trade so good. A large percentage of these men never would have forged, had their wages been higher. Many others are the victims of the get-rich-quick disease; they haunt the gambling houses, brokers' offices and the like. Often when they begin they expect to make the check good; generally, they would have made good if the right card had only turned up in the faro bank, or the right quotation on the stock exchange.
There is another class of forgers, generally bankers, who speculate with trust funds. To cover up the shortage they sign notes expecting that they will never be presented and will deceive no one but the bank examiner. If luck goes against them too long, the bank fails and the forgery is discovered. These are really not forgers, as they never intend to get money on the note. It is only a part of a means to cover up the use of trust funds. Of course, these men are never professional forgers, and are much more apt to die from suicide or a broken heart than to repeat.
But with few exceptions, the criminal comes from the walks of the poor and has no education or next to none. For this society is much to blame. Sometimes he is obliged to go to work too soon, but often he cannot learn at school. This is not entirely the fault of the boy's heredity; it is largely the fault of the school. A certain course of study has been laid out. With only slight changes this course has come down from the past and is fixed and formal. Much of it might be of value to a professional man, but most of it is of no value to the man in other walks of life. Because a boy cannot learn arithmetic, grammar or geography, or not even learn to read and write, it does not follow that he cannot learn at all. He may possibly have marked mechanical ability; he may have more than the ordinary powers of adaptation to many kinds of work. These he could be taught to do and often to do well. Under proper instruction he might become greatly interested in some kind of work, and in the study to prepare him for the work. Then too it is more or less misleading to say that an uneducated man commits crime because he is uneducated. Often his lack of education as well as his crime comes from poverty. Crime and poverty may come from something else. All come because he had a poor make-up or an insufficient chance.
After all, the great majority of men must do some kind of manual labor. Until the time shall come when this kind of work is as easy and as well paid as other employment, no one will do manual labor if he can do any other kind. Perhaps the time may come when the hardest and most disagreeable work will be the best paid. There are too many unskilled workers in proportion to the population to make this seem very near. In the meantime—and that is doubtless a long time—some one must do this work. Much of it is done under supervision and requires no great skill and need not be very disagreeable or hard. In a complex civilization there is room for everyone to contribute to the whole. If our schools are some day what they should be, a large part of their time, in some cases all of it, will be devoted to manual training and will be given to producing skilled workmen. This sort of school work can be made attractive to thousands of boys who can do nothing else. And if easier conditions of life under fairer social surroundings could be added to this kind of education, most boys who now drift into crime would doubtless find the conventional life more profitable and attractive.