We are beridden by excess prophets.Washington Star.
We are beridden by excess prophets.
Washington Star.
Nature builds some men bigger than any office or title. Theodore Roosevelt was such a man, whose wont it was to coin cutting saws such as, “The shots that hit are the shots that count.”
Taken for what it was meant to convey, that epigram needs no champion; yet the implied negative of it may or may not hold water. That will depend upon the ratio of hits to misses.
Missed shots prolong conflict, multiply fatalties, and pile up huge waste of the materials of war. Hence, largely, the staggering toll taken by the World War in priceless young manhood, and of the going resources of the nations engaged.
It goes without saying that a fighting force must be an expert force in the care and use of the tools it employs; but that is of the primary exactions. The master key to victory, alike in business and battle, is moulded of leadership; leadership thatenvisages the tactical machine made up of units of balanced efficiency.
The American military system essentially does and must presuppose the squad leader to be as efficient in his domain, as is the commanding general in his. Indeed, an American army made up of prime privates, and the more petty leaders, might pound through, in a pinch, even though faultily disposed betimes by the bestarred and besilvered; whereas, under the reverse circumstance, it would almost certainly suffer defeat at the hands of an evenly-schooled foe.
But a properly trained, led, and served army would not necessarily close a given case. Assume such an army at points on the field with an inferior enemy, and the hazard might still be settled by swivel-chair soldiers, as it very nearly was in the War of the Rebellion; also very nearly was by round-table strategists who insisted that Foch should keep his general reserves massed where he knew he could not use them to advantage, as he had planned, to pummel the German divisions, piled up in a close pocket, where they were glaringly open to raking flank fire.
Fortunately, that issue was settled by the purblind German General Staff, which was so obsessed by the idea of the spectacular capture of Paris, that it could not see Amiens; Amiens, seen at the time by all of the Allied leaders as plainly the objectiveof the German grand plan of attack. Whether or no Hindenburg now lashes himself thereof in order to spare his former imperial masters, false leadership defeated Germany; and it came right close to spoiling the battle broth for the Allies.
So much of seeming diversion is employed to set off the fact that social and prison progress has been held up in America, particularly during the last three decades, by “false leadership.”
For example, consider this master stroke, framed by a much-quoted minister of the gospel: “Possibly somethingis to be granted topunishmentas adeterrent. No doubtsomepeople are tosomeextent restrained from wrong doing byfear of punishment.”
The person who penned those lines—underscoring of which is ours—knew that had religious creeds relied solely for their carrying power on strictly voluntary service for God from the heart of man, they had limped to an early demise.
Had the writer marked it that not even “fear of punishment” condign by the Almighty “restrains” by-choice criminals from “wrong doing,” he would have made the best case possible against punishment as a “deterrent”; yet only the best case possible, since the efficiency of deterrence is to be judged by its effect upon the normal mass, and not upon the abnormal few.
In such instance, the qualifying word points the difference as between the mere “tough” brawler,“restrained” from going the limit, and the ruthless blood-spiller whom fear of punishment eternal does not feaze. Monstrosities occur in all forms of animal life. When the monstrous human strikes, he must be struck accordingly.
Moreover, before we reach final conclusions, we must know the order and ordering of our deterrence; must know it up through the gamut of the apprehension, the conviction, and the sentence of lawbreakers, and then through the gamut of their prison activities.
False procedure as to any one of the four processes named will invalidate any general statement of negation concerning the efficience of punishment for crime. Procedure in America has been false in every named particular. Therefore, the actual effect of just and necessary legal punishment for crime cannot have been declared.
Much of crude guesswork has been exploited by single-seeing fetichists of one or another kidney; but cardinal facts have remained hidden from such, for the very good reason that to uncover those facts requires hard digging strangest to their striving.
When we shall have caught our thieves as surely as Canada catches hers; then fitted the punishment to the offense; then fitted the institution to the offender, and the offender to the institution, will be time enough to place stricture on punishment values.
At a time when, and in a country where, themurderous footpad knows the chances are three to one against his being brought to trial; ten to one against his sentence to life imprisonment; eighty to one that he will not suffer the death penalty; and that the all-around odds are nearly prohibitive as against the practical application, both in and out of prison, of the least elastic predicates of penal codes: it is sheer gratuitous dilettantism to allege that punishment of crime in America doesn’t punish.
How can legal punishment punish, if only about five shots in the hundred of it hit so as to hurt?
Here, again, “The shots that (miss) are the shots that count”; and that would still be true if criminals were favored only by so much as the gambler’s throw; in fact, they would continue to jump at an even chance to outmaneuver agents of the law. Why not?
Exhibit No. 2, offered by a highly-paid correspondent of a Chicago newspaper, is fully as informing as are our “minister’s” conclusions: “There never was a time when theft was considered proper.”
From 323 to 354 B.C., Spartan youth were most carefully schooled by State agents in promiscuous sneak-thievery. Petty thieving by the lads of Greece was then considered a necessary accomplishment. More than that, the boy who came back empty-handed from a foraging expedition, was brutally punished, even unto death.
With germane facts of comparatively recent history in mind, the “correspondent” probably wouldn’t have been guilty of assertion so grossly incorrect; yet the fact remains that loosest of declaration has for long years been employed by a certain class of writers, in furtherance of impish itch for cheap, if ephemeral prominence.
Furthermore, for a State directly to put limited stamps of approval on its young thieves, as did the agents of Lycurgus, would be but one of many ways by which to establish them; in very truth, the indirect method of doing so is hands over the most pernicious and far-reaching method.
The most expeditious anti-social job of the latter kind is done as it is being done the country over in the United States; which is to say: maim the criminal law until it goes on crutches, and at the same time order prison régimes to square with the instinctive reactions of lawbreakers. That is to play both ends against the public security; and that is precisely the condition with which the American people are confronted.
To tale off a summary of associated influences would crowd a bulking volume. Also, it would yield what mostly wasted effort yields, since Americans have been fully cognizant of the constantly widening cracks in the national structure, as well as of the manner in which those openings have been effected.
He knows that neither added nor rescinded statutes can eliminate bad lines of blood, established mainly by an immigration policy framed and executed as if to establish those lines of blood. Hundreds of thousands of those of the “lines” are daily plying disruptive wares; wares which they will continue to ply, more or less, unto at least the fifth generation ahead. A country cannot sit up of a sudden and determine to serve overnight antidote for the slow poison of its people.
He knows class legislation is deadly to democracy; yet he sits supinely tight while organized labor successfully clubs with votes for special privileges, successively the more indefensible.
He knows the avaricious brute is at the bottom of all of war, and he knows blood-letting within such as the sixteen-foot prize ring is the cruelest of war in miniature. Nevertheless, he piles his own dollars on the pyramid of dollars pulled down annually by the pug-ugly fraternity, the while winking the nether eye as his own kiddies are imbued, through suggestion and example, with the spirit of the fistic parasite.
Nor must women be denied her meed of praise. She, too, is getting the punching habit of mind. Hundreds of the bejeweled of her wait breathlessly at the ringside for the benignant “K. O.” Her voice, raised for the making a national pet of the parasitic pug, is recorded: “I am notespeciallyfond of seeing the blood flow; but I justdoteon ‘draws.’”
When thefemme de ringshall have wormed herself a bit further into the mysteries of the roped arena, she will be bally-well fed up with “draws,” the majority of which are “crooked” in order to coin “easy money.” Also, she will likely transmit to her brood the instinct to shunt productive work and tear things.
He knows fattened money-hogs shoulder to bar the way to the money-trough, where they pile fat on fat.
He knows of the cheap flings of the charlatan; of the ruthlessly lawless reach of the radical labor leader; of the rotten bases from which the bebadged are frequently forced to work; of the political chicanery by which the sting is drawn on the one hand from the edicts of upright judges: and on the other hand—if much less frequently yet frequently enough—written into the edicts of legal agents whom the ermine but drapes.
He knows all, and more, and sundry; yet he will not so much as step to the primary and register his vote against the nefarious combination.
Shall the load be fastened to his back, he will have none but himself to blame. Hundreds of voices have for long years dinged into his ears the danger ahead.
For threatened retrogression none are moreresponsible than those who have known better, but who, willy-nilly for a price, have shunted public thought from facing actual conditions, to an abiding faith in the reverse of all of human experience. Hence the drifting with the flood tide of those conditions; and hence the miserable mix of the moment.
Take just one more gem, illustrative of the kind of self-contradictory stuff which the public has purblindly swallowed. It is out of the scrambled brain of one who assumes to see reformatively from “the hill of vision.”
(1) Pro: “If other men, living under the same conditions, succeed in maintaining their integrity, what excuse can the criminal claim for his failure to do the same?”
(2) Con: “In conclusion, the criminal is a man whose faculties are not well balanced. ‘Just as the twig is bent, the tree’s inclined.’”
Broadly speaking, the “conclusion” is correct; but observe that it fights the companion question, tooth and nail. First off, the average man does not carry the handicap of congenital predisposition to thieve, as do most of instinctive thieves. As a “twig,” he was not “bent” and “inclined” that way. Secondly, “other men” had not “lived under the same conditions”; so the positive case is at once cleared of the cardinal hypothesis. And thirdly, since the criminal of the class indicated “is a man whose faculties are not well balanced”; and since “Justas the twig is bent the tree’s inclined,” he has at least two-fold limited excuse for his oblique thoughts and deeds, likewise claim upon our commiseration.
Examples of the kind given could be multiplied indefinitely; indeed, it is the exception to come upon socio-criminological writing that will stand up, even under large-lens analysis.
Thoughtless plungers, with their half-baked opinions, we have a’plenty; idiosyncratics are, of course, irrepressible, since like the true criminal, “their faculties are not well balanced”; the self-seeking advertiser never misses a throw no matter how cheap; purse-packing politicians play the penological game for the “rake off”; hectic emotionalists berate those who do not see with eyes blind to the wide-open machinations of criminal malingerers; kindergarten panaceas are seriously advanced as means by which to stop death-dealing bandits; and a dash of the seasoning of the conglomerate mess is done by every dilettante who has worried through the like of Freud’s “dream” stuff.
It wouldn’t occur to a bookkeeper that he could remove his coat and weld a better joint than can a blacksmith; nor to a lawyer that he could lay brick to line with a journeyman mason; but any man or woman who has fondled a fetich of reform, backed by the most casual knowledge of, and contact with criminals, has been cock sure of call to draw plansand specifications for seasoned criminologists to follow.
Therefore the game of penology has attracted and held very few big men, who have refused a vocation in which one must constantly adjust, then readjust, to the dissonant tinkling of little bells, rung by individuals who cannot be brought to listen for the fundamental tones of reform. And therefore puerile, patch-quilt prison methods, with rivalry between single-seeing cults as to which could place the greatest emphasis on bizarre banalities.
“All of true force is silent.” If you know baseball to its vitals, sit in the grand stand and test out that truism; observe there how the mouthy “fan” will miscall the turn, both on the player and the play. Observe, also, how the real student of the game is too busy following the finesse of the general play around the whole circuit, to be led into a Dervish dance over outstanding features. And observe that while “stars” may “twinkle,” it is the evenly-balanced team, and team work that nails the pennant to the staff.
Team work! Support of every man by every other man engaged in a given work! That would be made as if to the hands of social and prison reform; but it wouldn’t enable the “twinkler” to worm himself under caption type. True, self-praise is seldom written into the final record; albeit he who cunningly employs the kin of it can appreciably holdup his betters, and the big work they take earnestly.
Contrary to the general understanding, prison reform stands at inches below the mark set for it decades ago by fitted and far-seeing men. It could not have been otherwise under grossly overdone probation and suspensions, made binding by most ill-considered sentences to institutions wherein industrial and auxiliary averages have been cut to the pattern of habitual felons.
The remedies? Enumeration of them would fill another big book. A few, basic ones, are struck off by the writer in his Stop Thief! Agreeably with the specific lines of this chapter, the public can make a prime start at actually speeding up social and prison reform, through searching out self-alleged social seers for what they actually know about the game they essay to umpire; as well as how they came by knowledge sufficient to do it.
The cumulative effect of little pills of social effort can help clarify the reform atmosphere; but when it does the pellets are charged with the dynamic alternative of divine law.
“Excess Prophets!” Pseudo protagonists! Aye! And spot the man, no matter what his station or calling, who lends influence of kind whatsoever to fasten the minds of lads and lassies on “sporting” non-producers.
Essentially, bear down hard on him who would knight the wont-work principal of that lowest-downabomination called “the prize ring”; else history will have it America went out of her way to flout a gentle Jesus, and thereby to dig her own thug-planned grave.
Hyperbolic rot? You don’t believe it? Then think on it that while millions of men, willing to work, can’t get work, the gate receipts of the brutal affair about to be pulled off, as between Dempsey and Carpentier, will aggregate close to sixteen-hundred-thousand dollars; and that a cool half million of that sum will go to the principal “pugs,”—say nothing of the aftermath in such as moving picture rights, and vaudeville stunts to drive the devilish business home.
CRIME AND THE LAY CRITIC
“Boast not of happiness until you reach the last day of your life,” Croesus admonished Solon, the code builder of ancient Athens.
“For the condemned I entertain but little blame, and for the good but scant praise,” echoes a lady, who would direct us from the hill of vision how to reform, rather than punish criminals.
Casual comparison discloses little of kin between the admonition and declaration quoted; yet they shoot from the same trunk, if not from the same branch. Both flout well-being and doing. Put into practice, either would make of life a juiceless grind.
The lady further affirms that “One of our chiefest duties is to rehabilitate the criminal into respect for himself.” The platitude would carry more of weight, were it unqualified. Moreover, her declaration fights her assertion, since a man’s “respect for himself” presupposes just pride in a robust manhood.
Condone vice and discount virtue, and you lock arms with the habitual criminal. He does exactly that. Denying sufficient of moral motive for honestendeavor, he moves over lines of least resistance to that which he craves. Doing it, he will twist such as the lady’s startling epitome of the moral code to square with his oblique selections.
And the good lady would not “greet” prisoners with, “Ye who enter here, leave all hope behind,” but put them to “tending plants,” and thus solve a vexing problem.
As a first essential, reformatory prisoners are “greeted” with plenty of soap and water. Their free-life garments are sterilized or burned. The house physician then passes on their physical condition. In clean skin and garb, they are now ready for biographical examination by the Superintendent, by whom they are given a straightforward talk concerning the aims of the reformatory. In much the same manner, they pass through the hands of the heads of departments. They are then ready for trade, scholastic, military and gymnastic instruction.
Religious services for all denominations are held. Classes in ethics, nature studies and history are heard. Amusements and lectures are frequent and varied. The personal equation is strongly marked. One would needs employ reams of paper to specify the advantages afforded prisoners in a modern reformatory. It is sufficient to place that named against trite verbiage, such as “leave all hope behind,” and it is only fair to add that when reformativeoffices are rendered abortive, they usually are because of the purblind meddling of kindergarten criminologists.
For the submerged fraction who are held in prisons of last resort, every humane thing should be done, even though they had refused the good offices of society, both in and out of prison; yet must we face the portentous truth that an appreciable percentage of habitual criminals so confined, are those who had sounded the full gamut of institutional life. Reformatories always confine a positive number of graduates of juvenile schools of reform, and thousands of ex-reformatory lads go marching on to convict prisons.
Why? For one, cardinal reason, because those who have guided public opinion in matters criminological, cannot be made to understand that life is a most serious business for these young men. The majority of them are loaded down with natural or acquired handicaps, not the least serious of which is dislike of, and opposition to, consecutive, concentrated endeavor. Hence, such lads need above all else to be subjected to mental, moral and physical education and training, most carefully prescribed and prosecuted. This, to the end that they may build to sound minds in sound bodies, and have it borne in upon them that “Work is worship.”
Instead, the pressure of many, who merely putter, has been for surface pursuits for prisoners; foractivities which have the least to do with reformation. Result: thousands upon thousands of such young men have been paroled, again paroled, and once more paroled, from correctional institutions, unskilled as to a legitimate trade or occupation, with the half-opened minds of the thief or thug, with hearts drawn to contempt for the social scheme in part responsible for their plight, and for correctional training which left them to fight against prohibitive odds.
Clean and uplifting recreative exercises for repeating felons should be regulated to meet the requirements of necessary mental and physical relaxation. Such exercises should not, other than on State or holiday occasions, interfere with the regular daily schedule of the reformative régime. That is, and must be, relatively drastic. The social exactions upon instinctive recidivists leave no choice in the matter. They must be broken to both the halter and the harness of the free life working day.
As to occasional, unskilled felons, committed under the indeterminate sentence and its average short detention period, nothing less than concentration of thought and energy on their part can spell social rehabilitation for them. In free life, it takes a young man from five to seven years to become a journeyman mechanic. About ninety of the hundred of reformatory inmates are mechanically unprepared when received. They are detained less than fifteen months on the average. Consider such circumstancesand say how many “plants” they should “tend” during the daylight of their prison day? In many cases their families require support, and they the hand-tool or other skill with which to support them. Without the skill, they are reduced at best to skin games; and that’s the crux of the crime question.
An effusive member of the sterner sex, with quill-swagger of the criminological dilettante, cheapens the pages of a popular periodical with the following: “What brutes were these (prison) guards on whose good will the parole of many prisoners depended; but what could one expect of those willing to accept positions that degraded their incumbents below the convicts over which they lorded it.” Here, you have the Hugoistic echo, to the effect that the mere badge of authority postulates degradation. Monstrous libel!
With impartial and lavish hand, the gentleman further tosses these bon-bons to “members of the board of managers for prisons”: “And who were these men who sat in deliberation over the destinies of thousands? Were they trained criminologists skilled to decide questions of crime and punishment? Had they the capacity, the knowledge, and the experience that would fit them to perform so nice a task, or were they mere politicians, blown into high places by the winds of favoritism?” And here, you have scrambled thinking again. How “traincriminologists,” other than through their intimate contact with criminals?
Bombastic mode of attack with embellishment of incident might be pardoned, were it employed to condemn the manner in which corrigible lads are railroaded—at the instigation of lay reformers—(?) through juvenile institutions and reformatories to State prisons, and there suggested into the habitual class of offenders against the public law. But such language as that quoted in the preceding paragraphs grossly amplifies untruth not only: it is incendiary as well.
Crass sensationalists, mawkish sentimentalists, and misguided philanthropists to the contrary notwithstanding, there have been, there are, and, if we do not mend our penological ways, there will be increasing thousands of criminals by-choice operating in the States, to whom such utterly reckless and false statements furnish the last formula for their depraved and dangerous instincts. The periodical to which we allude is on the library list of many of our reform institutions. Rather than feaze those who seek either to amuse themselves, or to blaze forth as bellwethers, or to line their purses, or to utter easily recognized counterfeit coin of Bolshevistic coinage at the game of penology, we assume they will construe it a right rich joke to learn that extracts such as those quoted are frequently, if surreptitiously, struck off on institutional presses,and spread broadcast into the hands of prisoners.
Self-expression from conviction matures the man and makes the nation; but the pose of protagonist imposes grave responsibility. He who assumes it in writing for the public eye, on a subject vital to the security of the commonwealth, owes it to himself and to his readers to employ whatsoever he elects to be the weight of his influence against contact of extremes; to write well within knowledge, observation and experience studiously gained, and not at all scandalously. Those who write and speak otherwise, are in the way of, rather than pointing the way to, the reformation of the criminal. Quasi-billingsgate is quite reliably the chosen weapon of the cheap charlatan.
“Trained criminologists,” to whom our voluble friend so confidently refers, make few general statements regarding the genesis, etiology, and successive stages of crime; but they are one in the conclusion that it is first of all a most complex social-science study, not conclusively reducible to a given number and kind of prime factors. Notwithstanding, gentlemen peck diligently at “poverty” for the root of crime. Were it so, “The Jukes,” the most prolific genealogical tree of pauperism of which we have record, would hardly have pushed thirty per cent of its branches up through poverty not only, but as well through the effluvia of licentiousness, alcoholism, and crime, to the sunlight of wholesome growth.
It is yet true that craving want betimes aggravates the causes of crime, albeit it does not commonly initiate criminal action. From both the objective and subjective points of view, it is in a larger, deeper, and more wide-spread sense true, that the urge and surge for things for which no man has need, impel to felonious conduct.
Next to bad blood—which cries for expression out of the graveyards of remote generations—the carrying power of false suggestion and example is perhaps the most potent force in unmaking men. The criminal readily educes that if a “captain of industry” may at one and the same time pick the nation’s pocket and effect the garb of a lowly Jesus, the habitual thief may “tell his beads” and thereby discharge his moral obligations to society.
In character, a country is as good as its supposedly best, and bad as its worst citizens, the influence of the former of whom, when employed to misdirect wealth and mislead authority, is the most pernicious menace to national character and longevity.
From the standpoint of essential values, therefore, the felon finds it more and more puzzling to parse virtue. He observes that mainly from the ranks of the cultured and wealthy are recruited our greatest and meanest offenders; offenders all of the time against moral law, and as much of the time as they dare against legal law, a distinction which, our man insists, begs the fundamental questions of right andaltruism. He is told that a filched dollar remains a filched dollar still, alike when attempt is made to make it represent one or another form of brotherly love, and when employed to garner more filched dollars. He passes no sleepless nights over the ethics of the question, but does construe it a resentable mystery that he should go to prison, and his prototype on to social prominence.
Philip of Spain was a bit over-zealous “for the glory of his Lord and master.” It was lame statecraft and lamest Christianity which visited unspeakable torture on loyal subjects. But that were humane, compared with methods by which the bulk of a great people are condemned to grubbing, colorless lives. Kill a man’s chance to express himself as nature intended and constantly demands of him, and as for fullness of living he is half dead. He is also in the mood to dare the abyss.
It is well to emulate those who stride over obstacles to wholesome success; yet, in justice to the horde with whom it is a constant grind to tip the balance of mental reach and physical stamina with the average of their fellowmen, let it be plainly understood that they who win distinction, do it while drawing on God-given gifts.
There is no such thing as real greatness, or actual criminousness, by accident. The instinctive thief thieves through the operation of laws as fixed as those which determine the tides; laws, expressed alsoin weight of influence which impels the morally oblique to yield blessings of birthright for sin-stained money.
Much of contention to the contrary notwithstanding, few criminals commit crime because of lack of ability or opportunity to make an honest living; but first and foremost out of poverty of character which induces anti-social processes of reasoning. The latter is superinduced by observation and contemplation of the fact, that billions of “easy money” flow into the bunkers of those who least respect law, either human or divine. The aim of the criminal by-choice, is to make “easy money.”
Of such are the teeth of the master-key to multitudinous doors leading to common and uncommon rascality. They also unlock to thoroughfares over which endless columns of human parasites wend their way. Hereditary pressure and criminal atmosphere aside, they are the chiefest of crime-breeding motives, not comparable with that which we ordinarily sense as poverty, which, during the plastic years, may well operate as a blessing, rather than as a curse.
And let it further sink in that the meanest and most dangerous of quasi-parasites is he who pyramids consecutively on that which he mulcts from the common purse.
Beyond all men, penologists welcome light on the predal puzzle; also, they evaluate accurately—thoughthe public does not always as yet—the smudge from the farthing candles of self-seeking academicians. And that is to ignore the perjured meanderings of press agents who peddle spurious wares for a price. Of the latter, ex-prisoners cunningly thereby take a whack at law and order while they “cop the coin.” Moreover, lay “uplifters” encourage the criminal cunning.
It is bad enough when those who ought to know the fallacy and sin of it, attempt to substitute false procedure, loose methods, and maudlin sentiment for the vigorous and synthetic, if kindly education and training which alone can make good and self-supporting lads of lads who instinctively stumble. It is not far from dastardly when censure for the disappointing results which follow, is heaped on the shoulders of those who make creditable use of tools quantitatively and qualitatively so meagre, that the States must needs wax ashamed of them.
We give serious attention to the trite, wholly injudicious, and grossly false allegations against “prison guards” and their superiors in rank, because it is past time to attach advalorem tags to ever-recurring, petty consideration of a grave problem; a problem so profound, that those who give to it the most consecrated research are surest to put on the mantle of charity and the modest mien; and a problem with which Americans supinely drift,content to leave prescriptions for remedial measures to those who could not box their criminological compasses under either a theoretical or practical showdown.
In about the same ratio, prison guards and college graduates fail to make broad use of their institutional training. Neither, so derelict, draw inspiration for work to the true perspective of service. The one will see in education but books, and the other in the prisoner but deviltry. Nevertheless, at college is the place to study books, and in prison the place to study the prisoner. There is but one way by which one can come actually to know the criminal, and that is to live and work with him.
We rightly accord praise to those who point the defective equipment of certain so-called “types” of criminals. By the same token, let us dig up better than sneers for those who remodel faulty human clay and shape it into something like the true image of man.
Those noisiest and most illogical find naught in the criminal to challenge other than means of reformation which would ordinarily correct the pranks of a headstrong youth. So, in free life, we induct the occasional criminal, and in institutional life encourage him to lock arms with the habitual criminal; for, once started on the toboggan of crime, the former usually gravitates to the level of the lowest of his class.
Of all ills, in or out of prison, with which our people are afflicted, that of false clemency with coddling is the most pronounced and far-reaching. So, natural laws will have it; and so, therefore, the after-parole record attests.
While the personal equation in prison management should never be negatively considered, the reformation of the criminal still resides at his finger tips. That, in the final analysis, whether or no our man likes “Steve” of the institutional staff; approves or disapproves of any part of the house régime; tells the truth about all following his release, or tells out-of-whole-cloth, stock-in-trade lies, with which the habitual criminal is ever ready to assail the ears of the super-emotional.
The last and only reliable test of the efficiency of a régime of reform reduces to the question of recidivation; which is to say: what percentage of the grand total of the paroled lapse into crime following parole, are caught at it, and are reincarcerated, either under the original or new indictment? As a matter of fact, we have not and cannot have informing data concerning the above, vital point, until we shall have established an international bureau of anthropometry, as well as regulations pertaining to the indeterminate sentence which shall insure reasonable supervision over, and control of, the paroled felon. Then, even, regiments of habitual repeaters will not be “caught at it.” And then, those will“report” as from a prayer meeting, who had just cracked a safe.
The criminal in America is peculiarly a menace to society because of that which we do not know and do not find out about him. Such data as we have stands a serious blemish on the penological escutcheon of the nation, and makes comparison with the best pre-war results of other nations as unsatisfactory as humiliating.
Foreign penologists say to us: “Especially, you make our corrective systems read well, and we must allow that they look the real thing; but we find it difficult to reconcile the efficiency you claim, with the number of recidivists you admit.Please: why so many criminal rounders in and out of your prison houses?” Why, indeed, and it is a question a patient people cannot shunt much longer.
Nothing is so expensive to the State as the criminal, concerning the future of whom in America, this is binding: the moment society at large concerns itself seriously with individual practice of the “Golden Rule,” and incidentally about alleged prison malpractice, that moment we shall begin to get criminals in leash, and not before.
In the meantime, if some would not, as they do, through loosely written and spoken construction of vice, virtue and authority, place a premium on anti-social expression, they would probably render the best aid of which they are capable to thesingularly complex work of reform. Calling false turns is simply to give the criminal more rope. Playing up to the criminal, and down the public security, is to make bald bid for social chaos.
“At least,” said Hippocrates, “Father of Medicine,” to his students, “be sure that you do no harm.” So much should be demanded of Pharisaic punters with a penchant for scurrilous scribbling.
PRISON DISCIPLINE
Not one in ten thousand digs to the deep meaning of the word “discipline.”
Particularly as to prison application, discipline is in the minds of the great majority as measures objectively imposed to compel subjective adjustment to house rules and regulations laid down.
Such contracted view covers only so much of primary compulsion as may be necessary to imbue refractory criminals with at least fearsome respect for correctional measures. Thereafter, the aim should be to enlist the prisoner’s voluntary efforts for skill and culture under his own control.
Few prisoners challenge the mailed fist of the State. Save for some of those confined in prisons of last resort, the bulk of prisoners buckle to, from one or another motive, and make the best of a bad job to an early parole.
They do not mean to take their cue from the seething fraction that always constitutes the nucleus of real criminals in America. As a rule, the latter have first off to be force-fed to a degree in order tobring home to them the potency of the State’s power.
If discipline visited upon such men is to carry for their amendment and repair, it must take heed of natural and acquired predispositions to think and act obliquely.
True, there come times when the persistently refractory course of the unit leaves him beyond the pale of disciplinary choice. Where, in the face of every good influence and helping hand, a prisoner goes about it advisedly to stir up group manifestations against reformative processes, there is nothing for it but to meet him with power beyond his own. Moreover, when he insists upon contact of extremes, no apology should be offered in the process of forcing him to respect for that power. And moreover, it is tentatively insignificant if the “respect” is engendered solely by fear of the consequence. As an individual he persistently crosses the common good. As an individual he must be met, until he is brought to understand that hyenaized conduct, causeless except for his ego-centric curves, entitles him temporarily to no more consideration than is accorded the self-determining social pariah. This, because his interests as compared with the interests of the mass, are for the time being as naught.
The cardinal mistake in the matter of handling instinctive anti-social plungers, consists in not taking up disciplinary stitches with them in time, as for instance: every reformatory in the land confinesan appreciable percentage of “graduates” of juvenile schools, in which, as “cute” kids, they were indulged day in and out in the execution of self-centered acts.
Common-sense disciplinary measures visited at once upon such lads, then followed up consecutively to the logical end, would have mended matters for the most of them; and by common sense we refer mainly to natural impositions and deprivations, with the right kind of individual effort for them strongly marked.
But no; they were rated as just unthinking boys who were blowing off surplus steam. There was no question about the blowing off of surplus steam, albeit they were not blowing it off unthinkingly. To the contrary, they were calculatingly transferring the ways and means of the thuggish gangster to reformative domain, and scoring with it; scoring with it individually not only, but by “gang” expression in strongholds of the State’s social defense. Hence, incipient riot essential in mass manifestations that occur in certain juvenile schools of reform.
Just such lads are either rushed to parole, or the load is shifted to reformatories by transfer direct. Through turning back onto society lads who had run to institutional rope about as they chose to run, while they had been groomed to despise discipline and the State’s disciplinary agents, the same load is indirectly unloaded, not always inadvertently it would seem.
Heads of first-aid houses of correction have been blamable for the named procedures, only in so far as they must have yielded of conviction in order to prosecute banal measures prescribed by their superiors in rank of lay extraction; but be the facts thereof as they may, they have imposed first off upon reformatories the heaping chore of causing lads to put off forms of expression to which they had become habituated while under the initial care of the State.
By the time reformatories get such ego-centric, instinctively anti-social, wretchedly brought-up lads, they are better than half-strapped to the toboggan of crime. Throughout the plastic and most impressionable of years, inclusive of time spent under State instruction, they had made pretty nearly their own pace, pretty close to the pace that kills. Of self-discipline they had learned next to nothing, and less of the law of consequence. Accustomed to having unearned donatives tossed them, and to force compromise with their obliquely-conceived and collectively-executed flings in primary institutions, they see no reason why they should be denied the one, or held up as to the other, in the first reformatories to which they are committed. What is more, the public, purblind when not indifferent to basic causes and motives for their continued criminous conduct, is naturally inclined to their view. Therefore periodicals pay for the spurious stuff ofex-prisoners, expressed with the gusto of injured innocence.
The average lay critic portrays a reformatory to the public as a place where magic wands of reformation can and should be wielded. No matter that a lad had been the terror of his ward; then had been practically established by a juvenile plant a rough-shod, “faking,” shirking, undercutting young “roughneck”: the reformatory must blow him to virtue as Nature blows the mushroom, else it is smugly pronounced passé by those who do not know and cannot know of the instinctive reactions of natural, crime-soaked young felons.
Furthermore, gentlemen responsible for utterly false procedure in juvenile reform schools, are the readiest to visit stricture upon reformatories, because they do not work reformative miracles in jig time upon lads with whom the gentlemen themselves so miserably failed.
By the same token, the same gentlemen are inconsistent while grossly unfair, who lash prison officials because they do not reach reformatively those same lads, passed up to them, via themselves and reformatories.
“Just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.” The primal responsibility for such lads rests with society as a whole, beginning with the lamest and most loosely executed immigration laws ever framed by man, resulting in a big brood of the big brood ofanarchists and semi-anarchists, who have yet to do their worst; so much emphasized by execution of the general law so lax as to be ludicrous; the last clamped down by legislation designed to catch and hold the votes of militantly self-centered groups; and all made binding by so ordering the activities of corrective régimes, that they shall square with the instinctive reactions of predal felons.
As if all of that, with its endless chain of pernicious by-products, were not enough, we needs must nationalize, heroize, and put on pedestals the clan parasite for the youth of the land to emulate, featuring “get-rich-quick Wallingford” and pug-ugly-drone stripes.
At the present moment, millions of men and women in America acutely in need of work, can’t get it. Why? Fundamentally because billions of dollars have been shunted from legitimate channels of trade to sporting grooves, there to circulate mainly from pocket to pocket of parasites; and there to remain, most of them, relatively dead to industry.
A dollar turned over and over in legitimate business, and constantly growing as it goes, has quite somewhat the edge on the dollar passed to the gambling clerk, to the bookmaker, to other gamblers and their grand army of henchmen such as “fillers in” and race track “touts,” to prostitutes and prostitution of work and the worker: and then back in bulkto the gambler of one or another kidney, to be passed around a like circle.
That is to follow the pocket-to-pocket circulation of but one “sporting” dollar. The variations and combinations of route are legion, but the illustration points our point, which is that America is at pains to imbue the minds of her up-coming lads with false values, as for instance: gone sporting mad, she puts a kingly premium on the blood-spilling brute and parasite, and on his parasitic promoter, while she discounts the laudable aims and efforts of the actually deserving; she does, indubitably, through placing premiums where she does, the which fact no amount of sporting-monger sophistry can alter.
“Pug” Dempsey drew down $300,000 at Jersey City for twelve minutes of cruel slugging. The average skilled artisan cannot earn one half of so much money in a life time. Get down on your knees and make that pleasing in the sight of God if you can, while millions of His children literally waste away for lack of the bread of life.
Do nothing worse than grind out annually in the social mill thousands of sport-drugged lads, who would be and remain sporting drones in the social hive, and cure the case with a few reformatories and prisons! Impossible!
Order reformative régimes so that their reformative processes must yield in practice, suggestion and example, to the sporting schedule, and to inmateswho stand accursed of outraged sport! Ridiculous!
Expect a spell of any kind of discipline to make up to men and lads, that of which they had been and are being cheated by grossly overdone sport! Futile!
True, it is, that prison discipline has basically to do with serviceable muscles; but serviceable muscles to be used to social and productive ends, and not to the ends of the sporting thief who dumps ill-gotten gain into palms dirtier than his own.
Another check imposed upon reformation of the kind of lads in question, resides in the State’s “penny-wise-and-pound-foolish” policy of withholding money for working tools germane to the process of their reformation; essentially, for trade tools, and for appointments and materials to match the tools, inclusive of the very best of human material.
A skeletonized trade school can yield but skeletonized results: whereas, exactly the reverse is demanded for unskilled, untaught young felons, if they are to be given a fair chance to make good in free life. There, they take with them the serious handicap of the prison brand; and there, crime-free mechanics grudgingly yield them place and portion. Therefore they must be ready to market commanding skill and knowledge, else almost inevitably have recourse to the crook’s outfit.
The “policy” of the State thereof is “penny-wise-and-pound-foolish,” because it is much cheaper, inthe end, to school a lad for social rehabilitation and have done with it, than it is to do it over and over again, and even then leave him less than half-baked industrially, as is commonly the case.
America holds the world’s record for recidivistic criminals. She will continue to hold that record so long as she puts up with the play-house prison, call the house by what name you will, and place it in the prison chain as you may.
While thinking of the house, and of the work tax payers pay for it to do, ponder very carefully this deep-digging declaration by Ignatius Loyola, S. J.: “Let me instruct a lad up through his seventh year, and I don’t care who instructs him after that.”
Probably beyond that which Loyola meant to convey, America’s elementary penological lesson is plainly written in his words; a lesson America should have learned by heart and heeded, decades ago. It is that she must, absolutely must, close her doors and keep them closed to natural breeders alike of criminals, and agitators against the public peace and security; then search out and deport such “natural breeders” who have sieved, willy-nilly, into the land.
Cures for habitual criminals seldom cure; correctional quackery, never. Also, when a lad shall have passed the “seventh year” by seven years, and from his first conscious thought had been given habitually to unlawful selection; and further, shall havecome congenitally by predisposition for such selection, the merry-go-round correctional plant is the last place on earth wherein amelioration of his plight will be effected. Young as he is, he will elect and maneuver for a criminal career, unless he is consistently subjected to schooling stripped of suggestion of crooks and crookedness.
Plenty of play in the wide open an imprisoned lad must have. Attempt to fit a man’s head to a lad’s shoulders is indefensible error; but the play should be wholesome play purged of the “pug”; it should be fixed in his mind as relatively incidental to basic measures of reform, and it should not be allowed to cross those measures.
As for the rest, “For forms of government, let fools contest; that which is best administered is best,” provided: the “form of government” runs true to the form demanded by the intrinsic social exactions upon a lad.
Contrariwise, attempt such as to make farmers out of young men whose urban life has been decided by every natural circumstance, is at once waste of time, material and human potential, and to fly in the face of geographic destiny. City-bred felons will take on just so much of farming as compulsion compels, or the ulterior motive dictates, and not a stroke at it more. If you question the above assertion, ask any farmer who has tried out the ex-prisoner farmer who was city-bred.
Coming down to detail for correctional discipline, one must carefully guide one’s pen. General statements thereof are unassailable only when they predicate the unchangeable; yet certain factors cannot be shaken from their shoes. Truth camouflaged is no less a lie. Dull the edge of honesty and it does not cut to the bone of equity. Make the manual processes pay tribute to by-play, and bald bid is made for the drone-sport. Compromise with chronic perpetrators of evil deeds done out of evil intent, through loading them with largesse, and they are furnished with the last formula for piling deviltry on deviltry. Construe a lad’s conduct as of primal importance, while holding his reaction to educative activities to be of secondary import, and build beyond doubt to the faker and malingerer. Essay to form or reform character either with the “billy” and billingsgate, or with padding and coddling, and the result will reflect the asinine tools employed. Imbue lads with the belief that their reformation is an overnight joke, and they will make night hideous, as well as most of days—for good measure.
Beyond all, lead erring youths to believe themselves immune to religiously prosecuted discipline fitted to the individual case, just because they are youths, and their huzzahs as one for you will not shrive you of your share of responsibility for their continued criminousness.
It is easy to scold, hard alike to salve and save;but the salving and saving must be done. The scolding has been coming to some for a long, long time; particularly to self-nominated lay reformers, and “uplifters,” who mostly reform and uplift after the fashion the frog jumped out of the slime-coated well, which is to say: farther down to slime at every attempted leap to light.
While that is a pity, out of the efforts of many who keenly engage to help, it is also seriously reprehensible; for, he who affects the role of protagonist concerning the most complex problem given man to solve, owes it to society to know intimately the order of the criminal’s going; else he will find himself hopelessly enmeshed in a labyrinth of motive and counter motive.
It is also easy to write disciplinary “don’ts,” and betimes most difficult to execute them. Just the same, don’t curse; don’t threaten, bluff or be bluffed; don’t lose your temper; don’t make promises unless you can fulfill them to the letter; don’t construe as directed against you personally, acts that are aimed at bigger game; don’t fraternize with prisoners to the gutter level; don’t heap discipline of any kind on a lad, until he needs must conclude that you are “down on him,” and are “giving him the worst of it”; don’t wabble; don’t shriek; don’t resort unduly to petty impositions for petty offenses; don’t utter false coin of suggestion and example; don’t commonize discipline of character whatsoever, else itwill lose its carrying power; don’t reach lightly for tags of stigma: they depress and discourage; don’t despise hints dropped to you by lads who are hoping for better things, and who may lead you to the correct psychology of the individual case, and of the mass; and don’t assume that you know it all about crime and criminals: no man does, nor can, give him a life time to do it.
Do seek to know yourself, your man, and so much of a great-big work as it is possible for you to know. Doing it, realize yours will be just one opinion about it all. Scores of others have written that which you must absorb in saving degree, if you are to get a grip on what makes and keeps men criminal.
In short, be actually a compassionate criminologist with an open mind, and not a misinformed, or half-informed, or uninformed ego-centric, single-track dilettante, who drives ruthlessly along rock-strewn roads, over which life students of budding and budded felons soon enough learn that they must pick warily their way all of the way.
But, warning! Listen to the “personal equation” cult, and many of the conclusions given off in this chapter by the writer postulate him a fit subject for the psycho-analyst. According to that wrecking crew, nothing clings to the habitual young felon that can’t be cast off with such as baseball, and a bit of “laying on of hands”—by the “crew,” of course.
The “hands” have been patting and puttering persistently during the past three decades. Result? The mounting American Apaché has not so much respect for law and agents of the law, as eagle for sparrow. He rides gun-hung, kills for the mere blood-lust of killing, lies “until the cows come home,” and laughs up his sleeve betimes over the use he makes and use made of “research” of him.
Caught and corralled—against which the chances are about ten to one—he nestles down in many a State nest, where he practically dictates in a boiled shirt, and “does” what he sneeringly terms, “sleepin’ time.” This, spite of the written effusions of ex-criminals, who rush to print with grossly overdrawn statement—for a consideration.
Writing and speaking about the class of criminals in question, gentlemen affect the esoteric. They have it, for instance, that the offenders are mostly “morons,” hopelessly ox-like mentally by nature’s fling in embryo, or the victims of arrested mental development. Therefore, gentlemen are moved to hurl anathema at those who dare the assertion that appreciable irresponsibility applies only to “morons” who had not measured up to average intelligence at any form of human activity, do not do so, and probably cannot do so.
Apparently, it does not occur to our friends that the mind that functions alertly along any one line, can be developed to function alertly along manylines. In any case, the question of the subject’s voluntary efforts will be uppermost; yet that question may be quite foreign to his intrinsic mental content. If he chooses to be a mighty clever thief, just as another chooses to be a mighty clever mechanic, and pursues single-mindedly his choice, he won’t know any more about mechanics than the mechanic knows about thievery; but if he becomes a mighty clever thief, he will have used brains sufficient for any ordinary accomplishment. That he had side-tracked honest for crooked skill agreeably with the weight of influences exerted upon him, relates usually to his moral obliquity, and not to his meagre mentality.
Specific mental efforts held in “arrest” by him who spurns the fruition of such efforts, by no manner of means classifies him a “moron” in the sense that he is commonly classified a moron. His choice of mental activity is oblique, but his execution under the choice stamps him as anything but a mental dud. He is usually a moral mongrel from mixed causes, and must be prescribed for as such.
Were any but the lowest grade of predal felons—bungling imitators they—fit subjects for kindergarten treatment, they were not able to master the most massive time-locked safe locksmiths can contrive; nor could they “get away” with about ninety per cent of their loot; nor hold peace officers in contempt, and the combined sleuths of the land pretty much at bay; nor press so cunningly, individuallyand collectively, for ill-timed and placed prison perquisites, and for comparative freedom of choice in the matter of their response to actual reformative measures; nor cast crooked lines and haul in the bebadged; nor enlist the “pull” and “protection” of higher-up grafters and meanest of secondary thieves; nor so mix high-soaring mixers of prison broth that they don’t know which way to turn for ingredients, and do turn over the seasoning thereof to habitual criminal rounders; nor lead up to false cards, exposed all the way from prevention to parole, inclusive of gross stretching of probatory extensions.
Real prison discipline for such men means a sharp tacking of their minds away from criminal shoals. Aside from educative activities understood, such as trades and scholastic instruction closely and consecutively imparted, it means a taking up of their loose, anti-social slack, mental and physical; particularly and essentially, of their smug contention to the effect that society is an “easy mark” for all kinds of criminous flim-flam and bunco-steering.
Well, then, what are the corporal and semi-corporal disciplinary tools to be employed on the job? Any tool, this side of cruelty or brutality stripped of revenge, which will bring it home to habitual, by-choice marauders who do murder for diversion, that they cannot dance on the shoulders of the State.
What? Make prison life for such men dully automatic, comparatively, under an industrial drive?Precisely. Make life in prison onerous enough to them so that they will turn to honest toil, rather than endure it.
Reinstate the mechanism and the spirit of the “hell holes of Egypt”? Not at all; but reinstate respect for law and authority in the minds of such as death-dealing parasites; let them know, baldly, that “comin’ a shootin’” for hard-earned gelt, does not entitle them to browse, else buck in prison.
First of all, have done with the “Welfare League” fraud. Have done with the idea that instinctive, habitual felons, amenable both to the menace and machinations of many other instinctive, habitual felons, whom they must sooner or later face in free life, can be trusted to preside over the destinies of a prison population. That throw is precarious, even for colleges, where, if those in the know are to be believed, it is touted as doing exactly that which it does not do.
At any rate, go to the subterranean, perversely sex-charged, murderous record for evidence on which to condemn the prison Welfare League; but doing it, insist upon examination of all of the books, of the submerged tenth of prisoners who are cheated by specious crooks, and of the entire after-parole record of the latter.
Then use the eyes of your mind, clamp down the lid on banal counterfeits of reformative processes, break active agents who bungle with thosecounterfeits for a price, and you will help make secondary prisons what they should, nay, must be made, viz: industrial bee hives, wherein would-be social wolves go bang up against compelling contrast.
“Never again!” said an ex-prisoner, as an English turnkey “good-lucked” him into free air from one of England’s convict prisons. When American criminals so exclaim on being released from American prisons, we shall cease to have falsely-alleged “waves” of crime, and not before.
Rational prison discipline involves no less a chore than to change the point of view of men become habitually a law unto themselves. The view point will vary in accordance with the amount and kind of adverse influence unloaded upon the subject, inclusive of his congenital scars. There will be parallels that apply to nearly all, and sharply-defined tangents that mark the few. Comparative insensibility to pain, borne or inflicted, examples in the first instance. The oversexed, undersexed, and sexually perverted declare in the second case.
A prison population is never of one mind, nor of the same clay, save only for a common criminal camaraderie, ever alertly expressed to take advantage of those who think criminologically in single numbers.
Therefore, the man who rushes behind bars with a cock-sure cure-all for criminality, is at once to be pitied and shunned; and less than reformativelyuseless is the individual who does not understand that the particular reasons for the manner in which a given criminal was grooved for crime, predicate the means by which he may best be weaned from crime.
In other words, while all must be held closely to catholic schooling, such as trades and occupational teaching, the emphasis belongs where Nature and unnatural acquirement place it.
Shall a grown lad have acquired a mania for the sporting life, say, and not so much as a smattering of vulgar knowledge, he should be held down on sports until he engages earnestly for knowledge; he should, because he cannot hope to get anywhere worth while and remain a crass dunce; he cannot, in conscience, out of his old-age exactions, however such as the baseball “fan” may howl to the contrary. God planned for man to be something bigger and better than an ignorant automaton at play; also, He demands deeper digging by man than that which reduces to mere making of dollars.
It is clearly up to correctional plants to raise their charges beyond the level of the “tin” sport. Even where exceptional sporting ability is shown, it should not be allowed to cross the making of the whole man. This, because when such as the cunning of his throwing arm fails a man, he must have recourse to commanding skill, and pleasures of the mind, else the sharp edge of the meaning of life willcut into his soul, while he drifts down stream a dependent derelict.
Service is the “meaning of life.” Service begins with self-discipline. Self-discipline presupposes rational arrangement of, and adjustment to, basic values. Therefore the essential purpose of the parent State should be to establish, or reëstablish, basic values in minds either cheated of, or switched from, basic values.
The process may not be put up in a neat parcel of print. It includes all that must be put off, put on, amended and repaired. Nothing germane is so small as to be negligible. Nothing is too big to be attacked. Abnormalities, before all else, should receive the strictest of attention.
Essentially, the kindly, helpful, well-timed and placed word, is golden.
Irreproachable suggestion and example are of the very weave of the mosaic of character.
Unquestionable square dealing serves to file off the ragged edges of resentment, born of restricted liberty.
Patience of the kind the good God has with us all, is due His derailed children.
None but the measure naturally suited to the man and his offense, will carry.
False clemency is crime-breeding; yet, punishment that leaves only the smart of pain suffered, makesthe soul of the recipient of it seethe against the man, or men, by whom it was applied.
The first duty of the disciplinarian is to make clear the necessity for, and the righteousness of, the condign measure.
Appeal to reason put in words that flow from the heart, is never totally lost.
Not all of compulsory discipline is negative, and not all of educative discipline can be made purely voluntary.
Pain is Nature’s mentor and monitor. The moment man essays to eliminate all of pain, he miscues.
The long arm of discipline should reach at one and the same time for the serviceable tool, and for precept to keep the gaze of lads fixed on the stars: and so, keep the balance in their minds established as between the finite and the infinite.
Reams could be written as to what discipline should do and leave undone, agreeably here with individual exactions, and there with first regard for the protection of the mass.
It remains with the disciplinarian neither to cross values, nor to confound magnitudes. Doing that, he will, if he is wise, examine as closely as he may the sum of human experience; then rely on plumb plain horse sense.
As to psycho-analysis, the latest wonder worker: practically the same thing has been called by severalnames; but it has its positive uses in deeper diving for disturbing impulses, and in a more enlightened method of passing healing suggestion. Pressed to the exclusion of palpable exactions easily read and met, it can be rendered a nugatory nuisance.
For several decades, advanced criminologists have been delving very close to the manner in which psycho-analysts delve to-day; indeed, the difference in the mode of operating as between the two is not sufficient to demarcate them fundamentally. Both aim at change of habit of thought and action, primarily through removing obsessions from, and establishing actual values in, the mind; and secondarily, through so reordering the entire environment of the subject as to reinforce the primary process.
However, those who look for such as psychoanalysis to carry the burden of the quiring for reformation, are destined for disappointment. They are, for the very simple reason that an individual is, at a given moment, the sum of countless impressions, thousands of which were not sufficiently engraved on his memory to abide there; but which, to the last impression, pyramided upon either his good, or bad, or doubtful character. Therefore, mental research must be comparative, as is every thing else on earth; and therefore, the results accruing from mental research will be comparative results, as are all results on earth.
Just the same, one needs must dig deeply whileaiming high; but above all else, tie to fully-known, practical quantities, and apply them so that they shall yield as nearly as possible, under the circumstance, to the height of their power.
In so far as mental research goes hand in hand in sequence with that dictum, it will bless. Whereas, if it is reduced by too strenuous devotees to the indignity of a fad, it will likely go the way of fads; for it is no “cure-all,” and is first aid to the befuddled mind.