FOOTNOTES
[19] “Problems of Greater Britain,” vol. i., chap. ii.
[20] “Liquor Legislation in the United States and Canada.” Rathbone and Fanshawe.
[21] Op. cit., p. 104.
[22] Op. cit., p. 170.
[CHAPTER V.
THE CRIMINALS, INCAPABLES, AND THOSE IN DISTRESS.]
We have seen in the last two chapters that there is every reason to believe that, on account of improved external conditions, and notably of the sanitary advances which result from the efforts of preventive medicine, the race is deteriorating in general constitutional robustness. Those selective agencies which in more primitive times destroyed the sickly, especially during their early years of life, have in part been removed or modified, with the result that the sickly are preserved and in larger numbers live through and into the child-bearing period, raising the mean duration of life, but notably increasing the rate of mortality after middle age. These sickly ones leave children behind, who, as a matter of course, transmit their constitution to the race. In our study of disease we included intemperance, for in cases where there is a distinct liability to give way to drunken habits, and apart from those cases where it is merely a habit acquired in bad company, we may look upon it as a symptom of some innate variation from the normal, and it is therefore the physician’s duty to treat it like any other constitutional disease. In the same light we are bound to view the cases of many criminals and persons who from some inborn defect are incapable of doing their share in the work of the community.
[Crime is often an Acquired Habit.]
It is probable that a large proportion of criminals are the creatures of accident or of vicious training. Children are very imitative, and are apt to acquire the habits and even modes of thought of those who surround them; and bad example in their homes, or the neglect of parents who, perhaps, in their turn had also suffered from bad example and neglect, has often stamped a child’s character for life. At school again, the child is surrounded by influences which often affect him throughout life for good or for evil, and later on he is still susceptible to many evil temptations which may in his case be exceedingly strong. We are therefore all of us a compound of our innate inborn qualities, and those that have been stamped, as it were, upon us by contact with the external world; and we have no right to judge in an off-hand manner of the innate qualities of a criminal without a very extensive knowledge of his upbringing, and of the temptations and influences which have surrounded him. Theft by a person in necessity need by no means imply so vicious a temperament as that of a man who spends his life in getting the better of his less clever neighbours, and enriches himself by the loss of others, as is done in many so-called legitimate ways; and the killing of a man in passion may be done by one who would be incapable of settling an old grudge by taking a mean advantage of an enemy. Again, many criminals are incapables driven to crime through their incapacity; therefore with the incapables let us study them.
[The Innate Criminal.]
Over and above those we have just mentioned, however, are a band of innate criminals whose feet take by nature the crooked rather than the straight path, whose lives alternate between abuse of public law and the punishment thereby entailed. These beget children, and the suffering they inflict and have to endure is continued from parent to offspring. In every locality these inveterate criminals are well-known to the administrators of justice. Time after time they come up for punishment, and wantonly and wilfully all chances of improvement are thrown away; they seem wanting in those feelings of individual responsibility, and in the wish to be held in esteem, that are among the necessary first principles of life in an organised community.
[The Jukes Family.]
The histories of many of these criminal families have been written, and perhaps the best known and most striking is that of the Jukes family, written by R. L. Dugdale. This family was traced by Dugdale for seven generations, and during that time it contributed to the welfare of the State an unparalleled history of pauperism and crime. It is seldom, indeed, that the history of crime can be traced so far as it can be in the case of the Jukes, and the reason is that most families disperse by intermarriage, and the taint becomes diluted and no longer stands out in prominence. The distinguished French novelist, Emile Zola, who, in a series of novels, traces out the history of a criminal family, falls into the error of supposing that such a thing as a long family history of crime is possible without isolation from the rest of the community. The family of the Jukes lived in a district by themselves in America, and they formed a family clan, and intermarried amongst themselves, thus complying with this isolation which is a necessity for the long continuation of any family characteristic.
[Intermarriage does not stamp out Criminal Tendencies.]
It might, perhaps, then be said that intermarriage and dispersion of the criminal taint is, indeed, the most ready way of getting rid of it. But this cannot be so, for it is more reasonable to suppose that although by intermarriage the intensity of the criminal tendency may be diminished, yet for the same reason individuals with this innate tendency will be all the more increased, and that the further intermarriage of these individuals with others having similar taints of character, may at any time tend to again reproduce the inveterate criminal in perpetual recurrence. We may dilute ink with water so that we can no longer see that it is black, but we dare not draw the inference that the ink has been destroyed. It is equally as impossible to believe that the criminal taint can disappear unless the criminals are prevented altogether from adding their progeny to those of the rest of society.
It might be urged that in the case of the family of the Jukes their crime was due to imitations of bad habits kept up in the isolated district in which they lived. It must be at once granted that much of their crime and pauperism was no doubt due to bad upbringing, and the polluted moral atmosphere in which they lived; nevertheless, we are justified in believing in the existence of such a thing as innate want of moral backbone, of which they were a probable example. We have not to go far to find in our everyday experience of life that out of a family whose members are most of them docile, yielding to discipline, and capable of affection and self-sacrifice, one or two, perhaps, seem by nature to be wanting in these qualities. Such sporadic cases are only to be explained on the ground that imperfections in their ancestry have cropped up in the new generation, for the criminal taint is a fact to be observed and accounted for like any so-called physical peculiarity of form or feature. It follows, too, that we are bound to look with the greatest pity and commiseration upon the inveterate criminal as upon a person diseased, and that we should use our best endeavour to prevent the recurrence or continued permanence of such a type.
[Segregation of the Criminal an Ultimate and Effectual Resort.]
We, therefore, come face to face with the necessity for practical action on our own part if we would fulfil our obligations to those who will come after us. As Pike remarks,[23] “Perpetual imprisonment of the irreclaimable—imprisonment not only nominally but really for life—would be among many causes of that change in the general tone of society which is shown by history to be the greatest preventive of crime as now understood. Like persons affected with scarlet fever or other infectious maladies, the propagandist criminal should be confined in his proper hospital—a prison—and if incurable should be detained until his death. Like phthisis or other hereditary disease, the criminal disposition would in the end cease to be inherited, if all who were tainted with it were compelled to live and die childless. The remedy may be painful, and even cruel, but perhaps greater cruelty and greater pain may be inflicted by the neglect which leaves physical and social ills to spread themselves unchecked.”
Many of the innate criminals, and those who have committed crime rather from the effect of want, or bad example, than from any inherent tendency, sooner or later fall upon the parish. Within the same wards of the poorhouse, or receiving the same out-door relief, we find this criminal class together with the incapables and deserving poor. This is, indeed, a most unfortunate state of things, for we are bound to draw a strong line of demarcation between those, on the one hand, who are in want through acquired habits of idleness, those who are innately incapable, and those, on the other hand, who are afflicted during their lifetime by sickness, adversity, or old age. We habitually speak of these classes as “the poor,” and the unfortunate use of this term as a common description of totally distinct conditions has led to most undesirable consequences.
[Our Unfortunate Use of the Word “Poor.”]
With us everyone who has not sufficient means of subsistence we term “poor,” we assist them out of the public purse, and we consider that in so doing we obey Christian teaching. This theory and its practice are due to a slovenly habit of mind, and perhaps also to an incomplete acquaintance with Scriptural teaching. The “poor” of Bible language means obviously the deserving and unfortunate, probably the incapable, but certainly not the habitually idle and vicious. We are not led simply to infer this, for there are positive statements to this effect. St. Paul said: “If any man will not work neither shall he eat,”[24] and again: “He that doth not provide for his own house is worse than an infidel.”[25]
[The Unfortunate, the Aged, the Incapables, and the Vicious, are treated alike.]
Our forefathers were more discriminating in this respect than we are, and even in the reign of Henry VIII. the line was drawn between “poor, impotent, sick, and diseased folk, the sick in very deed and not able to work, who may be provided for, holpen and relieved, and such as be strong and lusty, who, having their limbs strong enough to labour, may be daily kept in continual labour whereby everyone of them may get their living with their own hands.” If, however, we look a little closer into the matter we shall be able to recognise at least three quite distinct classes of persons grouped together under the term “poor,” and all of whom are treated by the community very much on an equality. As we shall presently see, the rough and ready way in which we view these three groups has led to gross cruelty and injustice on the one hand, and to ill-advised assistance and help on the other.
Within the same rooms and wards of the poorhouse, or receiving assistance under the same system of out-door relief, we find those who, from innate or acquired vice, form the criminal class, undistinguished from worthy and respectable men and women and their children, whose only fault was, perhaps, that their small savings over and above the necessities of their life had been spent too carelessly, or even had, perhaps, been invested in a society administered by dishonest men; we find widows and orphans of men who have died from accident or disease while in the course of regular and honourable employment. With these will be mixed the class we have especially to study—the incapables; a poor type, with physical and mental defects, such as insanity, epilepsy, and idiocy, and with these many vagrants must be included. Where laws or regulations are framed to deal with these three classes, as if they formed one natural class, the greatest injustice of necessity follows. The law-makers have to deal with the idle and vicious as well as with the deserving and distressed, and by grouping these classes together and framing regulations to apply to all, some are of necessity treated more kindly than they deserve, while others become the victims of unmerited brutality.
This fact was first brought forcibly home to me by a case in a north country poorhouse—a case which quite represents the present disgraceful method of treating those without means of subsistence. A woman, a soldier’s widow, whose husband and three sons (all soldiers) had been killed in active service, was left without relatives. She supported herself and lived soberly until old age, when feebleness and commencing gangrene of the foot compelled her to seek the poorhouse, where she died alone and unvisited by any friend. I saw her in the next bed to a drunken prostitute. The one woman had given of her body to the country’s defence, the other had given of her body to its ruin, and yet the country treated them both alike because they were alike in want of bread.
Lawyers and law-makers have tried, with limited success, to cope with these questions ever since the first Poor-law in 1601; they have failed, perhaps, because of their point of view and of approach. The physician, accustomed as he is to study his cases, each with their peculiar symptoms, and each with their appropriate methods of treatment, would, perhaps, have done better than his legal brother. We must look deeper than the mere surface, we must not be content to give bread and pass away, and feel that our duty is done.
[Our Poor-law Regulations are at Fault.]
In reference to the first class, those who are lazy and vicious, and will not work although capable of it, we have to remember that the community is itself to some extent to blame for the present state of things.
Before 1834, the Poor-law in country districts habitually supplied the unemployed with what was considered a sufficiency, and those who maintained themselves by independent industry and capacity often fared worse than those in receipt of regular Poor-law aid. “Poor is the diet of the pauper, poorer is the diet of the small ratepayer, and poorest is the diet of the independent labourer,” remarked a witness in the Poor-law Commissioners’ Report of 1834. It cannot be denied, therefore, that there is a certain want of independence (especially perhaps in rural districts) engendered by methods of relief administered in past times. As a result of this, those without physical and mental disqualification for work fall back on the Poor-law for relief in time of distress, and, counting on the certainty of this relief, are less strenuous in their efforts to provide against the evil hour. Vice, too, is increased in those who know that during the incapacity which may follow its exercise the workhouse door is open to them, and that food and shelter are to be had between the intervals of each debauch.
It was for the benefit of the sickly, the aged and other really deserving poor, that organised charity came into existence, but it too often has been the lazy and vicious who have profited thereby.
[The Idle and Vicious are Subjects for the Criminal Law.]
But though society has made so great a mistake in the past, it is no reason that this system should continue. And that it should do so is inadvisable, both in the interests of the ratepayers and in the interests of those upon whom the rates are spent.
The poor-rates are generally paid with extreme reluctance, whereas were it felt that they were to be props to the aged and needy, this reluctance would largely vanish. People are generous enough—witness the cordial support universally given to supplementary charities—but few pay their poor-rates willingly, for they know that in most cases these rates go to the support of the drunken, vicious and lazy. As to the paupers themselves, not only would increased funds be at the disposal of the deserving poor, but the moral atmosphere of the poorhouse and relieving office would be altogether purged by the exclusion of the sturdy beggars, of those who are able-bodied, but idle and vicious, who should be placed apart and treated under separate regulations. They are subjects for the police and for the criminal law; as outcasts from humanity, we may endeavour to reclaim them, but whilst unreclaimed, let them feel the full effects of their misconduct. The prison cell is warmer than the rock cranny or pit in which the primitive Briton sheltered himself, and the prison fare is better than was his food. Why, then, should the idle and reprobate vagabond receive the advantages of a civilisation built up by the busy toil of those around him, a toil in which he will take no part?
To this class we may, if we will, offer work, but in offering bread, we undertake a greater responsibility than we perhaps are aware of. Food and clothing means the power to live and marry, and as there are limits to everyone’s resources, when we give anything, even a penny to a passing beggar, we are giving some of this power, we are taking upon ourselves the responsibility of “selecting,” and are influencing this selection, let it be in never so small a degree. We are playing with humanity the part of the gardener with his flowers, or the farmer with his stock.
This is a very high function, and a difficult one to perform judiciously, yet we all of us presume to exercise it without thought or training. There can be no doubt that the lawgivers responsible for the present condition of public charity, and private individuals who assist cases whose thorough investigation they have been too lazy to take up, are in part responsible for the perpetuation of the criminal classes in the community.
[The Poor in very Deed.]
If we place the vicious and idle, though capable, pauper on one side, in a class by himself—a criminal class—we can deal fairly and reasonably with the other two classes.
Under the varying conditions of life some people are hardly pressed upon, and the burden is light upon other persons’ shoulders. Our conditions of life, although perhaps selective in the main, are by no means uniformly so, and thus it happens that the amount of money in a man’s pocket is no certain criterion of even his capacity to make it. Especially in a community such as ours, where men pass in a lifetime from poverty to riches or the reverse, and often as a result of surrounding conditions over which they have no control, we may have stupidity and vice reposing sumptuously on inlaid Florentine, while intelligence and virtue are seated on rush-bottom. As I hope to bring out shortly, there is too little selective influence in a civilised state. Some of our old aristocratic families were headed no doubt by men of great capacity at their commencement, but it was the organisation of Romish civilisation that gave them the conquest over their worse organised fellow-kinsmen settled in England. Blood for blood, innate quality for innate quality, there was little to choose between them, yet circumstances made one the villein and the other the lord. Selective influences that might have operated in a savage community have been kept in abeyance to a great measure by inherited property and class distinction; and though, fortunately, good men are continually rising, and vicious, idle men are falling, yet this is to a great extent kept in check. Thus we find in the lower class many men and women of excellent physique and mental capacity doing in their lives as much as can be expected from anybody. From the biological point of view—that of blood, bone, muscle and brain, a view which we, in our biological study, are bound to take—the lower labouring class is little inferior in quality, whilst they exceed in numbers the upper and middle classes. From the changing conditions of life (conditions that are not uniform in any class) they especially suffer, for they are nearer the limit which, if passed, means deprivation of that which is necessary.
[Our Misguided Attitude to these.]
We have, therefore, no right to assume that when we find destitution around us the destitute are of necessity more to blame in their lives than we are in ours. They may have been hardworking and provident, and yet have fallen victims to want. Any note of condescension in our attitude towards this class is an impertinence of the grossest nature, and it is our duty, if we help at all, to do so as one brother to another, simply and naturally. The recipients of help should be allowed to feel that they are receiving only what they would themselves be prepared to give; that they should receive it, not as a dole to be eaten in bitterness, but as a friend’s gift to be enjoyed.
In these cases we are far too apt to stand aloof and do nothing, or to interfere only when it is too late, so that while the very scum of the criminal classes are being supported, worthy members of society are allowed to pass through circumstances of the utmost distress without a helping hand. The numberless stories, many of them undoubtedly true, of the large sums yearly made by well got-up begging swindlers, show how little our emotions are guided by our reasoning faculties. We are too prone to give when our feelings get a shock, and we are too often incapable of acting in anticipation of a catastrophe which is not already before our eyes. How many there are around us in difficulty, who, with some judicious help, might themselves regain prosperity. Too often we wait till it is too late, till all is practically lost—till, in fact, our “feelings” have been sufficiently acted upon.
[The Incapables.]
While the first of the classes into which we have divided the “poor” are destitute as the result of vicious training, and the second from the hardships of their special surroundings, the third class are destitute from innate incapacity. To the idiots, insane, epileptics and others suffering from severe constitutional defects, there must be added the vagrants who will not, because they cannot, do regular work. I say “cannot,” for I believe the vagrant class forms an interesting and ill-understood body by themselves. They fill our workhouses, to which they crowd in inclement weather, leaving the towns for the country in spring, and returning to them in autumn. They sleep in barns, under ricks or hedges, and live on what they can find or beg or steal. They marry and have children, who are often a source of profit from the increased charity they bring. Give them a spade to dig, a hammer with which to break stones, or a garden to weed, and they tire of the constantly repeated action, be it ever so simple; complex manipulations, or tasks requiring forethought or attention, are for them quite out of the question. They will keep rooks out of the fields, tramp after bulrushes, or trap a rabbit, but an unexciting occupation with a result not immediately attainable is to them unendurable. We can hardly fail to see in this class, in many cases, the direct descendants of our more savage ancestors, who most probably never mingled in the streams of civilisation that have flowed by their side. They have continued to exist by the primitive and precarious means adopted by early men to gain their livelihood. Charity, firstly of the monastery, and secondly of the Poor-law, has kept them alive, and we have them by our side to-day.
[Segregation Ultimately Required for their Elimination.]
Whatever be their origin, there they are, leading an existence that is an anachronism and an anomaly in our civilisation. Theirs are the hardships and privations of the savage, but from their position in society, of which they form the lowest dregs, they have not his advantages. Their neolithic ancestor who lived in the Sussex Downs or the Yorkshire Wolds, and shot buzzards with flint-tipped arrows, felt a superiority amidst his surroundings, and we have every reason to believe he was as proud a man as any one of us. But the poor tramp, an outcast and a dependent, lives a life worse than that of the shepherd-dog in the fields, and perpetuates this misery from century to century. Here, as with the idiot or epileptic and others of this class, there is clearly a case for segregation. All are obviously unfit to perpetuate themselves, and in the best interests of the human species they should be prevented from so doing.
We have seen in this chapter that just as preventive medicines and the luxuries and comforts of modern civilisation have so far tended towards race deterioration, so in like manner our law-framers have done their best to perpetuate some of the worst strains that society possesses, strains that in a community without poor-laws would many of them have long ago ceased to exist. While, therefore, it is quite clear that the end that we should have in view is the non-perpetuation of the criminals and incapables, any proposal to segregate these would in the meanwhile probably be unfavourably received. In the case of the unhealthy we may hope by force of public opinion soon to prevent such marriages as are to-day of too common an occurrence, but in the case of the criminals and incapables the case is different. They are not to be touched by a sense of public duty, for they only obey the preponderating influences of the moment. Their lives will have to be ordered for them, and the responsibility of action must fall upon other shoulders. One cannot help thinking that a great step could be taken in the meanwhile by purging the poorhouses of all unworthy occupants. The criminal classes would then stand by themselves, and the public, learning gradually to regard them in their true light, would probably very soon grudge to support them, generation after generation, and would come to see that their segregation under circumstances involving no personal hardship would diminish and in time remove the evil.
[Incapables to be Treated like Chronic Hospital Patients.]
The incapables seen side by side with the distressed and aged would then be viewed with that commiseration they truly merit. Their lives might be made better worth the living than they are at present, and the poorhouse might come to be regarded as a hospital and shelter for the unfortunate, rather than as a refuge for drunkenness and vice. The denizens of these dreary buildings might then partake in their share of kindly attention, and feel some warmth of human sympathy now denied to them.