ADJUSTING HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT
Most people live a narrow existence. Perhaps the great majority of men and women find their safety in this kind of a life. The adjustment of heredity and environment is not an easy task to one who lives an unsheltered life. The ordinary person, thrown on his own resources, is poorly equipped for existence. His opinions on most matters are not sound. He uses poor judgment as to how he shall spend the little money he gets. He is generally driven by debts and harassed in all his efforts to get a living. A large family adds to his trouble and his existence is a constant struggle with what, to him, is an almost hopeless fate.
Industrial conditions for the most part are relentless and hard. The poor man is thrown into competition with his fellows for work. He may get along when work is easy to get and wages are good, but in dull times he falls behind, and is in hopeless trouble. His life is a long, hard struggle to make adjustments to his environment, and it is not strange that he goes down so often before the heavy task. Failure to make proper adjustments directly and indirectly often means prison to him.
Again, the ordinary and especially the weak man is hopelessly puzzled by his environment. It must never be overlooked that man has a lowly origin. The marks of his humble birth are in his whole structure and life. His make-up has been the work of the ages. He is a late development of a life that knew nothing of law, as law is understood today. His ancestors were hungry and went out after food, they killed their prey and took their food by main strength whenever they had the power. They were subject to certain customs which were very strict, but which were few and did not seriously complicate life. They knew only the law of force. Their existence was simple and primal, and they were governed by no "rights," except such simple ones as were made by might and custom.
Civilization is a constant building-up of limitations around heredity; a persistent growth of environmental control as it progresses, or at least moves along. This structure, especially the legal structure, is built by the more intelligent and always by the strong men. It is always shifting and moving, and it is impossible for the inferior man to adjust his emotions and his life rapidly to the changes. Things which are not condemned by his feelings of right and wrong are condemned by laws that meet with no response from his emotions and moral ideas. To him at least these are not different from the things that are done by others with impunity and without rebuke. Especially is this true of the rapidly growing class of property laws that have had no counterpart in the early history of man. This list has grown so fast that it is beyond the power of a large class of men to find in their feelings any response to many of these criminal statutes. The ever-growing social restrictions are of the same modern growth, and it is equally impossible to feel and understand them. What we call civilization has moved so fast that the structure and instincts of man have not been able to become adjusted to it. The structure is too cumbersome, too intense, too hard, and if not breaking down of its own weight, it is at least destroying thousands who cannot adjust themselves to its changing demands. Not only are the effects of this growing body of social and legal restrictions shown directly by their constant violation, generally by the inferior and the poor, but indirectly in their strain on the nervous system; by the irritation and impatience that they generate, and which, under certain conditions cause acts of violence.
VI
PSYCHOLOGY OF CRIMINAL CONDUCT
No one can understand conduct without knowing something of the psychology of human action. First of all, it must be understood that reason, which so many have idealized and placed in control of the human machine, has little to do with the actions of men. It is a common habit with most men to find fault with and bewail the fact that human beings do not act from reason. However much the truth is impressed upon us, we never seem to realize that the basis of action is in instinct and emotion. It is really useless to quarrel with Nature. Whether it would have been better to have made man some other way is not worth discussing. He has been evolved in a certain way and we must take him as he is. Our impatience with the method that Nature has provided for influencing human conduct is largely due to our idea of the meaning of life.
Man has fancied himself in a position in the animal world that facts of life and nature do not sustain. We seem to feel that man has some high calling; that he should make something of himself which cannot be accomplished; that he should form some sort of a perfect order that he never can reach; in short that man has a purpose and a mission. It is manifest that all we know is but a mite compared with the unknown, and it may be that sometime a purpose will be revealed of which man never dreamed. Still from all that we can see and understand, Nature has but one desire, and that is the preservation and perpetuation of life. This is its purpose or, rather, its strongest urge not only with men but with all animal life. Sometimes to create one fish a million eggs are spawned. Nature is profligate both in spawning life and compassing its destruction. In the human species the capacity for life is immeasurably beyond its fruition. A large portion of those who are born die an early death. And that human life shall not be extinct, Nature plants the life-giving desire deep in the constitution of man. The creation of life comes from an instinct so profound and absorbing that it carries a train of evils in its wake. Many are overweighted by the sex instinct to their positive harm. Nature somehow did not trust such a fundamental duty as the preservation of the race to reason. If intellectual processes were responsible for life, the world no doubt would soon be bare of animate things. Neither could the care of the young be trusted to anything but the deep-seated instinct that causes the mother to forget her own life in the preservation of the life of her child.