The Mysteries of Modern London

by George R. Sims

In all the cases that I know of childish criminality of the insane type—none of these children are of normal intellect—there is a family history which accounts for everything.

In the case of a little lad who broke into a house for the sole purpose of killing a canary—and he killed it cruelly—the mother and father were "afflicted," and the eight children of the family were all of violent temper and a source of constant annoyance to the neighbours. Six of them had been certified for "special instruction"—i.e., to be sent to the schools specially arranged for the feeble-minded.

It was for a long time a widely entertained idea that for a great deal of juvenile crime the sensational stories called "Penny Dreadfuls" were largely responsible.

In the worst cases of juvenile crime—or, it would be fairer to say, of juvenile insanity with a criminal tendency—of which I have had personal knowledge, there has been no fiction reading at all. The appeal to the imagination has been wholly lacking. The children have acted on their own initiative or the suggestion of a companion suffering from a similar lack of moral sense.

Here are two boys who broke into a church—one is fourteen, the other fifteen. Their object was to get at the offertory box in which they had seen money placed. On the younger boy when he was caught was found a common table-knife which he had taken from his home.

Asked what he had taken the knife with him for, he said without the slightest hesitation, "To stick into anybody that tried to nab me."

It was fortunate for the policeman who caught the lad as he came out of the church that he seized his quarry by both arms; otherwise he might have had practical proof of what the knife was carried for.

Suicide among children is officially announced to be on the increase. Suicide among children—the idea is terrible! One can hardly connect childhood with deliberate self-destruction. How, one asks oneself, can a child have become so melancholy, so depressed, so weary of life as to seek that which for all normal children has an element of terror in it—death?

The answer is that a large number of attempts at suicide by children are not caused by melancholia, but by insane malice or ungovernable temper. The dominant idea is the idea of causing trouble and pain to others. A little girl who attempted to commit suicide by throwing herself into a canal explained after she had been rescued that she did it to upset her mother.

I have dwelt reluctantly on this feature of our modern life—this outcome of the stress of civilization. I have made no mention of one phase of it with which the police-courts are, unfortunately, only too familiar. For its details you must turn to the records of rescue homes in which the cases are set out of girls of tender years who have been "rescued." But it is impossible to ignore the feature itself in dealing with the mysteries, or little-known phases, of London life.