Now this inability is physical. The wish is spiritual—the ability is physical and depends greatly on health. With ill-health or malnutrition in the young the first thing to give is the power of control. The average of criminals are a stone underweight. Therefore, crime is dependent to a great extent on health. Ill-health causes crime; accidental mutilation causes crime; accident creates an aptitude to crime; neglected youth and education cause crime.
Religion does not affect crime one way or another. The greatest criminals are often religious. Mediæval Europe was very religious and very criminal, and there are many other instances. Honesty is inborn in all; it is part of the "light that lighteth every man that is born into this world"; it requires no teaching. What must be acquired is the ability to give effect to it. Crime is a physical, not a spiritual disease. And crime is no defect of the individual. It is a disease of the nation—nay, of humanity—exhibited in individuals. You have gout in your toe, but it is your whole system that is wrong. This disease can be cured by Humanity alone. Criminals are those whom we should pity, should prevent, should isolate, and, if possible, cure.
Remember what John Bradford said, looking on a man going to be hanged: "But for the grace of God there goes John Bradford." He, too, would have been the same had he had bad training in his youth.
We have all of us within us instincts which rightly directed result in good, which in default of outlet we can be trained to control, but which without outlet and without the receipt of training may result in crime. Crime is, therefore, a defect of training and environment, not of personality.
CHAPTER XVI
COURTS REFORM
But, pending any such great change as must come in all penal law when the subject has been carefully studied, there are many smaller amendments that might be made both in Civil and Revenue Courts and Law.
The pressing need in Criminal Procedure is, I think, a change in the treatment of an accused person when he is arrested.
The first instinct of an offender is, as I have said, to confess, even if an understanding person is not available to confess to. He has offended the Law; he wants to make all amends he can by confessing to the representative of that offended Personality. I have seen very many first offenders and talked to them before they got into the hands of pleaders and others, and my experience tells me that a man who has committed his first offence is very like a man who has caught his first attack of serious illness. He is afraid not so much of the results as of the thing itself. Sin has caught him, and he is afraid of sin. He wants protection and help and cure. He does not want to hide anything; his first need is confession to some understanding ear. Many, many such confessions have I heard in the old days. That is the result of the first offence.
But this tendency to truth is choked when it is ascertained that as a result the offender will be vindictively punished and made in the end far worse than he was at the beginning. Naturally the offender says to himself: "I am bad now. What shall I be after two years' gaol? Better fight it out. If I win and get acquitted, at least I shall have a chance to reform. If convicted that chance will be taken from me for ever. And fighting will not lose me anything. The penitent prisoner who confesses gets no lighter punishment than if he had put the Court to the expense of a long trial. Why therefore repent? It will do me harm, not good." That is the case now; under reasonable laws it would be the other way. But even yet in country places he often confesses to the police by whom he is arrested.