The Criminal & the Community

by James Devon

Men young and old go wrong in the endeavour to make a show. They want position and are willing to pay for it even at the expense of others; indeed, there are many who spend as much effort and energy in intriguing to get a position they could not fill as, if properly applied, would enable them to qualify for it. Some want to be social leaders, and exceed the limits of their income in the attempt. So long as they merely get into debt their creditors are the losers, but there are limits to credit and their situation may offer them facilities for peculation. The intention is to repay the money; but the honourable intention may be out of their power to execute, and the criminal act brings them to disgrace and ruin. In all cases where the process has gone on for years without discovery, the offender is found to be firmly persuaded that he is rather an ill-used person, and that if he were only allowed time he would be quite able to show a balance on his side of the account. This suggests the reflection that his conduct must have been often under review by himself, and a wonder as to how long he has taken to twist his mind to a belief in his own integrity in face of the facts; yet it is only some such belief that has enabled him to continue his defalcations. It is sometimes matter for surprise to the public that men who have continued to embezzle funds for years should have appeared so respectable; but they are not acting a part; they have convinced themselves of their uprightness through it all, and that is a very important step towards convincing others.

Even the Churches are not free from the imputation of making the end justify the means; and with lectures against gambling they sometimes run lotteries to obtain funds. This does not show bigotry against gambling, but it can hardly help to drive home the objection to the vice. Example is worse than precept in these cases.

The Press, which reaches a wider audience than the pulpit, is becoming more a means of making money for its proprietors than a medium for the formation of reasoned opinion; and some papers have organised sweepstakes under the thinnest disguise. As for betting, there are numerous papers that depend on it for their profits. Workmen and women pore over the betting news and run into debt to back a horse. The misery that many entail on themselves and their dependents by this conduct is widespread, and efforts have been made to check it, but it does not seem to be diminishing. As a rule it is safe to assume that people do not bet with the intention of losing, but with the hope of winning. It is not harmless excitement they seek; it is money they want; and they argue that they are doing nothing different from what is done by wealthier people on the Stock Exchange. They know as little about horses as those who speculated in rubber knew about that substance; and they have no interest in improving the breed. They want to be rich without working, and they see that some men manage it. The losers are forgotten; and what do they matter anyway if we win?

This spirit of selfishness and greed is not confined to the gambler, though it shows itself nakedly in his pursuit; and before it can be exorcised a better conception of our duty to each other will require to be attained. Meanwhile it is a small thing to prosecute bookmakers and those who deal with them, if the higher forms of gambling are left untouched. The poor cannot afford to gamble and must be protected from themselves; but can anybody afford to gamble? Can the State afford to allow them to set such an example? The whole evil has been dealt with in a peddling spirit. The bookmakers stand to win, whoever may lose, but they are not the people who gain most. They are not an influential class, however. If the newspapers were prohibited from publishing betting news the machinery for the gamble would fall to pieces; but if this were attempted there would be a howl, for they are not without influence. So there are difficulties. There always are difficulties when influential people have to be dealt with; and it is much easier to hit a little man than a big one—but the profit is less. I do not say that there are not those who gamble for the sake of the excitement, but that these do not come to prison as a result. The man who does run grave risk of landing there is he who gambles for the money that he may win but that he usually does lose.

The desire to shine among others is at the root of much of the foolish and criminal conduct of many men and women. It is not necessarily an evil desire, but the methods adopted to secure admiration may result in evil. There is much talk of the dignity of labour, side by side with the worship of money. If people draw the conclusion that the dignity of labour means that one man should work that another may spend, they are likely to make an effort to escape the dignity. They hear of the blessings of poverty, but they see that among them are not comfort and social consequence; and in so far as they prefer these they will let anybody else have the blessings. To admit that some must be poor if others are rich is not to accept the poor man’s lot for oneself. So long as honest work is only given formal praise and poverty implies practical hardship, while the possession of money is allowed to create a presumption in favour of a man, there will be those who will seek to get it by any means in their power. If we paid the homage to poverty that is given to wealth we might reasonably expect to find these people content to be poor; but while there is no likelihood of that being done, we may as well face the fact that our social inequalities result in the commission of crimes against property among a proportion of those who have a chance of helping themselves thereby. The great mass of men and women—rich and poor—do keep free from grave offences, living their lives quietly and discharging their duties as citizens according to their light and their ability; but these false ideals stimulate many to the commission of crime. It is well, therefore, to remind ourselves and others that ultimately a man is judged not by what he has but by what he is, and to recognise that a man is foolish if he sacrifices his life and dwarfs his personal development for any social advantage whatever.

The conditions which engender crime may be greatly modified and in many cases may be destroyed by political action. Crime is largely a concomitant of city life, as we have it. To live properly people need room, and so long as the present congestion exists all our efforts can at best palliate the evils which infest and infect us. We may regulate the sale of drink in order to prevent drunkenness; we may classify our poor and attempt to relieve their poverty; but drink and poverty are factors which remain comparatively inactive in the causation of crime, except where men are packed together to the degree in which we see them. Let our cities continue to be hemmed in and built in the air instead of being spread over the earth, and we shall require additional sanitary regulations to combat disease and more police laws to cope with crime, while the numbers in our institutions will increase.

The city is the product of our industrial pursuits and the methods by which they are followed; but the city as it exists is no more necessary to the life of the community than the city before the day of Public Health Acts was a necessary part of our civilisation. Men could live conveniently near each other and work at the same occupation, at least as efficiently, if they had room, as is possible under the cramping conditions that exist at present. Man’s life ought to be something more than his work; and there will be more who work to live when there are not so many who merely live to work. Reform your cities; or rather see that men are not allowed for their private interests or pleasures to “do what they like with their own” in defiance of the public welfare, and the cities will reform themselves.

The tenants of the crowded districts are hustled by the law, which in some cases they offend from sheer inability to do otherwise. When those who make a profit by the existing conditions of affairs are as summarily dealt with there will be a possibility of improvement. There are some landlords who assume the supervision of their property and of their tenants, but others are merely rent collectors; and their carelessness provides opportunity for the criminal classes to hide themselves. So long as the law allows men to make a profit by denying others access to the land except on payment of whatever ransom they choose to exact, the cities will remain crowded and the country will become depopulated. When the landlord is made to pay if he will not let his land be put to its most profitable use, there will be less inducement for him to withhold it for a time in the hope of realising a famine price from the needs of the community. It is poor policy to punish people for the results of the strain to which they are subject while those who profit by the cause are left alone.

But political action is slow and political parties are—what they are. To most of us a change of Government means that Lord This is replaced by Mr. That; probably relatives, and almost invariably belonging to the same caste; none of them particularly hasty in applying the remedies in which they believe—for when it comes to doing things instead of talking about them a great deal more depends on sentimental impressions, the result of friendly contact, than on intellectual opinions and political theories. Politicians are like other people; their imagination can more readily picture the result of action as it affects their own friends than as it affects those of another social class. Those who have a vested interest in the present conditions of things may personally suffer by any remedial change; and though there are many who are magnanimous enough to place the public gain before all else, there are far more who honestly cannot see that any measure whereby they would suffer a private loss can possibly be a public gain. They are often very estimable persons, and knowledge of that fact paralyses the action of their friends who are politically opposed to them.

It would be so much more easy to remedy evils if those who profited by their existence were only ill-natured and grossly selfish people; but when they are kindly and courteous it is a pity to push them. Besides, they are often widows and orphans; for there is a remarkably high rate of mortality among the husbands and fathers of people who have money invested in land and in breweries. There are other widows and orphans, however, who have no intimate friends in Parliament, and whose condition cannot appeal so powerfully to the imagination of Ministers because they belong to another class. The trouble is that the measures that would aid one set of widows and orphans would hurt the other; and even when legislation is passed its action is delayed out of tenderness to existing interests.