In this connection, the efforts of employers to protect themselves as well as the community from accidents and occupational diseases may be properly considered. During and since the Great War efforts have been made on a grand scale to rehabilitate, re-educate, and restore to usefulness the war's wounded soldiers. This interest in the former soldiers and the success of the efforts already made has led to an increased interest in all classes of the industrially handicapped. A number of surveys have been made, in different parts of the country, of the crippled, and efforts are in progress to discover occupations and professions in which the deaf, the blind, and otherwise industrially handicapped can be employed and thus restored to usefulness and relative independence.
The wide extension of the police power in recent times in the interest of public health, sanitation, and general public welfare represents the effort of the government, in an individualistic society in which the older sanctions and securities no longer exist, to protect the individual as well as the community from the effects of unrestricted competition.
The literature of criminology has sought an answer to the enigma of the criminal. The writings of the European criminologists run the gamut of explanation from Lombroso, who explained crime as an inborn tendency of the criminal, to Tarde, who defines the criminal as a purely social product.
W. A. Bonger,[205] a socialist, has sought to show that criminality is a direct product of the modern economic system. Without accepting either the evidence or the conclusions of Bonger, it cannot be gainsaid that the modern offender must be studied from the standpoint of his failure to participate in a wholesome and normal way in our competitive, secondary society which rests upon the institution of private property and individual competition.
The failure of the delinquent to conform to the social code may be studied from two standpoints: (a) that of the individual as an organization of original mental and temperamental traits, and (b) that of a person with a status and a rôle in the social group. The book The Individual Delinquent, by William Healy, placed the study of the offender as an individual upon a sound scientific basis. That the person can and should be regarded as part and parcel of his social milieu has been strikingly illustrated by T. M. Osborne in two books, Within Prison Walls and Society and Prisons. The fact seems to be that the problem of crime is essentially like that of the other major problems of our social order, and its solution involves three elements, namely: (a) the analysis of the aptitudes of the individual and the wishes of the person; (b) the analysis of the activities of our society with its specialization and division of labor; and (c) the accommodation or adjustment of the individual to the social and economic environment.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
I. BIOLOGICAL COMPETITION
(1) Crile, George W. Man an Adaptive Mechanism. New York, 1901.
(2) Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species. London, 1859.
(3) Wallace, Alfred Russel. Studies Scientific and Social. 2 vols. New York, 1900.