So much, in part measure, is of the criminal pot as it boils; and so much tells why the criminal stands pat with commanding cards gratuitously dealt him. When society shall have matched his all-around play in the matter, will be time enough for society to belittle mental gifts with which he is enabled to euchre the land’s combined agents of the law.
In any case, relief is in sight. The bulk of predatory criminals are instinctive pug-uglies. The instinctive pug-ugly bids fair to be America’s representative hero. United States Senators and other governmental celebrities, who, with their women, occupied box seats at the Dempsey-Carpentier “boxing”—please don’t laugh—“exhibition,” so attested by travelling hundreds of miles to occupy those seats.
Hence, why not groom the parasitic thug for the National Congress, under the proviso that he would make attempt there to beat a modicum of common sense into the heads of certain of his confrères? The odds against his success would be nearly prohibitive, to be sure; but millions of Americans would relish his try at it. Then, too, the pug would stand a chance of being of some use in the human scheme, the which he has not been up to the present time: unless to image and suggest brawling and blood-letting to up-coming kids, is useful.
Let America get after and stay after her pug and mulcting parasites, along with her conscienceless money-changers and spenders, after the manner in which the Christ-man got after them, and the criminal will at once take up quite somewhat of the oblique slack of his mind. Until America does just exactly that, both in and out of prison, recidivistic criminals will ride the rougher shod in America, in constantly increasing numbers.
History seems to have it that a contagious human hysteria recurs in cycles; that the hysteria usually roots in an aimless spirit of unrest; and that when the wheel of time points the fatal number, myriads of advanced humans yield their grip on intrinsic values.
Initial expression of the mental eruption has usually taken the form of choromania, as witness ancient Sparta’s grand march to corrupted morals via the nude dance; also, America’s present peek-a-boo gyrations, remindful alternately of nothing so much as the lumbering clown bear, and “monkey-on-a-stick.”
One could make better than a crude guess as to the psychological sequences involved in the connection between the semi-bestial dance, and concomitant blunting of the finer sensibilities. One could, because sex-charged, hysterical dancing unchecked, runs in the end almost inevitably either to conscious or unconscious brutality of one or another form and degree.
In the beginning, the form may but slightly offend that which is natural, and the degree may seem to be as inconsequent; but the cumulative effect of both as suggested and imaged is to commonize a low level of human expression; and since a low level of human expression demands varied excitement pyramided, the final result will depend upon whether a people do or do not put overhead check on that kind of expression.
At the Jersey City prize-fight, Americans very palpably did just the reverse who fattened the purses of parasitic pugs and their purveyors there assembled.
As a matter of course, such as capsheaf criminals, gamblers, pool-room sharks, bookmakers, race-track “touts,” and members and ex-members of the won’t work “frat” were at the ringside, drawn as by an irresistible magnet to their natural element. But think on representatives of a nation’s dignity and sanity mixing with the motley mass, while entering into the spirit of the brutalizing abomination!