III
THE MORAL CRIMINAL
Dr. Adler says there are 10,000,000 feeble-minded people in our country. Well, well: it isn’t as bad as we thought.
Passaic News.
Crime is commonly imaged as felonious offense committed against the public law. Definitions of the word “crime” are likewise restricted in meaning.
The common idea of crime is natural, and the legal definition of it is necessary, albeit crime reaches far beyond casual views and word-analysis. In the final sieving, anything that abets, suggests or examples devilish conduct on the part of normal humans, is criminal.
It is a devilish thing to do individual murder; but it is infinitely more devilish to so gouge and mulct as to help kill the chances of millions of fellow beings to bring up their broods as children have a right to be brought up.
It is a spiteful fling of Nature that monogamous mating cannot hold the oversexed of the human species; yet their bestial impulses are benign, as compared with the persistence of the public press in successively pyramiding detail on detail of the nasty aftermath of the expression of those impulses. “News is news,” yes; also, nasty news is nasty news, concerning which the moral obligation is upon the newspaper fraternity not to flaunt it, time and again, at the top, under spread-type caption, for the edification of younglings. The writer has been in position to know that the bulk of newspaper men do not relish the kind of mental pabulum they feel they are practically compelled to serve to a percentage of their patrons. Editors and the like are usually staunch, far-seeing men who realize fully the fateful suggestion of the crime-breeding, sexually-perverting print they hold themselves obliged to feature, else be beaten to it by competitors with narrative a part of the public demand.
Nevertheless, it is more than probable that the sheet which should decline either prominence to, or reiteration of, such as erotic copy, would increase rather than yield its clientele. To believe else were to believe the mind of the average citizen to be reduced to a very low level.
As a matter of fact, the average reader lends but casual eye to crime and sex-charged stuff. He turns from the mere headings thereof in disgust. Did he follow through with arrested attention, he would be impressed with the carrying power of the stuff, and take measures to protect his kids from it. That the case boils down to impressionable effect upon the babe in embryo, is sufficient to give good men pause over the publication of such as prurient matter, poisonous to the last degree by suggestion to immature minds. Moreover, to deprive unsocial and anti-social plungers of a public audience, is one of the best ways by which to extract the tang from their obliquely-conceived flings.