Criminal Types

by V. M. Masten

Were all imprisoned, petty thieves in the land turned loose, and jail sentence given their equivalent in numbers of those at the top who make a business of breaking moral law, the basic steps would be taken at once to stop the criminal and solve the crime problem. The foraging criminal holds that he at least takes the gambler’s chance, while swivel-chair cheats “stack” and deal themselves sure-thing financial aces. In so far as that fact justifies the small-fry felon, he is justified.

Some allowance should be made for tainted-in-blood, gutter bred, falsely-environed social misfits, who are driven more or less to selection of the tools of the savage. Contrariwise, there is no defense of the well-born, well-brought-up man who descends in his dealings with his fellowmen to the level of the card shark. Yet even the latter is light in the dark as compared with the public character who affects sporting pugs, pirates, and parasites. When not a fit subject for the alienists, such an one is overdue for political death.

The common servant who cannot distinguish as between beneficent sport and sporting that smells to heaven, ceases to be a social asset not only; he is a menace to the moral health of the nation. Did he not stand convicted by the major millions of rational men and women, one would despair of the dawning day of a common brotherhood.

It were not too rank to paraphrase thusly: “The nation the gods would destroy, they first make sporting mad.” America is dangerously close to sporting mad. She will come out of that particular form of nerve storm because she will have to do so. She will have to do so for the very good reason that she cannot much longer pay the two-fold freight entailed; a two-fold freight expressed man for man in constantly reduced production, and an increasing number of disappearing dollars.

At a given time, the national wealth of America reduces to the equivalent of the number of dollars Americans have wisely earned and invested. Wisely-earned dollars mean big production, and big production means an average big spending and investing capacity. That, in turn, means brisk business along the lines of legitimate commerce and trade. And that means nearly universal employment, and freely-circulating money turned over and over along those lines.

Contrary to the claim of the gamester, there is a vast difference between the working power of the dollar that finds its way into the industrial groove, and the dollar that helps pack the purse of a prostitute. In the one case, the moral dollar will earn ever-increasing increment, while contributing to the general well-being. In the other case, the immoral dollar had passed and will pass mainly from the pocket of one mulcting parasite into the pocket of another mulcting parasite. It had and will, because human parasites produce nothing tangible in exchange for that which is dumped into their palms. The money they spend for their general upkeep is largely turned back into approved channels of trade; but that is but a fraction of the grand total. The bulk of their capital is and must be nearly as dead to the business world. It is practically of little more use to going business than is hoarded money.

Even so, the enacting indictment of the sporting drone is not a dollar indictment. The capital brief society should hold against him is that he plys intrinsically criminal tools, with which he frequently “double-crosses” even his fellow craftsmen.

“Well,” says the imprisoned felon of the stripe in question, “what did big and little business men do to the people during the progress of the World War? What did they do to each other when diving foreign exchange upheaved home values? What did they do to every body for long months after prices should have dropped pretty close to their normal level? Did they or did they not play the game as I played it, until consumers got after them with buying strikes, and the cry of stop thief? Did they or did they not?”

Well, “did they or did they not”? If they did, what had they on “the imprisoned felon of the stripe in question”? That’s a live wire, is that question; a live wire of the kind concerning which the criminal presses for answer, and he is entitled to an answer that doesn’t squirm and doesn’t quibble.

As a dealer in the world’s mart can you return an honest answer? If you cannot, hadn’t you better take inventory of conscience, and try to understand that the meanest kind of thievery is that which raises the ante on what should be common commodities and conveniences, beyond the purchasing power of the average purse, say nothing of the plight of millions of underdogs on whom the last curse of criminally-manipulated price levels falls?