If we are to catch up with crime and come up with the criminal, the obscured fact is the fact that needs must take root and abide in American minds. The obscured fact is, that infinitely more than the ideals from which correctional plants are operated, the ideals from which such as counting houses consummate—affect the grand ratios of crime.
So long as those at the top break moral law to bits and remain practically immune to legal proscriptions in the breaking, so long will crowded-out fellows at the bottom crack jokes over little things like penal codes.
However it goes with the rest of the world, America has reached the stage of unfolding whereof inequity at a price won’t work.
Nothing short of an enlightened national conscience will cut much of a swath in the stand of crime; a conscience that holds every man to the open mart, there to deal one-hundred cents to the dollar—give or take.
Remedial measures, taken as against the going saturnalia of crime the country over, will perforce center on prevention. Remodelling crime-soaked human clay won’t cure the case.
First, then, purge the land of natural criminals and breeders of criminals: this, in part, through restrictive immigration laws that religiously restrict; in part by searching out resident agitators against the public peace and security, and ticketing them for the countries whence they came; and in part by confining home-brew habituals and keeping them confined.
Secondly, begin instruction for a common virtue where children take on bents for thinking and doing at maturity; which is to say: at the hearths, and in the public schools of the land.
So much being admitted, it follows, with undeniable force, that the first logical step in point to be taken by America, should be reëstablishment of moral instruction in the public schools.
Thereof, America was steered, and steers for the rocks; for, “Just as the twig is bent, the tree’s inclined.”