It is yet true that craving want betimes aggravates the causes of crime, albeit it does not commonly initiate criminal action. From both the objective and subjective points of view, it is in a larger, deeper, and more wide-spread sense true, that the urge and surge for things for which no man has need, impel to felonious conduct.
Next to bad blood—which cries for expression out of the graveyards of remote generations—the carrying power of false suggestion and example is perhaps the most potent force in unmaking men. The criminal readily educes that if a “captain of industry” may at one and the same time pick the nation’s pocket and effect the garb of a lowly Jesus, the habitual thief may “tell his beads” and thereby discharge his moral obligations to society.
In character, a country is as good as its supposedly best, and bad as its worst citizens, the influence of the former of whom, when employed to misdirect wealth and mislead authority, is the most pernicious menace to national character and longevity.
From the standpoint of essential values, therefore, the felon finds it more and more puzzling to parse virtue. He observes that mainly from the ranks of the cultured and wealthy are recruited our greatest and meanest offenders; offenders all of the time against moral law, and as much of the time as they dare against legal law, a distinction which, our man insists, begs the fundamental questions of right and altruism. He is told that a filched dollar remains a filched dollar still, alike when attempt is made to make it represent one or another form of brotherly love, and when employed to garner more filched dollars. He passes no sleepless nights over the ethics of the question, but does construe it a resentable mystery that he should go to prison, and his prototype on to social prominence.
Philip of Spain was a bit over-zealous “for the glory of his Lord and master.” It was lame statecraft and lamest Christianity which visited unspeakable torture on loyal subjects. But that were humane, compared with methods by which the bulk of a great people are condemned to grubbing, colorless lives. Kill a man’s chance to express himself as nature intended and constantly demands of him, and as for fullness of living he is half dead. He is also in the mood to dare the abyss.
It is well to emulate those who stride over obstacles to wholesome success; yet, in justice to the horde with whom it is a constant grind to tip the balance of mental reach and physical stamina with the average of their fellowmen, let it be plainly understood that they who win distinction, do it while drawing on God-given gifts.
There is no such thing as real greatness, or actual criminousness, by accident. The instinctive thief thieves through the operation of laws as fixed as those which determine the tides; laws, expressed also in weight of influence which impels the morally oblique to yield blessings of birthright for sin-stained money.
Much of contention to the contrary notwithstanding, few criminals commit crime because of lack of ability or opportunity to make an honest living; but first and foremost out of poverty of character which induces anti-social processes of reasoning. The latter is superinduced by observation and contemplation of the fact, that billions of “easy money” flow into the bunkers of those who least respect law, either human or divine. The aim of the criminal by-choice, is to make “easy money.”
Of such are the teeth of the master-key to multitudinous doors leading to common and uncommon rascality. They also unlock to thoroughfares over which endless columns of human parasites wend their way. Hereditary pressure and criminal atmosphere aside, they are the chiefest of crime-breeding motives, not comparable with that which we ordinarily sense as poverty, which, during the plastic years, may well operate as a blessing, rather than as a curse.
And let it further sink in that the meanest and most dangerous of quasi-parasites is he who pyramids consecutively on that which he mulcts from the common purse.