America cannot, if she would, do other than pulse to the international pulse, so long as she out-breeds to all of the Caucasian races of mankind. Having bred to the cold-blooded from here, the hot-headed from there, and incorrigible enemies of public law from everywhere, she may make the best of it; but if she really has in reserve common sense sufficient to do it, she can break the strangle hold with which social wreckers seek to place her in chancery. Contrariwise, if she persists in attempt to wash the world of its human barnacles, she will pass of a leprous poisoning for which there is no known antidote.
RÉSUMÉ
While a common mode of operating and the wastrel’s way of satisfying abnormal demands of the senses usually tag criminals of different types, the ultimate psychology of a given criminal will be his very own. Surface signs may or may not differentiate him appreciably from thousands of those of his particular grade. In very essence of soul he will seem to match another as closely as his facial lines and moulding duplicate the lines and moulding of scores of others; still, as to the prime impulses that impel him, he will be more or less the individual slave and law unto himself.
In the sense that he himself will not be cognizant of the subconscious quicksand that sucks him down, the case of a given criminal will parallel that of most all of criminals; but while the undertow may initiate in substantially the same subjective causes for all, he will run to objective emphasis for his criminousness in accordance with the cardinal instincts that drive him. Hence, since he is just like no other criminal in every way, there will be a deep shading of difference in the manner in which he acts and reacts, as compared with the action and reaction of any other criminal.
Like the time-locked safe, each criminal has his particular “combination,” the key to which it is up to the State to forge—if it can.
Whatever his “combination,” be surprised if the convicted criminal does not assert stoutly that he was not guilty as convicted, but “framed.” Then, if you pin him into position where he cannot “stall,” be surprised again if he fails to rebut with parallels involving moral thieves, whose defense of wholesale pocket-picking is substantially that made by Falstaff to accusing Prince Henry in King Henry IV: “Why Hal, ’tis my vocation, Hal; ’tis no sin for a man to labor in his vocation.”
The natural criminal is nearly always a self-faking, hard-bitted social rebel, who cuts to fit the garment of his mind. He is usually pitiable much of the way, he should be succored all of the way, but he must be controlled in any humane way. He must, else human society will wax worthy of him while ridden by him.
Even so, the writer utterly disowns rating of “Slippy McGees” as thick-skulled savages predestined for incurable criminousness. Such rating is disproved in the reclamation to social service of thousands of lads who pulled out of the very slough of crime. Moreover, the right kind of free-life and correctional treatment of and for the crime-driven, will stamp wholesale damning of them as duty-shifting myth.
Shall America continue to make all kinds of bald bids for habitual criminals; and shall America at the same time so order her reformative régimes that they shall establish rather than arrest criminals of habitual potentiality, America will perforce multiply her flippant brood of bad actors. Still, that consummation shall have been chargeable in such instance to purblind, drifting, license-breeding America, and not to the withholding hand of God.