To each small company of men there should be allotted a cottage, which they could call their own. As far as possible these men should be left to themselves. The outworking of social and economic laws under such conditions might sometimes be summary and savage, but it would ultimately be salutary. Though for a while, save as it was held back by the mailed hand of military power, crime might run riot, the instinct of self-preservation would at last assert itself. The murderer does not like to be murdered; the highway robber does not like to be robbed; all classes of criminals object to taking their own medicine; and so it would come about that, even out of elements the most incongruous and unpromising, some form of social order would finally be evolved. It is needless to say that the sexes should occupy separate villages. This in itself would cut off one very formidable source of new recruits for the army of crime. Indeed, it is hardly too much to predict that, if this plan of permanent segregation and isolation were carried out for even a single generation, crime would sensibly diminish, our overcrowded courts would be relieved, taxation be lessened, and the staggering shoulders of modern civilization be to some extent unburdened from one of the heaviest loads they are now condemned to bear. It may seem an ungenerous thing to say, but it is to be feared that the opposition to any such plans would be likely to come from those whose familiarity with the vices of the present system should best fit them to labor for and most earnestly to desire its improvement. Enlightened physicians gladly join in any scheme which promises to prevent or lessen disease, in spite of the fact that their living depends upon its prevalence. So, enlightened judges, lawyers, and court officers might be expected cordially to approve of any system of moral hygiene which gave promise of efficiency as a prophylactic against crime. It is to be feared, however, that there would be a numerically large contingent who, like “Demetrius the silversmith,” would feel that “this our craft is in danger,” and who openly or secretly would do their best, as they have in a hundred instances in the past, to prevent the lopping off of a single twig from that wide-spreading tree of evil, whose fruit brings little scruple and no small gain to the cunning craftsmen who manage the costly and complicated machinery of the courts.
If such a system as has been rudely outlined were made absolutely secure, and the power of pardoning boards removed or greatly restricted, it might be wise to abolish the death penalty altogether. Juries might then have fewer scruples, and acquittals upon technical grounds, in spite of plain and abundant evidence, become less frequent. Mob law feeds largely upon the belief that even the worst criminals stand in little danger of punishment, but that “by hook or by crook”—mostly “crook”—especially if they or their friends can command means to hire lawyers and invoke the dilatory machinery of the courts, they are almost certain to escape. Whatever, therefore, tends to render the punishment of crime more speedy and certain is a direct discouragement to these sudden and savage outbursts of popular indignation against crime.
In the classification of offenders and their assignment to different penal villages, there would, no doubt, be some so atrociously and fiendishly criminal that it would be a cruelty to others and a mistaken kindness to them to permit them ever to go beyond their present prison walls. By the plan suggested, the penitentiaries in most of the States, now so crowded, while being relieved of a large part of their present tenants, could still be utilized for the confinement of these pariahs of crime.
Of course, in the working out of the plan suggested, there is abundant room for all the skill and wisdom which past history and modern experience can supply. Whether this or some better method shall finally prevail depends on so many uncalculated and incalculable contingencies, that he would be a very venturesome prophet who should attempt to forecast the future. It does not, however, seem reasonable that, in all the upheavals of modern thought, the questioning of old methods, and the suggestions of new and better ones, which these final years of the century are bringing, the treatment of the criminal classes shall be the one question that defies solution, or that the new æon which is soon to open shall find us still bound to a system which is confessedly a failure. Is it too much to hope that we can greet the opening of the twentieth century with a lustrum of prison reform, which shall bring at once the noblest mercy to the criminal, combined with absolute protection to society from its most avowed and most persistent foes?
HOW TO INCREASE NATIONAL WEALTH BY THE EMPLOYMENT OF PARALYZED INDUSTRY.
BY B. O. FLOWER.