Criminality and economic conditions

by Willem Adriaan Bonger

“However miserable these rooms may be they are yet too dear for many, who wander about all day seeking to get a living as well as they can, and at night take shelter in one of the common lodging-houses, of which there are so many. The lodging-houses are often the meeting place of thieves and vagabonds of the lowest sort, and some are even kept by the receivers of stolen goods. In the kitchen men and women may be seen cooking their food, doing their washing, or lounging around smoking and gambling. In the sleeping room there is a long row of beds on each side, as many as sixty or eighty in a single room. In many lodging-houses the two sexes are permitted to lodge together without any regard for the commonest decency. Yet there is still a lower step. Hundreds cannot procure even the twopence necessary to secure the privilege of passing a night in the stuffy air of these dormitories; and so they lie down on the steps and in the passage ways, where it is nothing uncommon in the early morning to find six or eight human beings huddled together or stretched out.”[11]

We may limit ourselves to this sketch of the habitation—all the other living conditions conform thereto. With so miserable a material life there can be no question of the intellectual life. Continual poverty and the permanent fear of dying of hunger destroy all that is noble in man and reduce him to the condition of a beast, without any aspiration for higher things; for those who have come to this state from the more favored classes become more and more degraded and have soon lost the little knowledge they acquired in earlier periods. Servility and lack of self-respect are necessary to the poor if they are to get the alms they need to keep them alive, since they occupy no place in the economic life. Between them and the workers there is an enormous difference; they have no feeling of solidarity in the social life.

What is the origin of the lower proletariat, from what classes is it recruited? If we are to believe many criminologists and sociologists the answer to this question ought to be that their poverty is not due to social conditions but exclusively to themselves; that they are inferior by nature. But to get a true answer we must put the question in this way: do the existing social classes form the groups into which men would be classified according to their qualities? [[279]]

Those who give an affirmative answer to this question reason as follows: men differ enormously among themselves in their innate capacities. The largest division of them is made up of people of moderate worth, a small number rise above this, and the rest are inferior. Circumstances have little influence upon the development of these capacities. If any man has great abilities circumstances cannot keep him from the place to which they entitle him. He who has little ability also arrives at the place which that fact makes his own. In other words (to confine myself to capitalism) the bourgeoisie, the ruling class, is composed of persons predestined to rule; next comes the petty bourgeoisie, followed by the proletariat, predestined to rough work; and finally lower proletariat, a class predestined to succumb in the struggle for existence, since incapable of meeting its requirements.[12]

An attentive examination of this theory, which is an application to society of the Darwinian theory of selection, shows at once—even supposing it to be correct—that there is an important difference between the struggle for existence in nature and that in society. In nature the conquered are either annihilated, or are prevented from reproducing themselves, while in society the lower classes multiply much faster than the higher. It is no longer a question of the survival of the most fit, and the annihilation of the rest, as in nature.

Who is it then who remains victor in the struggle for life in society? To answer this it is necessary first to answer another, Are the chances the same for all? If this is not the case then it cannot be a question of the triumph of the best.

There are few questions upon which opinions differ as much as upon this. Generally these opinions are only conjectures, for they are not based upon an examination of facts. For this reason I wish to set down here briefly the very important conclusions of Professor Odin in his “Genèse des grands hommes”, a work noteworthy not simply from the wealth of documents of which the author made use, but also from his very scrupulous care in examining them. Professor Odin has made studies of the educational environment, the economic environment, the ethnological environment, etc., of all the men of letters born in France between 1300 and 1830, to the number of 6382. [[280]]

As to educational environment, the author has been able to procure exact information with regard to 827 persons; a good education had been given to 811, or 98.1 % and 16, or 1.9 % had had a poor education. “All this forces us to admit that education plays a rôle not only important, but capital, decisive, in the development of the man of letters.”[13]

The economic environment in which the men of letters had passed their youth could be discovered in the case of 619. Of these, 562, or 90.7 %, passed their youth sheltered from all material care, while 57, or 9.3 %, passed their youth in indigence or insecurity. In consequence the author makes the following observation: “As it appears, only the eleventh part of the literary men of talent have passed their youth in difficult economic conditions. This ratio, already very small in itself, appears much more striking when we strive to represent the numerical relation which ought to exist for the whole population between well-do-do families and those that are not. It is impossible to say, doubtless, what this relation has been on the average for the whole modern period. But it is clear that we shall be well below the truth if we admit that the families of the second category are three or four times as numerous as those of the first. That is to say, from the mere fact of the economic conditions in which they are born, the children of well-to-do families have at least forty or fifty times as much chance of making a name in letters as do those who belong to families that are poor, or are simply in a position of economic instability.”[14]

Further, the author shows that the fifty-seven men of letters who passed their youth in an unfavorable economic environment were by chance put in a position to develop their capacities. (Only five of them received a poor education.)