CRIMINAL TYPES

BY
COL. V. M. MASTEN

BOSTON
RICHARD G. BADGER
THE GORHAM PRESS

Copyright, 1922, by Richard G. Badger
All Rights Reserved

Made in the United States of America
The Gorham Press, Boston, U. S. A.

INTRODUCTION

Very much in the printed page has been aimed wide of the mark alike of the prevention, the deterrence, and the reclamation of the predal felon.

It is intended that this semi-technical volume shall help to call the truly reformative turn. Also, the intention is that the subject matter of the book shall at once amplify and reënforce conclusions reached in The Crime Problem and Stop Thief! the author’s previous publications.

A distinctively scientific treatise on crime and criminals is not essayed by the writer, for the very good reason that such a treatise is not, at this moment, to any man’s hand. This, because human society seethes in the most fateful transitional state of all time up to this time; because human expression is more complex and varied than during any other period of human history; because material values change with constantly changing conditions; and because the criminal picks his tools and plys them agreeably with the pressure upon him of objective influences germane in those conditions of change.

The crass criminal presents no psychic problem. He is much as he was, impelled much as he was, when cavemen carried clubs. Having, usually, but mediocre mental equipment, and being crowded out of the big games of life, he has recourse naturally either to individual force, or to crooked cunning with which to match the throws of his better-equipped brothers.

By and large, the issue with the low-grade habitual forager is a very simple one; in the final analysis, he leaves society no choice other than to fight him with the like of his chosen weapons.

There will be isolated and sporadic exceptions to the general rule given; but as to the grand majority of marauding criminals, they must be met, both in and out of prison, with force more impressive than that which they employ; palpably so, else penal codes might as well be pigeon-holed for containing meaningless proscriptions.

It is as all would like it when the force can be confined to educative measures so ordered for sustained averages as to encourage the imprisoned to help themselves; but when they won’t help, just won’t, then steps must be taken which will make it practically impossible for them further to filch from their fellowmen.

If a thief will have it no other way than to be a thief, then control of him, and not his social rehabilitation, must be the desideratum.

Circumstantial felons there will be so long as social circumstance makes for them. Always a certain percentage will go down under the pressure of a closely competitive social scheme that recks but little of moral weaklings, and less of physical slackers; but such bear serious relation to criminal statistics in the sense only that they are dragged down to habitual crime appreciably by criminal recidivists; by repeating felons who forage on society by choice, who make no bones about it, who shout stout defense of it, and who glory in it.

With the latter class of criminals it is up to America to deal, and to do it now. During recent decades, and within and without prison walls, crime-breeding slack has been paid out to them until to kill ruthlessly means not so much to them as would warts on their hands.

Therefore: reformative régimes should function so as to free such prisoners of shackles forged by their lower selves. When refractory units will not coöperate to that end, the aim of society must be for deterrence that protects society from them, and no apology whatsoever to them for the deterrence.

For society habitually to bare its breast to the deadly strokes of derailed underdogs, just because they are derailed underdogs, is for society to spade at its own grave.

Statistics that involve general conclusions are avoided herein. They are, because under present opportunity for specific research, they cannot be made either substantially reliable or inclusive. At the best they may mislead. At the worst they will lie.

CONTENTS

CRIMINAL TYPES

CRIMINAL TYPES

I

TYPAL EARMARKS

Criminal types there are, but there is no one criminal type.

Closely-allied criminous expression is vastly different as to individual intent. That will be so because the underlying causes for like offenders are dissimilar and variable.

The height of the offense usually squares with the depth of depravity, the which is no respector of facial or other deviations from the Apollo type.

Jails would be more numerous than churches, were natural criminals surely shadowed forth in visible signs such as long, tapering fingers; rodent eyes, or those bead-like, shifty, countersunk and narrowly spaced; bull neck, connected with a vertically-lined back head; laterally-extended side-jaw bones; protruding fore jaw; the ape’s forehead, marked by the ape’s fuzzy hairline, the same fuzzy hair extending inward from under the outer edges of the eye sockets; eagle’s beak, or more commonly, the tangential, flattened nose of the gorilla, with arms like his, unusually long and big-boned as compared with the rest of the frame; thin lips, emphasizing a cruelly-set mouth, or thick lip above a ponderous jaw; and ears in all sizes, conformation, setting and contour, opposed to the perfect model.

It is true that the predal felon frequently features several of such as the signs indicated. It is also true that millions of honest freemen feature the same signs, and do no worse than dissemble, as more or less do all humans. And it is further true that, in so far as emphasis on such symbols is concerned, the bulk of lawbreakers would pass unnoticed in a promiscuous crowd.

Still, close parallels prevail as between members of classes of the anti-social. They ply the same tools, speak the same language, are bound by and large by the same laws of clan, foregather in the same caves of earth, affect the same mannerisms and mental attitude, and spend ill-gotten gain for intrinsically the same things, if over different counters; but they do not yield of themselves in the same measure to the powers of darkness. If they did, the bulk of them would be capital criminals, instead of offenders against property.

Usually the pack are of one mind as to the method of procedure, else they wouldn’t “pal” it as one. Type then matches type as closely as members of criminal types match; yet no two will be actuated by absolutely the same motives, and no two will have come by motives to act in absolutely the same way. The demarcation may call for the most careful of research; but it will be there, and it will demarcate, if only by shading so slight as to escape other than the truly expert examiner.

Glaring cross-matches of type evolve not infrequently, as for example: of two on the same job, the one would ride rough-shod and quickly over human life to what he seeks. The other balks, then and there, at ruthless spilling of blood, and will “queer the deal” rather than be party to a killing.

The first duty of the criminologist is to probe to the cardinal causes for a given type of criminal. Doing it, he will uncover the fact that aside from the congenital thief—who thieves as naturally as his more polished prototype mulcts agreeably with man-struck statutes—the average criminal commonly consummates in effect to help whirl the treadmills of parasitic sporting mongers. He is the pawn sacrificed in the all-comprehensive predal game. His the lay to go out and “get the goods,” somewhere, anyway; theirs to induce him to stake his loot against odds that are unbeatable at long play. He takes all of the chances coming and going; but since he is a generous and constant provider, nimble-fingered and witted gentry pass some little of coin to grease his going, and to “stake” him, fresh from durance for having waxed a bit too bold while operating out of the domain of comparative immunity. In big cities, the “bull” usually gets him only when he bungles.

In any case it is “Easy come, easy go” with the criminal, both as to the gelt he gets and his punishment for getting it the way he gets it; and so, while plying their nefarious tools, all types of criminals play both ends against the established social order.

The marauding type figure, for instance, that it is clever business to crack a man on the cranium, relieve him of a money satchel containing a small fortune, “plant” the fortune, then if caught and convicted, loll around a prison for a few months; and it is “clever” as seen from the criminal’s point of view, however asinine it may be from the viewpoint of deterring him.

Right here hides “the nigger in the woodpile”: the thief is sentenced merely to serve time, without regard for restitution of that which he had stolen. In many cases the time served is little more than “sleepin’ time” the which he jeeringly dubs it; and in no case does it cover the question of equity.

What actual redress has a man for the loss of thousands of dollars, in the imprisonment of a malefactor, no matter how long his term of imprisonment runs?

What the deterrence in a comparatively short prison term that leaves the prisoner with a firm grip on his bundle of loot?

What expect other than that certain types of men will gladly dare issues written to their hands, hearts, and natural predilections? Why wouldn’t such go after what they want with murderous tools?

How repress the criminal by bidding for him, and how deter him through laying odds in his favor that are close to prohibitive as against society?

Where the sense in penal procedure that puts a premium, both in and out of prison, on the won’t-work criminal rounder, and blisters the itinerant who does no worse than hawk harmless wares?

Why, on the one hand, tempt cupidity, and on the other hand, tax honesty? And if, as an individual, you will have it that way, why feel peeved about it, shall an automatic be shoved against your stomach as a raucous voice bites off the command, “Cough up the coin?”

Penal law will serve the commonwealth as it should only when it shall have assured restitution in kind by the thief, up to the reasonable limit. This, as to immediate restitution of “planted” loot not only; but the sentence should further amerce to a fine of the unpaid balance, to be worked out usually in prison by the prisoner and credited to the account of the party, or parties, he robbed.

If fine in prison working days were not congruous with generous justice, then the penalty to further amerce to stated monthly payments by the prisoner on parole, to be held reasonably to his last by the State, or in lieu thereof, to be re-apprehended and required to pay by compulsion as stated.

Cases would come up, of course, whereof the exact lettering of law of the kind could not be executed; but such law could and should be framed so as to embrace the great bulk of predal offenses, and still carry sufficient of elasticity to enable committing magistrates to judge and dispose wisely for the common good.

It will be objected that such legal procedure would visit hardships on the families of offenders. Unquestionably that would be so in isolated instances, albeit the bulk of predal felons do not have families, and when they do, they are frequently a drag on them.

Again, it is, in the end, for the best interests of all concerned, that the State shall bring the last pressure to bear in order to stop the thief; particularly, marauding and foraging thieves. And again, the State could furnish work for the families of prisoners in cases of special need—and save money.

Through it all, relative distinction should be made as between the purely circumstantial and habitual thief. Not that social bon-bons should be tossed to the former; but that very close to even-handed justice should be meted out to the latter. So much distinctively should be done because by-choice predal felons always constitute the nucleus of crime and criminal intent in America.

Isolated cases will not be entirely congruous with any general rule of penal law; but consideration of the peace and security of the great mass must go before emotional procedure whatsoever which crosses the curbing of the gun-hung hound who goes a’riding to kill.

To split hairs of deterrence over confirmed social hyenas, is to furnish them with the last formula from which to tear things.

At any rate, the most efficient punishment is natural punishment. To make the thief pay in kind is absolutely the best way by which to discourage the thief; and shall he have been made to pay for a “dead horse,” he shall have, mayhap, for the first time in his life, absorbed an awakening respect for the law of consequence. And having got so far, mayhap there will be hope for him; but not so, so long as society practically furnishes him grist to grind in such as subterranean “protection,” false sentence, false probatory extensions, and false prison régimes which allow him to pick and choose, play up and down and under.

Specifically writing, the time to start “restitution” is in the time of youth, and the occasion, the first offense. Then, when the toll against a lad is comparatively in pennies, the degradation of thieving should be brought home to him in a parole paper contingent upon his restoration, dollar for dollar, of that of which he had deprived another. Thereafter, raise the imposition to suit repetition, so long as he is held subject to probation. At the reformatory, the same rule should hold, plus legal interest on the obligation—shall he have come up through a juvenile school of reform, after having broken probatory parole.

Measures of the kind wouldn’t cure all of thievery, since many thieves are born thieves who take to thieving as ducks to water; but they would serve in due time to cause the bulk of potential thieves to consider it most carefully before deciding for the anti-social chute.

Whatever the type of criminal, he is usually motivated cardinally in the selection of a criminal career by a very positive distaste for actual work. If he is an itinerant, half-baked tradesman, he will take a “flyer” here and there at his craft, especially while the police are combining for those of his kidney; but consecutive, concentrated endeavor in a humdrum groove he will not abide. And since his instinctive impulsions are those of the parasite, and his appetites those which require some little of money to satisfy, he takes naturally to the tools of the crook.

What crooked tools he will select will depend largely upon his natural fitness to employ them. Usually he aims to excel in his particular line, and he will usually choose the line in which he thinks he can do so. If he is rough-hewn, likes the feel of rough tools, and has the knack of handling them, he will likely enlist in the yeggman division. One whose tastes are more refined and temper more timorous, will naturally go in for forgery, if he guides a cunning tracing pen. The big-tent men, with nerve and daring, take the longest chance with superior intelligence and engraving skill, and keep paying tellers agog. Those who pack a plausible “gift of gab,” backed by no mean knowledge of the intricacies of high finance, as well as where the same does and does not trench upon legal proscriptions, constitute the Wallingfords of “fake” promotion; and lesser lights of the same persuasion who have neither the smoothness of personality, approach and attack of their bigger brothers, form the “now-you-see-it-and-now-you-don’t” fraternity of endless variety and variety of working tools. The sneak-thief runs true to his name, and is properly most dreaded by the clan criminal, some of whom he is most liable to “double-cross,” and others to euchre with the cards of the “stool-pigeon.” Second-story operators, his near relations, are commonly drug-soaked neurotics with a penchant for the air-line, and bizarre ways and means of getting to it and getting away with it.

Since the temptation is great to get a whole lot for nothing and to do it quickly, and since it is so easily done these days, the marauding criminal will be most any type of criminal; but he is commonly a murderously-inclined high-wit of his class of exceptional nerve and resourcefulness, to the first of which he is commonly helped by such as heroin, and to the second by that spitting devil in spurious hands—the automobile. When he is a low-wit, and plans accordingly, the “finest” betimes get him; and when they do, he is a low-wit indeed if he cannot flash an indestructible alibi. Why not, when the testimony of his retainers is accepted at its face value in our courts of law?

The above partition of the predal crew is far from final, either as to selection of tools, or the manner in which they are employed. There will be overlapping and underlapping all along the criminal line, although the criminal is commonly quite as nice as another about his caste, habitually foregathers with those of his attainment, and affects to spurn smaller fry.

But bear it in mind that no two criminals are impelled to criminousness by identically the same underlying impulsions.

The moral weakling stepped off with pyramided peculation, got caught at it, and lacking moral stamina to face out squarely a grave mistake, chose the supposedly lesser line of resistance to “easy money.”

This lad, congenitally tainted with light fingers, brought up in the midst of criminal suggestion, deprived of the benefit of influences that might have counterbalanced, literally kicked into the company of habitual thieves, finally casts his lot with them and lets it go at that.

That young man, inoculated with several species of the sporting bug, and with virus that saps at once his courage and vitality, gets entangled where he can’t get clear, juggles figures, and finds his way into a 6 x 8 cell, where, being a consummate ego-centric—spite of the miserable mess he has made of it—he indulges in self pity, swears to himself that “everybody gave him the worst of it,” and declares for reprisal upon society in general. This is the type most likely either to “overlap or underlap,” depending upon the prison régime and the after-parole circumstance.

Another, engulfed over a heartless wench who rouses in him the demon jealousy—through playing him against the fellow who flashes “real” money, and for whom she adjusts the base string of her bow—goes desperate for means with which to match his rival’s flings, “borrows” “bundle” after “bundle” from his employer, bets all, mostly on the wrong “ponies,” is held up, then thrown down by the girl, and then caves in and limps into a life of crime.

Such as the latter two types are criminals by the legal book, but as a rule they are not intrinsic criminals. Rather, they are comparatively spineless misfits in a closely competitive social scheme.

One who does predicate the alloy in man is the born brute who wields a blackjack with unrepressed satisfaction, kills ruthlessly without pity or subsequent remorse, and comes naturally by a social sense so blunted and oblique that he wouldn’t walk a straight line if he knew it led to paradise. Partly as a side issue for gain, and partly to assure appreciable immunity from punishment for the common crimes of his class, the likes of him take on political thugism, and practically the same thing when they act as “starkers” for the active agents of certain labor unions. Needless to add, down-and-out ex-prize fighters, and would-be pugs of the prize ring, constantly recruit the mounting army corps of footpads, and “buzz-wagon” bandits.

To immigration laws framed and executed as if in response to the dictation of the spewed human spawn of the universe, is America indebted initially for brigades of her most dangerous brigands.

Sicilian and Neapolitan-Italians, members respectively of the Camorra and Mafiauso, particularly run to death-dealing criminality, prosecuted mainly individual against individual or group against group within the clan, or clan against clan, or either or both in the form of blackmail against countrymen who have made or are making their pile, some honestly, more the reverse. The law does not cope with them and their ox-like blood-brothers in crime from the North and East of Italy, because the law goes about it piecemeal. Nothing short of a thorough governmental housecleaning of such will meet the issue as the government has allowed it to be presented by them. However they may war against each other, they move practically as one against the foundations of American institutions. Therefore they must be met with America’s concentrated power, consecutively applied. Pecking at them, here a peck, there a peck, is childish compromise with them, and they know it; therefore, they are of the most flippant of the genus criminal: the more naturally so, because their native countries played into their hands much as America plays into them.

Close in the running with the foreign-born marauder is the mostly second-generation hyphenate, who would stretch the commandment to all of earthly time, and retain the phrasing—“In it thou shalt do no manner of work.” This usually low-strata, erotic, intrinsically dirty, diseased, all-round trickster type, habitué of pool rooms, tinhorn gambling dens, and lowest-down houses of prostitution, is pernicious because he is so all-pervading, while versatile in his limited sphere: meaning, for instance, that he is just enough of a card shark to flank a real captain at crooked dealing, and just enough of a bandit to “steer” and help plunder such as an inebriated plunger, or to assist in a roughly-engineered hold-up. He will affect good clothes and the like, but will usually wear them in such pattern, color, ensemble, and fashion, as to render him at once suspect to the trained eye. Even in the matter of dress, criminals example duck following duck, and doing it, take on little habits, especially of using and placing their hands, that are informing. Also, as to the predatory type, particularly, the set, wolfish expression of countenance is quite likely to be as marked as is the “poker face” of the green-cloth gambler. And also, his sexual excesses will be lined in his face, as plainly as the geographic divisions between States.

Prolific dupes of the preceding type of criminal are potential criminals brewed originally in the home still: mama’s or papa’s, or mama’s and papa’s self-indulged pets, given money to burn, and unquestioned opportunity to burn it after the manner of the globe-trotting freelance. Enough said, save only that criminals so fashioned are usually the most difficult and most tenacious of criminals; the former, because they are usually the most intelligent; and the latter, for the reason that they were home-primed, up through the most impressionable periods of youth and young manhood, for that which they quite naturally take on in the end. The intrinsic good in such lads is never entirely obliterated; hence they have their sober moments—so sober in fact that they commonly make for the “white stuff” and forgetfulness, as well as for nerve to go on with it. And then—finis!

The mental dud and habitué of iniquitous dens fetches and carries for more pretentious criminals. He will likely be a graduated dock-rat. Also, the passive agent on whom certain criminals execute their sexually-perverted desires; and also, he will be taking his kindergarten degrees at picking, snatching and sneaking. Such crowded-out derelicts are much to be pitied and little blamed, since they are the victims of cumulative circumstances wholly unfortuitous.

So one might pick and parse to many times the length of this chapter, not forgetting the meanest of secondary, subterranean crooks, who sport one or another badge of authority, while declaring themselves “in” on the division of criminal spoils. When the “division” reaches to those who pull political strings, we have the ulcerating stage of the criminous sore in the body politic.

While considering the limited list of criminal types herein adumbrated, recall again and again that not less than seventy per cent of the members of them are the ready dupes of those who utter and shove this or that mint of spurious sporting coin, inclusive of “dames” of all varieties of their variety, who urge them to do their worst.

Hundreds of pages could be filled, just in following out to their ramifications, the holds with which catch-as-catch-can gamesters alone throw crime-driven lads. More often than the reverse, “sporting” induces the first criminal offense; and still more often the gaming confirms the offender. It does firstly, because the gambling mania is less insistent and tenacious only than abnormal mating hunger, by which it is commonly aggravated; secondly, for the reason that a “killing” at gaming seems so often to offer the only way out; and thirdly, in that a tyro will as likely beat professional gamblers at their games, as a “bush league” base-ball team the best of them all.

And so, after all, the chosen path of criminals is far from rose-strewn. “Big” and “little,” and “lesser” grafting and gambling “fleas” land on their “backs” and “bite ’em.”

Then, as if to make certain the job shall be completed after the plans of Mephisto, the State stings the budding criminal to social death through paroling him time and again from prisons wherein he had taken on not enough of any kind of skill to make a decent living with it for himself—say nothing of for a wife and family. Hence, naturally, if not perforce, he resumes the whirl around the criminal circle.

Is it, then, that the State itself is in appreciable degree responsible for its criminals of all grades and types? It is, beyond peradventure. It is, primarily as hereinbefore stated. It is further in allowing sprouting “roughnecks” to run as they list at all hours of the night. It is further still in not establishing State control over such children, through parents with whom the aim should be to hold them to natural care of their offspring. Where that cannot be done, the State should assume full educative and disciplinary direction, and do it at the earliest possible moment.

Vicarious cases of the kind should be followed through to the logical end. When it gets down to self-preservation as against the nurture of the most natural of criminals, the State needs must step in and extend the helping hand, as well as establish the whip hand in minimizing the causes of, and motives for, the criminal.

During recent decades, the States generally have contrariwise motivated for crime sequentially emphasized, through attempted mating with reformative processes of cross-fire banalities, and worse.

Out of laudable desire to subject tempest-tossed humans to the least possible of punitive discipline, the States have suffered introduction into prison curriculums of distractions that disorder, even disintegrate reformative measures, as for examples:

(1) Stated periods of free conversation between inmates have been stretched to all-pervading promiscuous chatter, the most of it entirely foreign to reformative endeavor.

Such as relating by Ikey the “Starker Kid,” how he “blimped” on the “bean” with a blackjack this or that wayfarer, bears intimate relation to the following count. It does, because “promiscuous chatter” will hold up any kind of work. Concentration is killed by it; hence it is not tolerated in free-life occupations, and hence to fix the habit of it in a prisoner is seriously to handicap him.

(2) Paroles are governed commonly by mere conduct, rather than by most material industrial and associated averages: a fatal retrogression, in itself not balanced by the total of alleged progressive measures instituted during recent years. He is a mental dud of a self-determining criminal indeed, who won’t play up to that hand and “be good” on the surface, while planning to “stall” as to activities cardinal to his social rehabilitation.

(3) The tone of amusement and the spirit of play has been reduced, the one to the level of the crumb-grubbing, dance-hall rounder; the other to match the mode of the man-mauling brute. Too nice distinctions need not be made in either case. They should not, in fact, be attempted on any field of recreation where red-blooded lads foregather; but such as bestial brutality carrying homosexual suggestion should be nipped religiously in the budding, else the depraved instincts of the minor percentage will be taken on gradually by the major percentage, and in degree by all.

Just because general assembly for free play affords abnormal units the best chance to imbue their betters with the bad, is just why the latter should be most carefully guarded by State agents on recreative fields. The memory of “roughneck” sexual manifestations abides in the minds of lads, and constantly stands athwart of efforts to enlist their undivided attention for fundamental results.

Periods of play should be, as they are not, so planned as to coincide with free-life recreative hours. Also, the periods should be capitalized only in the sense of needed exercise, beyond which prison play is, on its very face, non-reformative. Nothing short of all-around intensive instruction, prosecuted in accordance with what will be the free-life exactions upon the grossly ignorant and unskilled, will work for their social reclamation. They must take up many loose stitches, and do it within a time allowance that is meagre.

(4) Camaraderie as between officers and inmates is carried to contempt-breeding familiarity; and freely-sprinkled cursing charged with foul suggestion, binds the “contempt.” Arraignment of such manifestations may seem far-fetched, if not trivial. Very positively it is neither. The reformative régime that suffers loose and foul-mouthed relations between officers and inmates cannot, by any possibility, express a wholly worthwhile purpose. The moral tonus of the place will be let down appreciably; general laxness will be the rule.

Aside from the fact that “Hello, Bill!” relations wrongly expressed commonize and corrupt, they tempt lads to make a foil of them, to the end that they may be as lazy and shiftless as they dare be.

And so, since the type of correctional plant in question will rather establish than reform all types of criminals, it is up to heads of houses of correction to run them true to reformative form. This, spite of both outside and inside pressure for fallacious methods, even though the “heads” must yield a cheap, ephemeral, and at bottom spurious popularity, in quest of measures that strike in and take root.

Such measures will not issue from minds obsessed by biological theories, stretched to the breaking point in favor of their furtherance; nor from the brains of stubbornly purblind mortals who refuse advanced tools of approved temper. They probably will originate with, and they certainly will be applied by, middle-of-the-road criminologists, who understand why, to the very dregs, it is, that the person given generally to loose, spineless practice, is reformatively less serviceable only than the person wedded to restrictive, hide-bound, single-seeing theory. Either way, the criminologist must strike the justifiable mean; shall he allow himself to be ridden by fetichism, he will surely foozle essentially, no matter what the surface signs.

Whatever his type, the average felon is usually a singular problem and a complex entity. As such he must be searched out, studied, observed when and where he is not observing, and then prescribed for. His exactions in full will not be made known at any one place, at any one time, to anyone on earth, through any one means known to man. When his limitations are mostly made manifest, they are found to be relatively much the same as those of the grand average of the common herd of humans.

Construe the criminal as you will, his crying need is for practical help to put on knowledge and skill with which to execute his social duties. He can well be spared frills, thrills, and a plethora of patting on the back; but not unquestionable suggestion and example, if he is to pull up and win out.

To school him not to lean, is first aid to any type of criminal.

To school the public to plumb to the cardinal causes for the like of the late, Los Angeles, degenerative manifestations, is to inform the public along the lines of the conclusion of this volume. It is also to disclose the deviltry, directed against the young, by the “camouflaged” libertine who deals in the vicious by-products of the sporting life. Hence, the writer bites again and again at the vicious-by-products of sport, by which he, himself, had been so ruthlessly disciplined, when a unit of the professional sporting mass. From having been “done” at it, he doesn’t have to guess.

II

THE CRIMINAL MIND

Large contentions less avail than instances observed.

Kipling.

Rudyard Kipling has been an adjustable man among men. His evenly-balanced mind has sized the stature of his fellows. He has nursed no crotchets by which to be betrayed into half-baked “contentions.” He has painted with pat regard for time, place, and individuals, whether the latter wore nose rings or royal purple. He has not debased a broad culture in hectic pursuit of dollars. He has stuck to a staunch last and striven handsomely.

Since much of so much must have been out of the generous hand of Nature, one could wish Kipling had studied criminals as he has studied other men, and that his “instances observed” thereof were spread as he would spread them in print over the globe.

A pen like Kipling’s would go far to clear away mental cobwebs, spun about the criminal mind by gourd-vine protagonists during the last three decades. As would he with our subject, let us begin at the beginning:

Whether the biblical account of the killing of Abel by Cain be taken as inspired writing, or as pure myth clothed out of man’s imagination, it was the first criminal act imaged by human consciousness. Also, Cain’s reply, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” to those who sought the murdered Abel, shadows forth fundamentally the attitude of mind of the average citizen towards the felon of to-day. It adumbrates, as well, the predilection of the criminal, now as then, to hide the truth with a smoke-screen of subterfuge; this, cleverly betimes, as in Cain’s case, through shunting question with question, though the more common and vulgar method is resort to the clumsily covered lie.

Crass criminals give America cause for pause, only because America either directly or indirectly places crime-weapons in their hands. Along criminous trails they blaze they usually leave easily-recognized marks. In the main, they are scrambled-brained imitators, whom to catch and trip is no great chore.

It is totally different as to the self-determining, self-reliant, mentally keen and resourceful criminal, who is nearly callous to the effects of criminousness, and who seeks life’s zest through matching wits with agents of the law.

Criminals of the latter class will meet you good-naturedly in ethical argument on your chosen ground, where they will catch you unawares “if you don’t watch out.”

For example, you expatiate on individual social service as a duty, and on the cumulative blessings which would accrue therefrom.

“Fine!” replies our man, and adds: “But how many are rendering that kind of service? How many besides those who make a ‘soft’ living at it, and those who first gouged and got theirs?”

You declare that line of argument doesn’t cover the question of individual responsibility; that it doesn’t answer for a thief to point other social slackers.

“All right,” rebuts Thief, “but why ring all of the solemn bells on the retailers? Why not sound the curfew on a batch of the big bandits, and land them where you land hard-pressed ‘pickers’?”

It’s waxing a bit awkward, because Thief’s query plumbs to the crux of the question; a plumbing he cunningly elects shall put society on the defensive. That won’t do, so you switch and let fall your king card in challenge to him to square criminous conduct with the enacting predicates of divine law.

If he believes, after a fashion, in a Supreme Being, you have him there to a degree; albeit the belief seldom strikes deeper than fear of far-removed consequence, the sting of which he is led to depend upon earth-born vicars to draw.

Finally to muss you up mentally, and in part to remove the moral stigma with which the Almighty stamps such as thieving, he will cite the twelfth-hour repentance and shriving of the thief on the Cross.

Here, again, your counter attack won’t carry, unless you can drive home the historical fact that the thief in question had thieved against his intrinsic grain; that he had several times started out to seek the Saviour to be shriven of the unnatural load he had borne; and that he was turned back by fear of fatal strokes at the hands of members of the capital band of murderous marauders with whom he had ridden.

The crucial point to which we have been leading up is, of course, that America deserves the flippant, murderous footpad of all nationalities; first off because she has made no serious effort to understand what he is, and why he is what he is; and secondly, for the reason that she has failed miserably to match either the subjective or objective tools he has employed.

Essentially, America has gone out of her way to make the master criminal welcome, and then to wash his blood-stained hands for him. More than that, she has insisted not only upon his being what he isn’t, either mentally, morally or physically; but further upon attaching to him the least modicum of responsibility for his criminal acts. Having furnished him with the complete formula for anti-social thoughts and deeds, she naturally gets the one from his lawless tongue, and the other out of the muzzle of his automatic.

Nor does the responsibility of America rest solely unto herself for the thieves and thugs she has bidden to her bosom, and there nurtured them with national pabulum that soured on their stomachs, or allowed them to be so nurtured. Thereof, she has complicated the crime problem the world over.

Time and again the forefathers warned against overfeeding of liberty and underwriting of patriotism, foreseeing that did they warn in vain, it would be a question of only a comparatively few years when America would lose her autonomous character, and with the loss, her intrinsically singular meaning in the matter of human progress.

That sterile hour probably will not strike. Americans look up with faith and strength; yet they drift with hyphenates and social wolves; with hyphenates who constantly press for group expression encircled by the restrictive collar of creed; and with social wolves become so bold that they utter lobo howls of defiance on public thoroughfares, where they are suffered to sink poisonous fangs into the very vitals of Constitutional law.

With the former we have begun to deal by determining to make it our business to know that the oath of allegiance to America shall issue from the mouths of aliens who hold mentally in reserve not a thing that crosses that oath. This, primarily, through lengthening the probation period prior to issuance of final papers granting citizenship; and secondarily, through an undercurrent of public opinion so strong as against the conditional patriot, as to make that opinion carry for what it should and must.

With social wolves, it is again “totally different.” It is totally different because an appreciable percentage of them are the offspring of Americans whose ancestry strikes back native-born for several generations. They have been mainly the product of American life and living, ways and means.

True enough, the tussle has been and is with alien criminals and undesirables who recently have sieved into America; but that fact doesn’t let America out for her own brood of social backsliders; neither for the manner in which she has compromised with the full bandit crew, constantly mounting in numbers, and constantly less regardful of law and order.

In part, at least, the mind of the criminal who operates in America, is American-made. There is no getting away from that fact, and there is nothing hidden or strange about it.

Take a case common to alien criminals and potential criminals: up to last accounts, Italy’s Camorrists and Mafiausists ran to illegal rope under indifferent hindrance by Italy; yet they much prefer America as a camping ground. Why? Why for the simple reason that loose as is Italy’s legal hold upon them, the like grip of America is even less binding. Furthermore, money-making, money-spreading, and license-breeding America is ripest for loot.

In no civilized country on earth, right now, when other countries are in the throes of disintegrating aftermath of the World War, can an individual, of his own volition, commit capital crime, and count chances of immunity from commensurate punishment in his favor, as he counts them in America.

That being the precise case stripped of lame excuse and lamer balderdash, why should it be extremely difficult to declare the functioning, as to his specific acts, of the mind of the capital criminal in America? And by “capital,” we do not mean to point the ruthless bungler who employs clumsy weapons clumsily; but the plausible, brainy crook, who cunningly “plays ’em all” against rightly-ordered social edicts, which he instinctively hates.

Actually look into and beyond the eyes of the “king-pin” criminal, while you seek to impress him with the just might of impartially executed law. Note how a hard glint will strike through the eyes, even though from ulterior motives he tries to hide it, and pretends to follow you reservedly.

Far from being the pitiable dunce and dupe he is so commonly rated, the by-choice American criminal of high grade is the most dangerous, least excusable, coolly-calculating menace to the social order the world has ever known. He is the most dangerous because he is the most resourceful, and has the least regard for human life; he is the least excusable for the reason that no country has ever borne with him and tried to help him pull up, as America has borne with him and tried to help him pull up; and he is flippantly the rest, and more, because the bids for him in America are made by exactly those whose first business it should be to overreach him.

Did he fail to make the most of those bids, he indeed would be the misfit “moron” agreeably with alleged “scientific” classification of him. Contrariwise, he “plays ’em all”: the judge; the patrolman; the politician; the social worker; the reformer, active and passive; probation officers; the prison agent of high degree he knows must play up to the merry-go-round cult of reformers, if he would hold his job; and, in a pinch in order to bag bigger game, he will “double-cross” any one or all, if he is sure he can keep the double-crossing under cover.

In so far as he shunts essential human values out of his mind, he is a fool, since true happiness is not for the thief or thug; but his material concepts fit human nature closely enough to enable him to go after and get pretty nearly what he wants, in and out of prison, while advisedly making use of all of the long odds in his favor. Doing it, he fears only higher-up spoilsmen who sacrifice criminal pawns.

Maybe he could, and maybe he couldn’t enter a room, envisage the objects therein at a glance, then step into an adjoining room and tale off most of those objects. Probably you couldn’t do so; but if you couldn’t, you wouldn’t put it down conclusively that you had thereby demonstrated your arrested mental development.

Largely because of such easily-misleading “tests,” America has been at meticulous pains to school the criminal to believe himself irresponsible for his illegal acts; this, seemingly oblivious of the fact that the mark of the true moron would rightly attach to him, did he fail to grind all of such gratuitous grist coming to his mill.

If America elects to classify the criminal exactly as he would be classified; and then to dispose of him exactly as he would be disposed of, that’s America’s business. His business is to promote the calling of false turns on him in favor of easy going at his chosen calling; and he attends strictly to business, without care otherwise for what you tag him mentally.

Ostensibly as opposed to the “business,” he will play any card for a consideration along any line you suggest; but not for a moment does he lose sight of his cardinal aim, which is to be a crook hailed by crooks.

Lay gentlemen particularly state the case in words opposed to those which precede; but just because they are lay gentlemen they do not, and they cannot, by any possibility, state the case as it is.

Being a real criminologist presupposes long years of consecrated study of and contact with criminals, in their midst. It also postulates a broad culture, inclusive of the specific bearing of genetic parallels and the reverse; and, as a matter of course, close study of such as the etiology of crime, and of individual and race psychology.

Notwithstanding, lay gentlemen have written, during recent years, most of the basic specifications for the social rehabilitation, by institutional correction, of the habitual, predal felon. Result? Let a parallel case give answer:

Before the discovery of the anti-toxin for diphtheria, suppose a criminologist to have had a strong humanitarian leaning to be of active service in the discovery and use of that anti-toxin. Assume further that he conned a few chemical paragraphs, messed about in hospitals, tinkered at synthesis and the reverse in the laboratory, and wrote copiously from his treasured notebook: how far, think you, would he have gotten in his quest?

The parallel is not perfect, to be sure, but it will serve to point these vital facts: (1) The ninety-and-nine of puttering, basically uninformed, amateur penologists have been primarily a nuisance, and the thousandth has been useless in the work. (2) Secondarily, they have been much more than a mere nuisance, in that they have made it their business to pull down the framework of rational reformative régimes put up by actual criminologists. (3) And in the stead of that deleted or destroyed, they have rung in either puerile activities and inactivities, or sporting-monger activities to the point of offense against God, against Nature, and against the social exactions upon the criminal.

The criminal has not concerned himself about the social exactions upon him. He has not because he isn’t built that way, and because he hasn’t had to do so. Those highest up in reformative councils have obligingly lettered reformative measures to his hand. Therefore he is always on his toes to ding fulsome praise of them in indiscriminating ears, while naturally condemning those he cannot fool all of the time.

So much, in part measure, is of the criminal pot as it boils; and so much tells why the criminal stands pat with commanding cards gratuitously dealt him. When society shall have matched his all-around play in the matter, will be time enough for society to belittle mental gifts with which he is enabled to euchre the land’s combined agents of the law.

In any case, relief is in sight. The bulk of predatory criminals are instinctive pug-uglies. The instinctive pug-ugly bids fair to be America’s representative hero. United States Senators and other governmental celebrities, who, with their women, occupied box seats at the Dempsey-Carpentier “boxing”—please don’t laugh—“exhibition,” so attested by travelling hundreds of miles to occupy those seats.

Hence, why not groom the parasitic thug for the National Congress, under the proviso that he would make attempt there to beat a modicum of common sense into the heads of certain of his confrères? The odds against his success would be nearly prohibitive, to be sure; but millions of Americans would relish his try at it. Then, too, the pug would stand a chance of being of some use in the human scheme, the which he has not been up to the present time: unless to image and suggest brawling and blood-letting to up-coming kids, is useful.

Let America get after and stay after her pug and mulcting parasites, along with her conscienceless money-changers and spenders, after the manner in which the Christ-man got after them, and the criminal will at once take up quite somewhat of the oblique slack of his mind. Until America does just exactly that, both in and out of prison, recidivistic criminals will ride the rougher shod in America, in constantly increasing numbers.

History seems to have it that a contagious human hysteria recurs in cycles; that the hysteria usually roots in an aimless spirit of unrest; and that when the wheel of time points the fatal number, myriads of advanced humans yield their grip on intrinsic values.

Initial expression of the mental eruption has usually taken the form of choromania, as witness ancient Sparta’s grand march to corrupted morals via the nude dance; also, America’s present peek-a-boo gyrations, remindful alternately of nothing so much as the lumbering clown bear, and “monkey-on-a-stick.”

One could make better than a crude guess as to the psychological sequences involved in the connection between the semi-bestial dance, and concomitant blunting of the finer sensibilities. One could, because sex-charged, hysterical dancing unchecked, runs in the end almost inevitably either to conscious or unconscious brutality of one or another form and degree.

In the beginning, the form may but slightly offend that which is natural, and the degree may seem to be as inconsequent; but the cumulative effect of both as suggested and imaged is to commonize a low level of human expression; and since a low level of human expression demands varied excitement pyramided, the final result will depend upon whether a people do or do not put overhead check on that kind of expression.

At the Jersey City prize-fight, Americans very palpably did just the reverse who fattened the purses of parasitic pugs and their purveyors there assembled.

As a matter of course, such as capsheaf criminals, gamblers, pool-room sharks, bookmakers, race-track “touts,” and members and ex-members of the won’t work “frat” were at the ringside, drawn as by an irresistible magnet to their natural element. But think on representatives of a nation’s dignity and sanity mixing with the motley mass, while entering into the spirit of the brutalizing abomination!

Save their women, and say how much the minds of honorables of that kidney have “on” the criminal mind? Essentially how much have they, taking into account their blood and bringing-up, and the blood and bringing-up of the average criminal? How about the mind of a public servant who does not know a bestial, crime-breeding thing when he sees it: or, if he does recognize its basic baseness, still clamps moral handcuffs on his conscience in order to indulge a natural or acquired predilection for brutish expression?

May such an one be held safe either to help frame or interpret the laws of his land, on which the oncoming generations of American youth must guide?

Could any of the revered forefathers have been dragged to such as current “boxing exhibitions”—again, “don’t laugh”—other than in the same as chains? If they could not have been, were they mental, moral and physical “hayseeds” of their day: or, do certain of their successors fundamentally flout their oaths of office, through literally flinging the most pernicious of suggestion and example into the very faces of America’s budding lads and lassies?

To what, at bottom, more than any one other concrete cause, was the late debacle due, if not to Germany’s brutally-planned persistence in making brutish sport a part of the common and uncommon education of her young males? If you are inclined to pass the query, question closely any one of thousands of German ex-students and soldiers whose face bears cicatrized scars of the sword’s edge or point, and get your answer.

The reply of the sporting mad of America would be that Germany advisedly fashioned the minds of her lads for alleged defensive war with her enemies, real and imaginary; whereas such as prize fighting conserves the all-around stamina of American youth, to be employed in the pursuits of peace, and that it is meant to do no more.

Rot, that, just plumb rot! Rot of the kind no thinking man would dare attempt to justify on bended knee. Prize fighting “is meant” first, last, and all of the time, to pack the purses of human parasites; to pack purses that are unpacked to beat the law, both God-made and man-made, from every possible angle. To hold else is either not to know the game, or not to want to know it.

Prize fighting is war in miniature between two men. It is, moreover, up to the point of a killing, the most merciless of war. It is, because “top-notch” fighters of the several “weights” are rare birds who are practically unbeatable in their prime, so long as they hold to Nature’s laws. Those who go against them are usually as good as “licked” before they enter the ring. Therefore the hundreds of “marked” would be “cham-pee-ons” who eke out a living serving essentially as punching bags for their physical betters; and therefore the former are marked with such as ear drums put out of commission; broken noses, wrists and hands; impaired eyesight; and internal traumatic wounds that are fated to rise up and curse them along at about life’s middle course.

Pretty picture in so far as painted, isn’t it, with which to stir the imagination and ambitions of your boy? And mark you, the vicious by-products of pugism have been but barely indicated herein, as for instance: at least one-third of the sixteen-hundred-thousand dollars of gate money of the Dempsey-Carpentier fight will circulate as disappearing dollars. The bulk of them will disappear from legitimate lanes of trade and circulate through corrosive sporting channels, the which are a drag upon the general turnover of business. What’s more important, they will be placed so as to further menace the morals of the young. And all will be managed mainly by those who pack smug chuckles over the apish credulity of legions of the self-nominated august.

This seemingly misplaced diversion is meant to drive it home, with the final word, that sport overdone at once locks arms with the criminal, and undercuts at the foundation of the national structure.

No matter what form of expression the non-producer may affect; or by what specious arguments he seeks to establish that form of expression, he remains a non-producing leech.

Did the professional sporting pug peddle his nefarious wares after having done an honest day’s work, it would still be bad enough; but he doesn’t, he never has done so, and he never will. He knows that always of the mass an appreciable percentage of sporting-bug bitten individuals can be relied upon to sponsor his spurious offerings. Therefore he plays up to them, and down to that which the Creator expects of every man.

However, that actual producers have to carry the drones of the human hive, is by no means the prime ingredient of the foul mess. That resides in spiritual loss not to be calculated in dollars and cents: a spiritual loss which side-tracks rational thinking and doing, while it engenders “a spirit of unrest men miscall delight.”

The criminal mind functions exactly as does that of the socially prominent, if not ethically discriminating woman, who, in a late newspaper item, declares for the blood-spilling at Jersey City because she thinks it was “wonderfully sportsmanlike.” As a matter of fact, there wasn’t a thing “sportsmanlike” about that brutal battle. There wasn’t, if for none other than the reason that Carpentier gave away nearly twenty pounds to probably the hardest-boiled, two-fisted fighter of his weight the prize ring has ever known. That, alone, spelled the “count” for Carpentier. Furthermore, the true metal of the clan rings in Carpentier’s contention to the effect that he broke the thumb of his right hand in the “first round.” Had he done so, he could not have rocked Dempsey with that hand, as he did, in the “second round.”

A “sportsmanlike” proposition presumes a fair fighting chance for either contestant. Carpentier didn’t have a ghost of a chance. American pugs knew it, though they cannily kept the odds on Dempsey up, so as to attract the big money from overseas.

Carpentier floored, battered, bleeding, doubled up in agony and gasping for breath, symbolized at once the spirit of the prize ring, and the chance the layman has when he stakes his money against the underground machinations of those who “toil not” and will not toil. They must first attract, then outmaneuver honest money. They do, and they do it while poisoning the national mind.

Finally, as regards claims even for physical betterment accruing from brutalizing sport: Rot, again, pure rot. Not a thing attaches thereto but which Dame Nature offers man gratis and bountifully out of her outstretched hands.

Have you ever, really, thought it all over? If you haven’t, make haste to do so. God will not hold you guiltless else; for, in just the degree men fail to realize that they are the moral “keepers” of His children, they will be held responsible by Him for those of them that take on the criminal mind and stumble on with it to the social discard.

While thinking it over, watch it out and see the sporting thief, and thug, primed for a nefarious business in such as the cigarette-soaked, gambling poolroom.

III

THE MORAL CRIMINAL

Dr. Adler says there are 10,000,000 feeble-minded people in our country. Well, well: it isn’t as bad as we thought.

Passaic News.

Crime is commonly imaged as felonious offense committed against the public law. Definitions of the word “crime” are likewise restricted in meaning.

The common idea of crime is natural, and the legal definition of it is necessary, albeit crime reaches far beyond casual views and word-analysis. In the final sieving, anything that abets, suggests or examples devilish conduct on the part of normal humans, is criminal.

It is a devilish thing to do individual murder; but it is infinitely more devilish to so gouge and mulct as to help kill the chances of millions of fellow beings to bring up their broods as children have a right to be brought up.

It is a spiteful fling of Nature that monogamous mating cannot hold the oversexed of the human species; yet their bestial impulses are benign, as compared with the persistence of the public press in successively pyramiding detail on detail of the nasty aftermath of the expression of those impulses. “News is news,” yes; also, nasty news is nasty news, concerning which the moral obligation is upon the newspaper fraternity not to flaunt it, time and again, at the top, under spread-type caption, for the edification of younglings. The writer has been in position to know that the bulk of newspaper men do not relish the kind of mental pabulum they feel they are practically compelled to serve to a percentage of their patrons. Editors and the like are usually staunch, far-seeing men who realize fully the fateful suggestion of the crime-breeding, sexually-perverting print they hold themselves obliged to feature, else be beaten to it by competitors with narrative a part of the public demand.

Nevertheless, it is more than probable that the sheet which should decline either prominence to, or reiteration of, such as erotic copy, would increase rather than yield its clientele. To believe else were to believe the mind of the average citizen to be reduced to a very low level.

As a matter of fact, the average reader lends but casual eye to crime and sex-charged stuff. He turns from the mere headings thereof in disgust. Did he follow through with arrested attention, he would be impressed with the carrying power of the stuff, and take measures to protect his kids from it. That the case boils down to impressionable effect upon the babe in embryo, is sufficient to give good men pause over the publication of such as prurient matter, poisonous to the last degree by suggestion to immature minds. Moreover, to deprive unsocial and anti-social plungers of a public audience, is one of the best ways by which to extract the tang from their obliquely-conceived flings.

The criminal feeds on the pernicious notoriety given him in the printed page. So do marital globe-trotters. Hence, a common publicity of dirt operates as a two-fold menace to good morals. And mark you, however specious the plea for the publicity, the menace of it remains.

In any case, purveyors of news will do well by up-coming lads and lassies, through pressing the soft pedal for dissonant tones; by passing up youth-poisoning narrative to those who have a natural predilection for that kind of print. They will do well to do it over their signatures, and thus permit the public to get a strangle hold on the few who would maim budding character for a packed purse. No one looks for such a change; but until some such measure is effected, gentlemen of the press may not wash their hands of crime by suggestion.

In effect, the bulk of the public press of America stand in no better moral light than does the foul-mouthed gossip who goes from house to house peddling filthy wares. There is no difference in principle between the two, and in practice only what demarcates retailing and jobbing. That, not only, but doing it over and over again, with but such details deleted as a self-respecting husband would hesitate to impart to a self-respecting wife.

“Noblesse oblige.” Let those on whom moral leadership is in part thrust, and in part assumed, go over their own lines and discourage the leprous.

The drone-bum is a drag on the public purse, but he baldly dresses and acts the part, makes no pretentions, makes no apologies and seldom deals from the bottom.

The sport-parasite, whose name is legion, and who is the “four-flushing” blood-brother of the hand-me-out peripatetic, goes about it differently. He affects spats, the last wrinkle in waistcoats, cane and gloves, feels the feel of silk, boast a wardrobe Beau Brummel would have envied, poses about in a “Packard Six,” and wouldn’t appear on the street “on a bet” under a hat a day out of style. Also, he spreads “easy-money” all along the sporting pike from baseball to the bawd. And also, the high finance, “fake-scheme” cult of him alone draw down annually close to five-hundred-million dollars. The bill is paid mainly out of lean purses, the strings to which have to be tightened, to the end that parasitic sporting mongers may give their dupes “the laugh.”

It is no new thing for the plausible parasite to refuse any part of the actual social load: meaning, of course, the sweating and tugging necessary to load that load. Non-producing knights of the gilded circle have always ridden the tiring nation to its last gasp. But it remained for Anglo-Saxon Christians to lend unqualified approval to intrinsic drones, who elect at the best to play for their “pile” and make hard working men and women foot the bill; and at the worst, to make every possible use at spurious sporting activities of crooked tools, such as manipulation, inside information, and, in the end, the confiscatory law of averages.

Followers in America of the Christ lend their money not only to the ominous business, but their moral support as well; followers, mind you, ostensibly of Him who raged at money-mad cheats, and who couldn’t abide them that shift labor to other backs.

Many there will be to bristle over the leads immediately preceding; still, search them out to the final throw, and it will be found that at least ninety per cent of them either pull or aim to pull directly or indirectly at strings on the “rake off.” This from the college graduated “sport” who heads for the gaming limelight, to the manufacturer who turns out the paraphernalia of blood-spilling “pugs.”

Many, bitten by the malignant sporting bug, believe the desideratum of life consists in hardening oneself to give and take the greatest amount of physical punishment. Mark it: to give and take the greatest amount of physical punishment.

Why take the punishment? Why, primarily, say the pugs, to the end that one may take care of oneself in case one is thuggishly assaulted; and secondarily, to engage at forms of exercise that conserve longevity.

Concerning the primary proposition, say as to how many times in your adult life you have been obliged to put up your fists in self defense? And as to the secondary contention, recollect that any form of strenuous exercise habitually taken on after the plastic period, results practically in a stretching of the muscles and tissues, and a feeding of them so stretched. Thereafter, the like of the form of exercise with the feeding, must be continued for years, and gradually graded down to some past middle age, else both muscles and tissues will go flabby under wrinkling flesh, and “Doc” must do the best he can in the case.

As an example of how the thing works out take this: the grand majority of ex-college athletes slough off too soon on the following-up process named. Hence, though they represent the physical cream of colleges, they do not stand out in life insurance statistics as by natural right they would, had they exercised and trained to Nature’s bidding, instead of to the snap of the professional’s whip; nay, had they not trained at all for heart-exhausting competition, and had just breezed along the countryside, agreeably with the modest demands of the muscular reflexes.

Lads are subject these days to all kinds of sporting flim-flam, not the least pernicious of which is that they must be banged about the lot in order to win physical standing.

Under stress of wholesouled play, pure sport will pass betimes the line that divides the gentleman-athlete and the instinctively brutal battering ram. It is good that some have a bit of grit ground into them. Sport must ride lads to a degree, else be robbed of enthusiasm that makes for wholesome results; but the moment the thuggish “professional” promoter promotes, bid farewell to the finer sensibilities and to the purposes to which pure sport and sporting should be held for lads.

When, as at present, it comes to the point where habitual parasites of the “pug” variety are held up to the youth of the land by governmental honorables, as exemplars of all a lad should be and strive for, it is time to call check; and if the grossly overdone sporting proclivities of men do not strike in, perhaps the fact that the women of the “honorables” also stand sponsor for first-driving drones, will do so.

Looking at the matter in the large, what is it if not morally criminal to babble in one breath about “disarmament,” and in the next breath imbue lads and lassies with the ideals of the shouldering hog, and the instincts of the boss bull? Where else than in the moral gutter should a nation expect to land, which goes out of its way to heroize thinly veneered parasites, and plays up to out and out cheats of the same breed?

The American people have their work cut out to arrest that for which they have bidden, put up, put down, and put through; which is to say: to snap social handcuffs on those who advisedly prey upon the weak crotchets and vicious curves of their kind. Adding to the germane tens of thousands of flouted laws wont do it; nor will anything short of a purging of the social conscience. Moreover, the purging will begin necessarily at the mother’s knee, and extend through the plastic years.

America heads for the shallows because she took on the impossible task of making over habit-marked grown-ups, bidden to her bosom from the scrap heaps of nations. Now, she may tack quickly or take her medicine, prescribed by past masters at brute-struck quackery.

So, without end, we might specify and elaborate. The crucial point is that the public sees capital menace to the public safety only in the acts of the crassest of felonious offenders: whereas much more of fateful consequence resides in the morally unclean machinations of those who practically shove human pawns to the first lines of criminal attack.

Were all imprisoned, petty thieves in the land turned loose, and jail sentence given their equivalent in numbers of those at the top who make a business of breaking moral law, the basic steps would be taken at once to stop the criminal and solve the crime problem. The foraging criminal holds that he at least takes the gambler’s chance, while swivel-chair cheats “stack” and deal themselves sure-thing financial aces. In so far as that fact justifies the small-fry felon, he is justified.

Some allowance should be made for tainted-in-blood, gutter bred, falsely-environed social misfits, who are driven more or less to selection of the tools of the savage. Contrariwise, there is no defense of the well-born, well-brought-up man who descends in his dealings with his fellowmen to the level of the card shark. Yet even the latter is light in the dark as compared with the public character who affects sporting pugs, pirates, and parasites. When not a fit subject for the alienists, such an one is overdue for political death.

The common servant who cannot distinguish as between beneficent sport and sporting that smells to heaven, ceases to be a social asset not only; he is a menace to the moral health of the nation. Did he not stand convicted by the major millions of rational men and women, one would despair of the dawning day of a common brotherhood.

It were not too rank to paraphrase thusly: “The nation the gods would destroy, they first make sporting mad.” America is dangerously close to sporting mad. She will come out of that particular form of nerve storm because she will have to do so. She will have to do so for the very good reason that she cannot much longer pay the two-fold freight entailed; a two-fold freight expressed man for man in constantly reduced production, and an increasing number of disappearing dollars.

At a given time, the national wealth of America reduces to the equivalent of the number of dollars Americans have wisely earned and invested. Wisely-earned dollars mean big production, and big production means an average big spending and investing capacity. That, in turn, means brisk business along the lines of legitimate commerce and trade. And that means nearly universal employment, and freely-circulating money turned over and over along those lines.

Contrary to the claim of the gamester, there is a vast difference between the working power of the dollar that finds its way into the industrial groove, and the dollar that helps pack the purse of a prostitute. In the one case, the moral dollar will earn ever-increasing increment, while contributing to the general well-being. In the other case, the immoral dollar had passed and will pass mainly from the pocket of one mulcting parasite into the pocket of another mulcting parasite. It had and will, because human parasites produce nothing tangible in exchange for that which is dumped into their palms. The money they spend for their general upkeep is largely turned back into approved channels of trade; but that is but a fraction of the grand total. The bulk of their capital is and must be nearly as dead to the business world. It is practically of little more use to going business than is hoarded money.

Even so, the enacting indictment of the sporting drone is not a dollar indictment. The capital brief society should hold against him is that he plys intrinsically criminal tools, with which he frequently “double-crosses” even his fellow craftsmen.

“Well,” says the imprisoned felon of the stripe in question, “what did big and little business men do to the people during the progress of the World War? What did they do to each other when diving foreign exchange upheaved home values? What did they do to every body for long months after prices should have dropped pretty close to their normal level? Did they or did they not play the game as I played it, until consumers got after them with buying strikes, and the cry of stop thief? Did they or did they not?”

Well, “did they or did they not”? If they did, what had they on “the imprisoned felon of the stripe in question”? That’s a live wire, is that question; a live wire of the kind concerning which the criminal presses for answer, and he is entitled to an answer that doesn’t squirm and doesn’t quibble.

As a dealer in the world’s mart can you return an honest answer? If you cannot, hadn’t you better take inventory of conscience, and try to understand that the meanest kind of thievery is that which raises the ante on what should be common commodities and conveniences, beyond the purchasing power of the average purse, say nothing of the plight of millions of underdogs on whom the last curse of criminally-manipulated price levels falls?

If you think yourself immune to such queries, make study of the ever-tightening grip of the proletariat on the use that has been made of them. Start with the French Revolution and come on down to glean the why of it that workers mean to be served, as well as serving, in the future.

It is true that hosts of toilers swallow hook, line and sinker of the crooked gamesters cast, and do it day in and day out: fatefully, to the end that 95% of them are but six months removed from the poor-house at the age of 65, in so far as their own financial resources are concerned. But they now have the fists of their minds doubled to batter those who would build and operate, from within a drawn circle, the like of the baronial toll gate. Unlock such as interlocking thievery, say they, come out into the open and do business with us man to make like men.

Next, let us hope, in order of the wrath of the honest toiler, will be the meticulously groomed and brushed parasite; next, whether he plys deft fingers backed by unbeatable odds, or a glib tongue to get a heap for nothing.

First of all to feel the hand of the worker should be the blood-spilling, pug-parasite; him who suggests war between brothers, dulls the finer sensibilities, lowers both the mental and moral tonus of mankind, and cheats even women into believing that he can, by any possibility, be of any basic use in the big scheme of life.

Many good people think differently; many who will not trouble to think as it is necessary to think, in order to classify men and motives. They are therefore plastic clay for the clan parasite, inclusive of clever criminals.

Crime? Why, only on criminals by legal edict are the keys of the turnkey turned. Myriads of humans who never face a presiding judge, plan and execute moral crime that is much more far-reaching than the average even of capital crime.

Hence, by-choice felons flit sneeringly to and from prison, where they have to be practically force-fed with moral precepts; that, very largely, because they know millions of free men meaner than they, are immune to legal force-feeding for the meanness.

So long as such conditions obtain in America, so long will recidivistic criminals mount there in numbers; and so long will they justify themselves to themselves, and to all who will listen to their half-baked contentions.

“I see and approve the good—I follow the bad,” says a far-famed poet, whose bold declaration of spineless principle leaves him spokesman for thousands of moral weaklings who are always on the fence, undecisive as to which way to jump. It also leaves him open to the charge of angling for a cheap, dirt-distributing notoriety.

Another, ostensibly an editor of a New England newspaper—shades of the Pilgrims stand by—flares at men of the cloth who denounce such as the late bestial scandal enacted at Jersey City. He is “convinced” that Catholic and Protestant ministers are “impugning motives here and blackening character there, because they have lost their tempers at the disinclination of the people to follow them.”

Passing motives “impugned” by the Infinite Mind, and character “blackened” with the devil’s own smudge, what would the scribe have vicars of God Almighty do? What the implication of his own monstrous and most illogical libel, if not that those on whom America does and must rely for moral guidance, should remain as mentally shackled, and morally blind, while blacklegs and backsliders establish schools for crime, and write the texts books for them?

Hardly! True Americans of the “people” for whom the gentleman assumes to speak, wax fatuous, not to say fat-headed betimes; but let us hope that they may be relied upon finally to search out and set down those who would yield American birth-right for the brew of the base at heart.

If the sporting-soaked must utter and shove counterfeit moral coin, they owe it to common decency not to affect the mantle of the mentor; they specifically do, because predal parasites bank on being able to point to them as having said and done the last fool thing. They further do, for the reason that they are the readiest gulls of the grafting gang they champion.

Moral thieves are moral morons. Count them, and get the cut of the saw of the “Passaic News.”

IV

THE PSYCHIATRIST

Webster defines psychology as “The science of the human soul; specifically, the systematic and scientific knowledge of the powers and functions of the human soul, in so far as they are known to consciousness; a treatise on the human soul.”

Modified by the phrase, “in so far as they are known to consciousness,” that definition will do, albeit we have arrived at but little “knowledge” of the “powers and functions of the human soul,” and at less of prescience that accounts for the by-choice criminal. Then, too, distinction must be made as between the finite limitations of the brain of flesh, and the infinite reach of the “soul” of man.

In any case, let us not cough over a too nice fitting of technical terms; but envisage, in the broad, the matter of mental research and healing.

The more material powers of the mind of the criminal frequently elude the examiner and tools which can be too “systematic.” This, because the examiner faces cards which the examined instinctively employ every means at their command to euchre. Also, if his limited scope of criminological vision causes him to over-emphasize present emphasis, and to bolt the way-backward trail of his subject, the examiner will remain as half blind to the basic reasons for a given criminal.

Cardinal causes for the criminal commonly hark back to remote ancestors. And so, for example, one unacquainted with the early history of the Sicilian people, the events of which changed so many of that people from trustful, mutually helpful sons of the soil, into dagger-thrusting brigands, lunging for the hearts of their blood brothers, has no call to classify the alien Sicilian-Italian who makes America his base of operations. That is essentially so, because the period from bib to puberty is the most impressionable after-birth period, during which a lad will tend to take on much that will aggravate congenital predisposition; predisposition the more fateful for the reason that it lurks in the unconscious, and there constantly presses upon its victim for expression.

Hence, psycho-physical research that does not cover the whole field of motive and motion, is comparatively valueless. By the same token, the investigator who is casehardened with technical lore, will be very likely to miscall the turn, especially on the alien and near-alien criminal.

Above all else, the psychiatrist must measure the criminal with an absolutely open mind, attuned alike to individual and racial determination; attuned, also, to his own definitions, such as that psychic contagion is “transfer of nervous disease by imitation”; and attuned to the fact that the mode of operating employed with Awasco, the sunny-hearted, comparatively ingenuous “Wop,” anxious to help, won’t do at all with Hungarian Zynthner the sullen, who is evasive, suspicious, and resentful alike of authority and the personal touch, because he still bristles over hurts visited upon him and his by thick-lipped Hapsburgs.

Mental searching of the latter class of criminals usually yields next to nothing that is specifically of capital importance. For want of the master-key to the situation, the operator leaves the tested laughing up their sleeves over having fundamentally over-reached the tester. Needless to add, the master-key is mostly shaped of the metal of foreign soil, and unlocks the far-removed circumstance.

First off, the really expert examiner will seek to win the undivided attention, full confidence, and voluntary coöperation of his man, who is to be led only by judicious degrees to the conviction that the questioner is not a mere cog of a “scientific” machine, the purpose of which is to bare the subject’s soul, regardless of his feelings in the matter.

Call mental research by what name you will: state it in esoteric terms laden with syllables, or so plainly that a recent past master at making mud pies can understand, and it must still be led, as well as leading, else miss the mark.

Stamps of stigma are essentially subversive of the end sought. Designate a lad by a disgraceful name, and you create the strongest of initial motive for him to earn the name. Moreover, such procedure is usually as senseless as harmful, since it is not within human gift to declare the morrow of the disease-free, pre-adolescent mind. The writer is moved to stress this paragraph, because he has observed so many cases whereof full-blown puberty has marked mental metamorphosis; marked it both as to the positive and negative, the which will usually depend on the sum of the subject’s bringing-up, inclusive, of course, of the sum of his environment; and partly on his intrinsic moral fibre, born at his birth. And recollect that juvenile predilections usually mark the confirmed criminal to be.

In any case, the negative conclusion should wait upon indubitable evidence; and the positive, general statement be mostly guardedly made, since the scales will likely tip to the weight of influence, and that may be in the lap of change entirely beyond the ken of “little man.” God, alone, disposes, alike as to mind and matter. Furthermore, pre-criminal motivations are never singular; hence the single-seeing reformer, or investigator, cuts no swath in complex, crowding crime. And furthermore, his conclusions may be absolutely correct, and his mode of applying remedial measures be diametrically at variance with the crying exactions of his subject.

Then again, crime is not a disease in the sense that it is so lightly proclaimed. Crime may eventuate mainly because of congenital flaw, physical, mental, or both; or it may crop out by acquirement in spite of a sound heredity; but it always issues to relative mental disease in the sense that habitually oblique reasoning becomes master of the subject, either tentatively, or for good and all; tentatively, if the constant weight of influence is preponderantly in his favor, and permanently under the reverse circumstance.

More than that, the serviceable investigator will understand how the weight of influence can be turned, one way or the other, by seeming straws of effort or circumstance. For instance, the mood of the moment must be understood not only, but as well, why it is the mood of the moment. Here, pre-natal influence may carry in nothing more tangible than a lowering sky. There, the marked face of the man betrays the erotic-neurotic in the throes of the immediate aftermath of his self-indulged spree, in which state of low vitality he naturally looks out upon an ugly, drab world. Another nurses a fetich: a ridiculous fetich, to be sure, but one of which you shall not purge his mind with a club of words; indeed, in no way else than through patiently building to his better understanding. Per contra, looms up the capsheaf of them all: the parent-spoiled ego-centric mouther, who is certain sure he could plan a better world than ever Almighty God could think of. Very good, encourage him to build it; then pick it to pieces, preferably with terse, pregnant parables that leave him not a stone to stand on. Do it often, do it advisedly, and do it thoroughly. You will not thereby win him at once to rational thought, but you have better than a fighting chance to switch him for it, if you are kindly tactful, and do not attempt to stuff your opposed views down his throat.

We are not concerned here with those doomed mentally in state of embryo, save that it is well to have in mind Dr. A. Jacobi’s “Report to the Prison Congress of 1892,” to the effect that “No congenital chronic thickening of the brain membranes, no fixed changes in the brain substance, unless it be syphilitic perhaps, have ever been cured.” So much is indisputable fact, qualified by the word “cured.”

With Dr. Jacobi’s further assertion, many will, without presumption, disagree: “It is not necessary to resort to material impressions (in the embryonic state) as the cause of physical, intellectual and moral anomalies in the offspring: that theory may safely be left to nurses and poets.”

Passing the poet—who usually culls and adorns, yet has been known to probe and create—while objecting strongly for the grateful nurse who often guides to health where the physician, single-handed, would have failed, is Dr. Jacobi’s second sweeping conclusion unassailable?

What is the last power of the protoplasmic germ, and what is the last influence from which it derives that power? Can any man answer unqualifiedly, and if he cannot, just why exclude the psychic from the possibilities? If morbidly by “psychic contagion” is admitted, why refuse pre-natal impressions of psychic origin?

We know that hereditary transmission is persistent as to physical attributes. It may appear to drop stitches here and there, though we shall note more or less of reversion to type if we follow through far enough; but let opinion be as it may, how is one to check up variations of mood, temperament and disposition with physical figures? As to the last three, Jimmy the first and Johnny the second of the same family are antithetic. Why, if the physical is final?

How, by purely physical analysis, are we to account for the fact that the original Clay family of horses were notoriously high-strung and hard to school to rein: whereas the Morgan family were supremely easy to break and groove? Why, where the blood line was kept pure, did the family temperament persist, with few deviations, and even then breed on again back to original family “manners”? Why, with mixture of those breeds, mixture of manners?

What made the intrinsic difference in mental bent and physical outlook as between Webster and Hayne? Why was the one a stickler for centralized governmental power, and the other champion of the rights of individual States, and why was each cock-sure of his ground of contention under the Constitution? In the final analysis, did anything out of physiology decide the question, and how did, what did decide, take up its abode in the national consciousness?

Do hopples employed in effecting change in the original, instinctive gait of a mare from trot to pace, alone account for change of gait? If so, why, when her instinct of motion is changed mechanically from the trot to the pace, does she transmit the latter-acquired instinct to her progeny, to the near exclusion of the gait she was born to? Why, when the hopples are removed, does she not revert to the trot?

Way back of Civil War days, a gentleman-horseman of Rhode Island changed the gait of the saddle horse of the lady of his choice to the pace, agreeably with the fastidious taste of the lady. Then, it was, the “pacer” made his bow to the horse world. To-day, he speeds better than fifty-fifty with trotters through the “Grand Circuit,” and almost surely transmits the instinct to pace. Hopples now are employed mainly to prevent “breaking”; in fact, pacing champions have been leg-free of them.

What’s the answer, if not transmitted instinct, and who is to draw the boundary line thereof? If the instinct to play a base horn, why not the instinct to play a base part? If the instinct to play a base part, why not the instinct to brood and abnormally berate oneself, or flippantly break laws, or froth over fol-de-rol, or “fake” the whole human scheme?

At any rate, the instinctive intent of the habitual criminal is summed up in the last phrase of the preceding paragraph. Therefore, we needs must sharpen our tools of amendment and repair accordingly.

Sharpening, we shall learn on the one hand that bloviation brands the surface-sign, self-seeking examiner; and on the other hand, that be his lip-service never so fulsome in favor of this or that man, method, or régime of reform, the examined is dealing from the bottom of the deck if he does not hearken unto “The stern daughter of the voice of God.”

The subject is hearkening if he has the grit to pass up “gutter guff” always circulating in the criminal crowd, while he puts forth earnest efforts for fundamental averages. Contrariwise, if he juggles those averages with his mind clamped to the sporting schedule of the place, he is “faking”; he is faking, even though he cunningly steers clear of the house disciplinarian. Hence, the rational régime of reform will require him to do the one, while making it practically impossible for him to do the other, and make an early parole—as he now does.

Save for congenital deviates the like of those named by Dr. Jacobi, determination of his reactions is but the first step in the social rehabilitation of the recidivistic felon; in truth, the determination so far is in appreciable measure self-evident. By the very fact that he elects to be and remain a lawbreaker, he is somewhat of a mental dud, and more of a moral pervert. Moreover, whether he was slated mainly by nature to play the part, or it was pressed upon him by the cumulative weight of spiteful circumstance, he plays the part.

The part is the part of the predal parasite, the which he likes fully well and will not cast aside lightly at call to carry his rightly weighted share of the social load, be that never so light.

Opinions differ as to the capacity of the criminal to adjust to social exactions, but there can be no two judgments as to the duty of the State to require of him that he shall make earnest bid for the best social expression of which he is capable. Thereof his number in the average is not so close to zero as it is commonly marked. Added to his positive mental response, a certain cleavage in favor of his brain and betterment must nearly always be allowed, since he usually plays possum in prison for “easy pickin’” in line with his anti-social predilections.

Furthermore, mental search made in a strange and stressed atmosphere, with tools utterly foreign to the subject’s attention, will get on his nerves to a degree, and may prove baldly misleading; misleading not only as to his latent mental content, but as well upon him, if negative procedure following the search causes him to throw up his hands in deep-seated disgust.

Under restrictive conditions, for which a bungling operator may be primarily responsible, a hyperesthetic might suffer close to acute sensory aphasia; and he who bears the burdens of hebetude would probably fare no better if the clicking of his mind were clocked to an arbitrary time allowance.

In any case, the final test should revert to material practices, and processes of intellection whereof the subject had worked from motive to excel, shall the motive have been good, bad, or indifferent.

Particularly, the examiner should beware a habit of mind that sends him fetich stalking: as for instance, to establish the ultimate, unconscious, sexual base of neurasthenia; or a given percentage of morons, applicable in general to felonious offenders against the public law, or even as constant for different prison populations. The danger that lies in determination to prove what one is predisposed to prove, is not easily overestimated; indeed, the test should, in such case, pass from tested to tester.

When a man gets that way as to any human question, he is relatively in the same state of mind as the fetichist who fondles milady’s shoe, to the exclusion of the body and soul of her, provided: the shoe is high-heeled and buttons. Such an one should turn awhile from the criminal crowd, to care-free thinking in the wide open. Before resuming his duties, he should further check up with one of his craft who planes his blocks to square with well-battened conclusions.

While it is true that no structural change to man’s hand is possible in the brain built in embryo, it is also true that the pernicious custom is to overdetermination of the damage done in that state. For example, the fact that a given subject may never hope to master calculus, doesn’t mean that he may not be stretched to the size of a serviceable breadwinner. In line with that truth, take one, of many, extreme cases that have come under the writer’s observation and treatment:

R., age sixteen, lowest-grade imbecile and borderline idiot, so dense that it took the writer three weeks to establish in his mind the difference between right and left. When so much of mental awakening came, came with it a pitifully wistful smile of blowing pride. Another three weeks, and he could execute on command with few slips through the “School of the Soldier.” At the end of three months, he worked regularly and reliably with his company in battalion drill through intricate “Successive Formations”; and within the year, he could take his company to and from any formation with which he had been taught to form. More than that, he picked up nicely at common school, and made relatively good progress at “Sloyd.”

Surely, all of that does not come under the heading of “reflex action”; and if it does, what of it? If a megacephalic, splay-footed, slab-sided, lumbering imbecile like R., so close to the idiot as to give off the latter’s proverbial scent, can be carried even to the stage of mental and physical development R. was carried “within the year,” what cannot be done for the mounting millions of mentally and physically backward girls and boys of America classed as “Morons”? How are we to get the down-to-the-ground work of the land done without the aid of such?

In any event, it is at once informing and encouraging to note that the school authorities of New York City have called check on the near mania of the period to attach negatively overdrawn advalorem tags to such children; and then, when so tagged, practically to dump them into the social discard, there to hate themselves, each other, and everybody.

For one, cardinal thing, the named school authorities rightly hold that the humane burden is upon New York City’s teaching staff to dig out and decide upon ways and means better than those which make social pariahs of unfolding lads and lassies.

The same authorities further hold rightly that the benefits accruing to such children through mixing with the better-equipped mass is, in itself, a consideration not to be lightly brushed aside. And once more, that mental backwardness is in appreciable measure chargeable to false methods of educative approach and attack.

Gentlemen who lie awake o’nights devising bizarre means by which alleged criminal “morons” can best be cheated of that which the school authorities of the City of New York insist New York’s mentally backward children shall have, will do well to follow the effects of the edict of those authorities. Certainly that edict won’t visit arresting embargo upon the normal mass of children, and must prove a boon to approximately ten thousand children who don’t just measure to arbitrarily-spaced mental tape; tape which is not, and can not be, out of the hand of the Almighty, and tape which can not measure to fully unfolded years.

As applies to either prison or public school instruction, the crucial points are: (1) Technical marks of stigmata are much too frequently and much too loosely attached to budding youth, the inevitable effect of which is to depress and discourage them, particularly out of the gibes of unthinking comrades. (2) More often than not, the marks initiate in the fallible brains of those tricked into overdetermination, through predisposition amounting to near obsession to make the technical case. (3) The marks, as arrived at under present conception of rational “follow-up” processes, do not carry to comprehensive measures. (4) The scholastic or reform curriculum that is not pregnant with influences fundamentally germane to the mental, moral and physical uplift of the last unit of the mass, is either falsely prescribed or prosecuted.

Because of his reasoning faculty, the child, more quickly than any other youngling of the animal kingdom, unfolds by imitation to good suggestion and good example. Hence, if solely because segregated-group treatment practically cold-blankets those two, capital influences, as exerted by the mass upon the individual, it should be relegated to the domain where veiled minds are wedded either to fantasies, or to the useless function.

Wheresoever mental dullards are schooled, the atmosphere should be surcharged with hope. There, the word “can’t” should be held taboo, and “you can if you will” issue commonly with the force of an unquestionable slogan. No matter how apparently hopeless the case, no suggestion of character whatsoever, to that effect, should be carried to the subject.

Related tests for physical reactions may be taken at very close to their face value, since the responses thereto are mostly involuntary, and, in any instance, the subject can’t just figure it out how to beat them. However, acquired ability, plus somewhat of natural gift of the psycho-analyst to trace signs to their source and intertwining, must be beyond question.

The phrase “plus somewhat of natural gift” is inserted, because the burden is at once upon the examiner to pick apart the mosaic of motive, and to uncover the counter motives of the examined. That he will not do reliably short of an intuitive faculty naturally keen, backed by a heap of horse sense, and a broad culture; a culture so broad that he can vibrate alike with such as the cheap paddock tout, the crass, ego-centric, oversexed hyperesthenic with a chip on his shoulder, the plain plumb bum and crowded-out derelict, the congenital victim of hebetude with ox-like mind and the sensibilities of the mullet, and the bald criminal cheat, out all of the time to bring the crime-tainted-bacon home over the subterranean route.

Actually to grade human souls and sound human hearts, is a heaping order that calls for catholic understanding of comparative sociology, retroactive as to transmitted traits of character for at least one-hundred-and-eighty years. Back of that, man has not yet probed to impulse for human action of the present; but he can not be sure that reasons in part for present given courses of human conduct, may not strike backward centuries farther than nine-score years.

Not so long ago, as world time goes, natural selection was the vogue. Under Lycurgus, a little later on, Spartan youth who were not expert foragers from the common hoard, were subject to the heaviest hand of the State. Another short bridge of years, and Germans who grilled the legions of Varus boasted that they “didn’t go to war but to annihilation.” Shortly thereafter the doom of the Roman Empire was adumbrated partly by the “lounge-lizard” given over to various forms of indefensible conquest, not the least of which led to vitiating sexual excess; and partly by establishing barbarous letting of human blood in the national consciousness as a form of amusement.

From then on, most of social upheavals carried the germs of future social chaos in thousands of killings, the bulk of which were born of hectic, heartless bestiality, and very few, if any, of which wrought for whole-seeing man.

Through all, war over religious creeds is chargeable, more than any other one influence, with retardation of human progress. Therefore, to trace the backward trail of the purblind bigot, is ofttimes the primary chore of the psycho-analyst.

Instinctive, habitual thievery lashed into lads, even unto death, 323 B. C. would necessarily carry with tremendous pertinacity; probably not unto this year of our Lord, but possibly so. It is given to no man to declare unequivocally that an intrinsic Greek thief of to-day is not, as to natural tendency to thieve, more or less the product of certain lads whom the authorities of ancient Sparta sped on their thieving ways.

We know comparatively so little about hereditary transmission, that to allege of the fixed “law,” or laws thereof, is to part company with the possibilities.

Degree by degree, the finite mind of man edges closer to that which but ten decades ago was by common consent relegated to the domain of the infinite; as for examples, telegraphy, telephony, and the wireless. The wireless, mark you, the metallic language of which depends primarily upon synchronous vibrations produced by sound waves.

That’s striking so close to telepathy as to make rational conception of pre-natal influence relatively simple reasoning. Also, it causes one to wonder if it be not a part of the Great Scheme of the all-knowing Father to unfold the finite mind of man measurably to conception of the infinite?

Be all as it may, present social conditions in America offer many visible signs of far-removed atavistic pressure upon polyglot Americans in the making; signs directly applicable to thousands of alien predal felons in our midst, whom, with such signs, the psycho-analyst must read. Of those signs are the singular predilection of the Sicilian-Italian criminal for criminousness by group expression, initiating with the “Mafiauso,” headquarters at Palermo, Sicily; and the instinctive predisposition of his blood brothers of the “Camorra,” across the Strait of Messena, headquarters at Naples, to combine against the established social order and tear things.

Hence, largely it is, that human life in America is at the moment held at a price less than the primitive savage placed upon it. Spurious leaders of athletics of old Rome got behind that bad business with the bone-breaking gladiator; and spurious leaders of athletics are to-day pressing in America for reversion to the murderous sporting type of Nero’s time, through establishing the blood-spilling pug-ugly, and heroizing the low-down parasital “sport.”

Get that, to its ramifications, such as that on the one hand the average annual salary of ministers of the Methodist faith has just been raised approximately from 800 to 1100 dollars; and on the other hand, that a won’t-work, fistic brute demands and commands $300,000, “win or lose,” for a few minutes at cutting, slugging and punching recognition out of the countenance of another parasital “pug.” This, while public school teachers have to press, and press for a living wage, given grudgingly.

Get just that much of anti-social play and pressure, then wonder not that the sporting-grooved predal felon spurns actual work, and that college authorities have to put hopples on thousands of sport-soaked, bucking young bronchos, in order to align them for a smattering of cheap culture.

As if all that were not enough, would-be bellwethers of reform can not rest until they have well-nigh ruined régimes of reform through supercharging them with so-called “sporting features.”

Right here is the chance for the wholly honest, wholly earnest psycho-analyst to score. Better than he, none should know that legitimate sport outraged is commonly one of the cardinal causes for the confirmed criminal; and that to further inoculate with the sporting “bug” a lad already ridden by the vicious by-products of sport, is directly to furnish him with formula for further perversion of a fundamentally good instinct. He also knows that perversion of the sporting instinct frequently ends with the Wassermann test, and the polluted victim who is a menace to the public health.

Prisoner or freeman, rational exercise in the free air he should have; but why, after nearly two-thousand years of kneeling at Christian altars, should man hold up such as the “two-fisted,” cruel, degenerate, human battering ram, as a criterion for his upcoming kiddies to ape? And if he will have it so, why babble about “disarmament” and “waves” of crime?