Problems of Conduct: An Introductory Survey of Ethics Part 19

WHEN the security of peace and an efficient government are attained, the way lies open for the amelioration of social evils. Freedom from war and from political corruption are but the pre-conditions of social advance, which must consist in three things: the healing of existing ills, the reorganization of society to prevent the recurrence of similar ills, and the bringing of new opportunities and joys to the people. Our first step, then, is to consider social therapeutics-the palliation of present suffering, the redressing of existing wrongs; however we may seek, by radical readjustments, to strike at the roots of these evils, we must not fail to mitigate, as best we can, the lot of those who are the unfortunate victims of our still crude social organization. The detailed study of social ills and their remedies has come to be a science by itself, and a science that calls for close attention; for there is more good will than insight a field, and nothing demands more wisdom and experience than the permanent curing of social sores. But it falls to ethics to note the general duties and opportunities, to point out the responsibility of the individual citizen for wrongs which he is not helping to right, and to direct him to the great moral causes in one or more of which an increasing number of our educated men and women are enrolling themselves. A questionnaire recently sent out by the author of this book discloses the fact that over half the college graduates of this country have given time and money to one or more of the campaigns which are being waged for social betterment. [Footnote: Some of the results of this questionnaire were published in the Independent for August 5, 1913, vol. 75, p. 348.] These evils which it is the duty of the State to try to remedy we shall now consider.

What is the duty of the State in regard to:

I. SICKNESS AND PREVENTABLE DEATH? Physical ills are the unavoidable lot of the human race; but by no means to the extent to which they now prevail. A very large percentage of existing sickness and infirmity could have been prevented by a timely application of such knowledge as the intelligent already possess. It is the poverty, the crowded and unsanitary living conditions, the ignorance and helplessness of the ma.s.ses, that perpetuate all this unnecessary suffering, this economic waste, this drag on human efficiency and happiness. Not only from humanitarian motives, but also from regard for national prosperity and virility, it behooves the State to wage war against preventable illness and safeguard the general health.

How shocking conditions are, in view of the sanitary and medical knowledge we now possess, we are not apt to realize. It is estimated that of the three million or so who are seriously ill in this country on any average day, more than half might have been kept well by the enforcement of proper precautions; that of the 1,500,000 deaths that occur annually in the United States, nearly half could have been postponed. Tuberculosis, for example, is not a highly contagious or rapid disease; it is absolutely preventable by measures now understood, and almost always curable in its earliest stages. Yet half a million people in our country are suffering from it, and about 130,000 die of it annually. Typhoid, which could readily be as nearly eradicated as smallpox has been, claims some 30,000 victims annually. It has been estimated by various statisticians that the nation could save a billion dollars a year through postponing deaths, and at least half as much again by preventing illness that does not result fatally. Tuberculosis alone is said to cost the country half a billion annually, typhoid over three hundred million, and so on. The cost in suffering, broken lives, and broken hearts is beyond computation.

There are many different ways in which the campaign for public health can be simultaneously waged:

(1) The enforcement of quarantine laws, vaccination, and fumigation, should be much stricter than it is in many parts of the nation. By such means the cholera, bubonic plague, and other terrible diseases have been practically kept out of the country, and smallpox has become, from one of the most dreaded scourges, an almost negligible peril.

Experience shows strikingly the advantage of isolating patients suffering from contagious diseases; here at least the State, in the interest of the community as a whole, must sternly limit individual liberty. And it looks as if we were at the threshold of an era of "vaccination" for other diseases besides smallpox; typhoid is now absolutely preventable by that means, and the number of diseases amenable to prevention or mitigation by similar methods is yearly increasing. In some or all of these cases there is a slight risk to the patient, in view of which compulsory "vaccination" is in some quarters strenuously opposed. Leaving the discussion of the principle here involved to chapter XXVIII, we may confidently say, at least, that voluntary inoculation against diseases is an increasingly valuable safeguard not only for the individual in question but for the whole community.

(2) Apart from state action, voluntary organizations formed to attack specific diseases, by spreading popular knowledge of preventive measures, and pus.h.i.+ng legislation for their enforcement, offer much promise. The Anti-Tuberculosis League can already point to a ten per cent decline in the death rate from that plague in the decade from 1900 to 1910. [Footnote: For methods and results consult the Secretary of the National a.s.sociation for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis, 105 East Twenty-second Street, New York City. Free literature is sent, and information furnished on request.] But while in New York City alone nearly thirty thousand fresh victims are seized by the disease every year, a voluntary organization cannot hope to cope with the situation; the power and resources of the State are needed. The congestion of population, and the lack of proper light and air, which are the greatest factors, perhaps, in the spread of the scourge, must be attacked by legislation. So typhoid must be fought not only by vaccination, but by legislation insuring a pure water supply, proper sewage disposal, and the protection of food from contamination.

Measures necessary to eradicate that pest, the house fly, must be enforced, the mosquito must be as nearly as possible exterminated, streets and yards must be kept clean, the smoke nuisance abated, the slaughtering of animals and canning of food sharply regulated, sanitary conditions enforced in homes and factories. One of the prerequisites to any marked improvement will be the "taking out of politics" of the public health service and making it an expert profession.

(3) Another service that the community must eventually, in its own interests, provide, is free medical attendance, by really competent physicians, wherever there is need. Without referring to the suffering and anxiety spared, the expense of this service will far more than be saved the State in the prevention of illness and premature death.

The most careful medical inspection of school children, including attention by experts to eyes, ears, and teeth, is of utmost importance; all sorts of ills can thus be averted which the parents are too ignorant or careless to forestall. [Footnote: Consult the literature of the American School Hygiene a.s.sociation (Secretary T. A. Storey, College of the City of New York). L. D. Cruickshank, School Clinics at Home and Abroad. Outlook, vol. 84, p. 662.] It is earnestly to be hoped that the present chaos of medical education and practice will be soon reduced to a better order; that pract.i.tioners who prefer manipulation or mental healing, for example, will, instead of forming separate and antagonistic schools, unite their insight and experience with the main stream of scientific therapeutic effort. The quacks who delude and murder hordes of ignorant victims must be, so far as is practicable, severely punished; and adequate physiological and medical education should be required for all practicing healers, whatever methods they may then choose to employ.

(4) Besides free medical attendance, the State must pro- vide free hospitals for the sick, nurses for the poor, asylums for those who are incapacitated by infirmity from self-support. The care and treatment of the feeble-minded, the insane, the deaf, the blind, the crippled, should always be in the hands of experts; and, so far as possible, work that they can do must be provided. With the enforcement of the measures we have enumerated, the need of such inst.i.tutions will become much less; but at present they are inadequate in number and equipment, too often managed by incompetent officials, and not always free from scandal. [Footnote: Cf. C. R, Henderson, Social Spirit in America, chap. XV.]

(5) Most important of all, perhaps, is the work that must be done to save the babies. Approximately a third of the babies born in this country die before they are four years old; half or two thirds of these could be saved. Wonderful results in baby saving have followed strict control of the milk supply and the banis.h.i.+ng of the fly. Besides this, mothers must in some way be given instruction in the very difficult and complicated art of rearing infants; for many of the deaths are due to simple ignorance.[Footnote: For methods and results in baby-saving, consult the Secretary of the National a.s.sociation for the Study and Prevention of Infant Mortality, 1211 Cathedral Street, Baltimore, Maryland. Also Outlook, vol. 101, p. 190. J. S. Gibbon, Infant Welfare Centers.] Poverty, the necessity of self- support on the part of mothers, also plays a large part; we shall consider in chapter x.x.x the possibility of state care of mothers during the infancy of their children. II. Poverty and inadequate living conditions? If human illness can be in large measure averted by state action, poverty can be practically abolished. The poor we have always had with us, indeed; but we need not forever have them. There is no excuse for our tolerance of the suffering and degradation of the submerged cla.s.ses; the causes of this wretchedness are in the main removable. The initial cost will be great, but in the long run the saving to the community will be enormous. Individual effort can only achieve a superficial and temporary relief; and even the two or three hundred charity organization societies in the country are impotent, for lack of funds and of power, to stem the forces that make for poverty. To dole out charity to this family and to that is unhappily necessary in our present crude social situation; but it is not a solution. It not only runs the continual risk of encouraging s.h.i.+ftlessness and dependence, but it does not go to the root of the matter. There will always be inequalities in wealth and room for personal gifts from the more to the less fortunate; but the State must not be content with such patching and palliating, but must strike at the roots of the evil. We will consider the chief causes of poverty and their cure.

(1) The cause that bulks largest is the inadequate wages of a considerable portion of the lowest cla.s.s. It is obviously impossible to support the average family of five in decency, not to say in health, efficiency, or comfort, with an income of, say, less than a thousand dollars a year, as prices go at time of writing (1914). Yet great numbers of families at present have to exist somehow upon less, even much less. Five million adult male workers in this country receive less than six hundred dollars a year for their work.[Footnote: Cf.

Professor Fairchild's comments in Forum, vol. 52, p. 49 (July, 1914).]

Even when mothers work who ought to be at home tending the children, even when children work who ought to be in school, the total income is often miserably inadequate. Yet there is ample wealth in the country, if it were better distributed, to pay a living wage to every laborer.

By some one of the means which we shall presently discuss, the State must see that all laborers are well enough paid to enable them, while they work, to support in comfort a moderate family.

(2) Involuntary unemployment is the next source of poverty. This is due to many causes: the periodic depressions and failures of industries; the introduction of new machinery, throwing out whole cla.s.ses of laborers; the enormous influx of immigrants and consequent congestion in the cities of unskilled labor; lack of education, or natural stupidity, which render some men too incompetent to retain positions.

Ignorance can be overcome by proper compulsory education laws; all but the actually feeble-minded (who must be cared for in inst.i.tutions) can, by skillful attention, be taught proficiency in some trade. And with a more widespread education the work that requires no skill can be left to the hopelessly stupid. The congestion of labor in the cities [Footnote: In February, 1914, there were reported to be 350,000 men out of work in New York City (Outlook, March 14, 1914).] can be largely remedied by free state employment bureaus which shall serve as distributing agencies; there is almost always work enough and to spare in some parts of the country, and usually not far away. But more than this is necessary; the State must see that work is offered every man who is able to work. All sorts of public works need unskilled laborers in every city of the country; there is digging to be done, shoveling and sweeping and carting. There are roads to be built, rivers to be dredged, parks to be graded, buildings to be erected, a thousand things to be done. It will be quite feasible, when wages are generally adequate, for the cities, by general agreement, to offer work to all applicants at a wage so low as not to attract men away from other employments, and yet to enable them to support their families decently.

The low wages given will save the city much money directly, as well as saving it the care of the indigent. But it will be a feasible plan only when the city's jobs cease to be used as a means of vote-buying by politicians and are offered where they are needed. [Footnote: 1 See W.H. Beveridge, Unemployment. J.A. Hobson, The Problem of the Unemployed. Alden and Hayward, The Unemployable and the Unemployed. C. S. Loch, Methods of Social Advance, chap. IX.

Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 8, pp. 168, 453, 499. Review of Reviews, vol. 9, pp. 29, 179. Charities Review, vol. 3, pp. 221, 323. Independent, vol. 77, p.363. National Munic.i.p.al Review, vol. 3, p.366. The unemployment which is the result of laziness must be cured by compulsory work as in farmcolonies, which have been successful in Europe. Cf. Edmond Kelly, The Elimination of the Tramp.]

(3) The third important cause of poverty is sickness and the death of wage earners. Here the way is clear. When the State has taken the measures we have enumerated for the public health, when it provides competent doctors and nurses, and bears the cost of illness, we shall have only the loss of wages during the illness or after the death of wage earners to consider. And here some form of universal insurance will probably be the solution; this is preferable to state care of dependents, as it carries no taint of charity. This solves every problem but the delicate one, which must be entrusted to expert diagnosticians, of determining to work is caused by physical weakness or mere laziness.

(4) The fourth great cause of poverty, drink, can and must be abolished in the near future, by the means already considered.

(5) There remain three personal causes which need be the only permanently troublesome factors- -laziness, self-indulgence, and the incontinence which results in over- large families. The laziness which prefers chronic inactivity to work is not normal to human nature, and will be largely banished by education, the improvement of health, and the improvement of the conditions and hours of labor. The obstinate cases of unwillingness to work must be cured by compulsory labor in farm colonies or on public works; most such cases respond to intelligent treatment and cease to be troublesome when some physical or moral twist has been remedied. The waste of income in self-indulgence of one form or other is more difficult to deal with; but the law can justly forbid the wage-earner from squandering upon himself money needed by wife and children, and direct that a due proportion of his wages be paid directly to the wife. If neither father nor mother will use their money for the proper welfare of the children, the State must take the children from them though that step should only be a last and desperate resort. Finally, there is the tendency, unfortunately most prevalent among the lowest cla.s.ses, to have more children than can be decently cared for. To some extent this evil can be remedied by the dissemination of information concerning proper methods of preventing conception [Footnote: There is, however, a danger in the general dissemination of such information- the danger of increasing prost.i.tution by lessening one of the chief deterrents there from.]; to some extent by moral training to self-control and a sense of responsibility. Or the State may undertake the countenance large families; if this is done (see chapter x.x.x), steps must of course be taken to prevent the marrying of the unfit-or, at least, their breeding. With our rapidly decreasing birth rate, and the spread of education, which will do away with "lower" cla.s.ses and fit every one in some decent degree to be a parent, this will probably be the ultimate solution. With the disappearance of poverty, the miserable living conditions of so large a proportion of our population will automatically improve. But much should be done directly by the State to prevent such housing conditions as make for physical or moral degeneration. We are far behind Europe in housing-legislation, and conditions in most of our cities are going from bad to worse. There is, however, no need whatever of unsanitary housing; it is merely the selfishness of owners and the apathy of the public that permits its existence. The crowding-which in New York City runs up to some thirteen hundred per acre-can be stopped by simple legislation. The lack of proper light or ventilation, of proper water supply, plumbing, or sewerage, of proper removal of ashes, garbage, or rubbish, is inexcusable. The results of living in the dark, foul-aired, unsanitary tenements of our slums are: a great increase in sickness and premature death; a stunting of growth, physical and mental, and an increase in numbers of backward and delinquent children; the spread of vicious and criminal habits through the lack of privacy and contagion of close contact with the vicious.

We are breeding in our slums a degenerate race,-boys who grow up used to vice, and girls that drift naturally into prost.i.tution; we are allowing disease to spread from them, through the children that go to the public schools, the shop-girls we buy from in the stores, the servants that enter our houses, the men we rub elbows with on the street or in the street-cars. Very salutary are the laws that require the name of the owner to be placed on all buildings; shame before the public may wring improvements from many a landlord who now takes profits from tenements unfit for habitation. But it ought not to be left to the conscience of the individual owner; the State must exercise its primary right to forbid the crowding of tenants into houses which do not afford sanitary quarters and permit a decent degree of privacy.

III. COMMERCIALIZED VICE?

The duty of the State in regard to the vice caterers is obvious; the commercializing of vice must be strictly prohibited by law and enforced by whatever means experience proves most effective. We must learn to include in this cla.s.s of enemies of society the manufacturers and sellers of alcoholic liquors, as well as of the less generally used arcotics; but this matter has been already discussed in connection ]with our study of the individual's duty in relation to alcohol. Of the proprietors of gambling dens, indecent "shows," etc, we need not further speak, concentrating our attention instead upon the worst species of vice catering, the commercializing of prost.i.tution. The extent to which the sale of woman's virtue prevails in our cities is scarcely believable. The recent commission of which Mr. Rockefeller was chairman actually counted 14,926 professional prost.i.tutes in Manhattan alone, in 1912; while personal visitation established the existence of over sixteen hundred houses where the gratification of l.u.s.t could be bought. Not all, certainly, were counted; and this list is, of course, entirely exclusive of the great number of girls occasionally and secretly selling themselves to friends, acquaintances, and employers.

Many hundreds of men and women, keepers of houses, procurers, and the like, live on the proceeds of this great underground industry; and to some extent-though to what extent it is, of course, impossible to ascertain the forcible retention of young girls is exist in most of the world's cities. What is being done to abolish this ghastliest of evils?

In most great cities, scarcely anything, for two reasons: the one being that so many men, perhaps the majority, secretly wish to retain an opportunity for purchasing s.e.x gratification, the other that the police generally find the protection of illegal vice an easy source of revenue.

If the police are honest, they break up a disorderly house-and let the inmates carry the lure of their trade elsewhere. The magistrates fine them, or give them sentences just long enough to bring them needed rest and nutrition, and send them back to their business. Or they drive them out of town-to swell the numbers in the next town. Attempts at legalization and localization are frank admissions of inability or lack of desire to fight the evil; their effect is to make the way of temptation easier for the youth. Compulsory medical inspection gives a promise of immunity from disease which is largely illusory, and entices men who are now restrained by prudential motives. There are, however, many promising lines of attack:

(1) When women gain the vote, they can be counted on to fight the evil. The prost.i.tutes themselves, being mostly minors, and, in any case, anxious to conceal their ident.i.ty, seldom vote; and the remaining women are almost en ma.s.se bitterly opposed to the trade. With women voting, and an efficient political administration inaugurated in our cities, we shall hope to witness the end of the scandalous nonenforcement of existing laws.

(2) The abolis.h.i.+ng of the liquor trade will take away the great political ally of the trade in girlhood; and without the demoralizing influence of alcohol fewer men will yield to their pa.s.sions and fewer girls be pliant thereto.

(3) The Rockefeller Commission disclosed majority of prost.i.tutes are almost wholly uneducated-about half of those questioned had not even gone through the primary school, and only seven per cent had finished the grammar-school work. Compulsory education, vigilantly enforced, will greatly lessen the number of girls who will be willing to take up the life of degradation, suffering, and premature death; especially will this be the case if s.e.x hygiene is properly taught. Approximately a quarter of the girls studied were mentally defective; these should have been detected in the schools and removed to the proper inst.i.tutions before they fell prey to the clever schemes of the procurer.[Footnote: Of 647 wayward girls recently at the Bedford Reformatory, over 300 were accounted mentally deficient.] For a falling-off in this alarming number of mental defectives we must await scientific eugenic laws to be discussed in chapter x.x.x.

(4) It is a shameful fact that thousands of girls, dependent upon their own earnings for support, receive less than enough to enable them to live in decent comfort, not to say with any enjoyment of life. Many, of course, waste their earnings on needlessly fine clothes, or at the "shows"; the American fas.h.i.+on of extravagant dress and the craving for amus.e.m.e.nt are factors of importance in the ruin of young girls.

But five dollars, or even seven dollars, a week is not enough to live on in the cities; and many girls are paid no more, even less. The State, in framing its minimum wage laws, or other legislation, must take cognizance of this startling and intolerable situation.

(5) Provision should be made for the care of girls who come alone to the cities. Dormitories with clean and airy bedrooms at minimum cost, and attractive reading- and social-rooms, offering provision for normal social life and amus.e.m.e.nt, can do much to keep lonely and restless girls out of the clutches of the vicious provision for young men who live alone might avail to lessen to some extent their patronage of houses of vice.

(6) The model injunction acts of a few of our more advanced States "vest the power in any citizen, whether he or she is personally damaged by such establishment, to inst.i.tute legal proceedings against all concerned; to secure the abatement of the nuisance, and perpetual injunction against its reestablishment." It is too early yet to speak with a.s.surance of the practical working of this method; but it bids fair to make the brothel business more precarious. If, in addition, laws against street soliciting are strictly enforced, the first steps of young men into vice will be made much less alluringly easy than at present.

(7) The most radical and effective measure of all will be to arrest the professional prost.i.tutes, segregate them, and keep them segregated during the dangerous years, except as genuine signs of intention to reform appear, in which case they may be released upon probation. The expense will be, at the outset, considerable. But the girls will be taught trades, and kept at work which will in most cases more than pay for their support. Moreover, the community will, of course, save the vast sums now pa.s.sed over by its l.u.s.tful men to these women. The saving of health and life will be incalculable. The girls, although under restraint, will be infinitely better off than they were, and can in most cases, with patience and education, be made ultimately to realize their gain; as they grow older and forget their early years of shame, they can be set free again, with some skilled trade learned, and some acc.u.mulated earnings. Professional prost.i.tution will, of course, still flourish to a degree underground; but it will be a highly risky business, attracting far fewer girls, and difficult for the uninitiated young man to discover. With this outlet for l.u.s.t partially closed, there would no doubt tend to be an increase in solitary and h.o.m.os.e.xual vice, and in the seduction of innocent girls. But the latter outlet can be checked by raising the "age of consent" to twenty or twenty-one, and punis.h.i.+ng the seduction of younger girls as rape. And the former evils, serious as they are, are far less of an evil than the creation of our present wretched cla.s.s of professional prost.i.tutes. As a matter of fact, there would, beyond all question, be a great diminution in s.e.xual vice, the present amount of it being due by no means wholly to desire that is naturally imperious, but to the artificial fostering of that desire by those who hope to profit financially thereby.

IV. Crime?

The gravest of all social ills is-crime. Its treatment may be considered under the three heads of prevention, conviction, and the treatment of convicted criminals.

(1) To some extent, not yet clearly determined, the causes of crime are temperamental, due to congenital defects or overexcitable impulses.

The inherited effects of insanity, alcoholism, and other pathological conditions, make self-control far more difficult for some unfortunates.

Such baneful inheritances will some day be minimized by eugenic laws; and individuals whose abnormal mental condition makes them dangerous to society will be kept under permanent restraint. The causes of crime are, however, to a far greater degree environmental. Undernutrition, overwork, worry, and various other sources of poor health, create a condition of lowered resistance to impulse. The herding of the poor into crowded tenements, the inability to find work, the lack of wholesome interests and excitements to provide a normal outlet for energy of body and mind, the daily sight of the luxury of the rich and the bitterness of its contrast with their own need, awaken dangerous pa.s.sions and reckless defiance of law. The lack of education, contact with absorption of law-defying philosophies of life, tend to make crime appear natural and justified. All of these unhealthy conditions are being attacked under the spur of our new social conscience; and with every step in social alleviation crime diminishes. Criminals are, in general, just such men and women as we; in like situations we too should be tempted to crime. We might all repeat with Bunyan: "There, but for the grace of G.o.d, go I!" Give every man and woman a fair chance for happiness in normal ways, and the lure of crime will largely vanish.[Footnote: Cf. An Open Letter to Society from Convict 1776 (F.

H. Revell Co.).] Yet human nature in its most favorable circ.u.mstances and in its most favored individuals has its twists and its anti-social impulses. For the potential criminal-and that means for every one of us-there must be elaborated also a system of moral or religious training which shall seek to develop the better nature that is in every man and enchain the brute. With such a discipline imposed upon each generation there would be a far greater hope for the repression of evil tendencies, whether due to temperamental perversion or provocative environment.

(2) If there is much to be done in the prevention of crime, there is also much to be done in insuring the prompt conviction of offenders.

The legal delays and obtrusion of the technicalities which now so often obstruct the administration of justice, hold out a means to the criminal of escaping punishment, work hards.h.i.+p to the poor, who cannot afford to employ the sharpest lawyers, and needlessly r.e.t.a.r.d the clearing of the reputation of the innocent. The overuse of the plea of insanity has become latterly a public scandal. In certain courts it has sometimes seemed impossible to convict a criminal who has plenty of money or strong political influence. In other cases such men have been set free on bail and proceeded to further may have to wait years for compensation; if they are poor, they may hesitate to set out on the long and dubious course of a lawsuit; or, if they embark upon it, it is only by an agreement wherein the speculator- lawyer takes the lion's share of the compensation. The result of all this friction in the machinery of the courts is an increase in crime, and an increase in the illegal punishment of crime. Lynching, which are such a disgrace to this country, are due primarily to indignation at crime which bids fair to be inadequately punished; they will occur, in spite of their injustice and brutality, until the penalties of the law are made universally prompt and sure and fair.[Footnote: See J. E. Cutler, Lynch Law. Outlook, vol. 99, p. 706.] A wholesome disregard of technicalities, and an interpretation of the law in the line of equity, a rigid exclusion of irrelevant evidence and argument, the provision of an adequate number of courts to prevent the piling up of cases, and of a public defender, of skill and training, to look after the interests of the poor, the removal of judges.h.i.+ps from politics by the general improvement of our political system, and the adjudgment of insanity only by impartial, state-hired alienists-these are some of the reforms that ethical considerations suggest.[Footnote: Cf. W. H.

Taft, Four Aspects of Civic Duty, II. Outlook, vol. 92, p. 359; vol.

98, p. 884.]

(3) The ends to be borne in mind in the treatment of the convicted Criminal are four: First, reparation to the injured party must be demanded of him, so far as money will const.i.tute reparation; if he has not the money, his future work must go for its acc.u.mulation, so far as that is compatible with the support of his infant children.

Secondly, he must be punished severely enough to serve as a warning to other potential offenders and, so far as they are amenable to such fears, deter them from similar crimes. Capital punishment for the worst crimes is shown deterrent than confinement; whether the danger of executing an innocent man is grave enough to offset this public gain is an open question.[Footnote: See A. J. Palm, The Death Penalty.]

Thirdly, he must be prevented from doing any more harm; this means confinement just so long as expert criminologists deem him dangerous, whether not at all (unless to deter others) or for life. The old system of giving a fixed sentence is wholly unjustifiable; some are thereby kept imprisoned when there is every reason to believe them capable of living honorably and serving the community as free men, others are let loose, after a term, more dangerous to the community than ever.

The habitual criminal, who alternates between periods of crime and periods of imprisonment, should be an unknown phenomenon. The judge should be obliged to p.r.o.nounce an indeterminate sentence, and leave it to the expert prison officials to decide if, or when, it is safe to release the prisoner on parole. Experience has already shown that few mistakes are made (where prison management is kept out of machine politics); and as the released prisoner is under surveillance, and may be returned to the prison without trial for disorderliness, drunkenness, or other anti-social conduct, he is not likely to do much damage. A second offense would be likely to bring upon him imprisonment for life, which would be within the discretion of the prison officials.

This method provides a spur to good behavior, and, when used in conjunction with the reforming influences we are about to consider, works admirably in abolis.h.i.+ng the criminal cla.s.s; whatever criminal cla.s.s persists-those who cannot or will not reform are kept under restraint for life, where they can do no harm. Fourthly, and most important of all, a painstaking attempt must be made to reform the criminal, to make him a normal, socially useful man. At present our prisons are rather schools of corruption than of uplift; too often first offenders are thrown into a.s.sociation with hardened criminals, and come out after their term of years with their minds full of criminal suggestions, and less able than before to live a normal life. The prison should be a training school for the morally perverted. First of all, the prisoner should be taught a trade, if he knows none, and made competent to earn an honest living. He should be kept at regular work, and his wages used partly to reimburse society for his keep, and partly to support his family, or, if he has none, to give him a new start when he leaves prison. Recent experience shows that the great majority of prisoners can be trusted to work outside the prison, at any ordinary labor, without guards-returning to the prison each evening.[Footnote: See Century, vol. 87, p. 746.] Regular hours, and wholesome living in every way, are, of course, enforced; sports are encouraged in leisure hours, and physical development ensured. Educational influences are brought to bear, through cla.s.s-instruction, books, sermons, private talks. The individual's mind is studied and every effort made to supplant morbid and anti-social by normal and moral ideas. Few criminals but are amenable to skillful guidance; most of them, could, if pains were taken, be transformed into useful citizens. All this application of modern penological ideas means a greatly increased expense per capita; but this will be largely offset by the work required of all healthy prisoners, and in any case is the best sort of an investment. The prevention of crime is, in the long run, much less costly, even from a purely financial standpoint, than crime itself. On pathological social conditions in general: Smith, Social Pathology. E. T. Devine, Misery and its Causes. M. Conyngton, How to Help. C. Aronovici, Knowing One's Own Community. Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House. S. Nearing, Social Adjustment. Charles Booth, Life and Labor of the People of London. Hall, Social Solutions. C. R. Henderson, Social Duties. W.

Gladden, Social Salvation. Public health: H. Ellis, The Task of Social Hygiene, The Nationalization of Health. Outlook, vol. 98, p. 63; vol.

102, p. 764. Literature published by The Committee of One Hundred on National Health (105 East Twenty-second Street, New York City). C.

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CHAPTER XXVI