Stop thief

Introduction

During the last three decades, members of the so-called "Spiritualistic School" have governed in America in the matter of reform edict. They have done it as if they had seen from the peak of prescience. Notwithstanding, the era of their influence is the blackest for crime in the country's history. The homicidal criminal assays human life at less this day than the primitive savage did. The blood-spilling brute is as the barometer of crime, and the deduction is distinct.

Since crime is cosmic, and the criminal nearly as varied as criminousness, such ominously-raw reading of the social sign can be charged up only in contributory measure against any cult or credo; but, the school in question can not shunt the burden of proof for assumption of wisdom greater than Almighty God's, expressed in slogan to the effect that repression of the predal felon is nugatory when it is not baneful, and for reformative regimes based on that assumption.

Firstly, that is exactly as it would be framed by human hyenas who break for money-bags across sunflooded thoroughfares. Secondly, were it sound ethically, it would well-nigh strip the Christian religion of carrying power.

"Thou shalt not" is the enacting clause of the Decalogue, to which sentient man is held to bald choice of adjustment, or to pay the penal price. From the very beginning, the Father has had to force His children to obey Him.

In any case, it has been demonstrated that methods won't do which motivate further regression of the habitual lawbreaker, while they leave him in contempt for precepts fundamentally at variance with his exactions; albeit he would be as dense as he is wrongly rated, did he not second fulsomely with lip service, men and measures that speed him from courts and correctional plants to renewed guerrilla warfare on society.

Had Americans nipped just that one, ulterior design in the bud, they would not now be taxed in the ratio of dime to cent for the upkeep of confirmed criminal rounders ; nor would constantly mounting death blows be delivered with sneering disdain of consequences ; nor would associated pressure be blatantly exerted in council chambers, where hyphenated tricksters seek to read the meaning out of the plain lettering of the Constitution, in favor of crass anti-social plunderers.

Whatever the specific degree of responsibility, Americans must waken to the fact that the broad question of crime is the cardinal problem before them for solution; also, they must react quickly to the truth that the state of mind which caused Cain to kill Abel, is precisely the state of mind which impels predatory criminals to tax liberty and tear things.

In pursuit of such a theme, one may be excused deviation from the customary wording of the introduction, if so to deviate is to sharpen the mind of the reader for the matter of the context. Hence, we have thought wise to place certain of general conclusions here:

Catholic analysis of the grand ratios of crime is impossible. It is not within the ken of man to trace all of human action to ultimate impulse. The capital motive for a given crime commonly lies locked in the criminal's breast. Bits of bait which obsessed the mind of the murderer and decided his offense often escape investigators whose minds are gripped by counter motives. Conversely, the prober has been known to glare at surface circumstance, while blind to congenital cracks in character.

Fortunate it is, therefore, that the main impulse to murder is usually easier to trace than is the murderer's weapon. The edict of the clan, issued to further pursuit of unlawful spoil, impels the gangster to kill. Given a crime of the unspeakable variety, the orders go out to round up the tramps, since many hobos are confirmed sexual perverts who value human life in pennyworths. Sexual mania running to degenerate curiosity, carrying a dash of race hatred, usually incites the negro in like cases. So the act trails to the motive, from depth of design to height of folly, such as drives the primitive in neighbors to exchange deadly blows over the ownership of a lineal foot of earth.

Objective factors of crime in America induce acts of the gravest kind. Example : A murderer has three chances to one in his favor against being brought to trial, ten to one against life imprisonment, and eighty to one to escape the death penalty. It is but in natural sequence that more peace-time murders are committed annually in the United States than in any other five civilized nations.

Such humiliating comparison tells plainly that deterrent measures do deter. They deter if they are binding, as in the days of "good King Alfred," when "you might have hung garlands of jewels and precious stones across the streets of London, and no man would have touched them." True, Americans do not take kindly to hanging a thief. But imagine "garlands of jewels and precious stones" hung across a thoroughfare of America's metropolis, where the police authorities caution day wayfarers to arm against blood-letting bandits.

Visible signs may well mislead, yet they seem to indicate that the alloy in the American blend of race now fusing strikes through from the depths mainly as follows:

(1) Waning reverence for sacred things; not irreverence for mummery rooted in man-made tradition, but flippant flouting of fundamental injunctions. Therefore persistent catch-as-catch-can tactics employed to make of God's own day a gala day.

(2) Constantly increasing homicidal pressure resulting from the ever cheapening price put upon the taking of human life: sign reminiscent of a cardinal cause for the buried ruins of one-time capital nations.

(3) The excessive toll paid to recreative activities and amusements irrationally ordered. All of clean sport, and its kin, is good to the point of toning body and mind, thereby re-creating appetite for worthy work. Beyond that point it does not shape muscle for life's use, does shunt the mind out of pabulum necessary for its full unfolding, and does usher in the insidious gaming habit with its manytentacled curse.

Centuries before the batting average was suspected, Mens sana in corpore sano haled men to the stadium, there to frolic, while they shaped and disciplined their bodies and minds for laudable pursuits. Then came the gamester-parasite with his brute and wager; and then the Roman amphitheatre began the writing of hideous pages into history. T?oday, many have the same pen in hand a'scribbling the prize ring pug into prominence, with women in at the death.

What, in basic principle and brutalizing suggestion, the difference between then and now? How far a cry is it from the roped arena to the Roman amphitheatre? How far from combat or other sport that kills, maims, or leaves its to-be-fatal internal mark?

(4) Growing contempt for law, order, authority, and the agents thereof. That is to put it mildly, when red-handed young men receive capital sentences with a sneer or smiling sang-froid. Common lawlessness would not now obtain, had we given common-sense support to those sworn to execute the criminal law agreeably with its most binding predicates.

"If you want to get a bad law repealed, enforce it. 5 ' On the other hand, if you want to render good laws ridiculous, temporize with those who break them, either in or out of prison. Nature holds out no rebates in the matter of obedience to edicts which the general law echoes. Man may not improve upon that by bidding for the parasital brute, and through him, for predatory war.

(5) The pace set for weaklings by those who practice financial legerdemain. Deft argument can not convince petty thieves of essential values, while pyramidal thieves pick the nation's pocket.

Tell an instinctive money-shark that spurious dollars carry the germs of crime and disease, even death, and he will laugh at you. Nevertheless, it is true; so true that were it not for unclean money, sufficient of prohibitory law might be printed on a postal card. During recent decades, the cardinal causes of crime in America have been variable only in the shifting of emphasis. For the emphasis, public neglect and public indifference are markedly chargeable, as is indicated by these capital crime-breeding influences :

(a) Loose immigration laws still shot to pieces in the enforcement.

(b) Crime by suggestion.

(c) The sporting instinct run mad.

(d) Law that has limped.

(e) Judges who have judged not.

(f ) Class legislation.

(g) Public conception of the offices of penal and semi-penal institutions, and of the potentialities of the comparatively small, yet instinctively criminal, class of habitual felons who draw casual offenders with them into the maelstrom of crime.

Other constant and diverse, yet mutually sympathetic, factors are not singled out because they are woven into the fabric of all nations.

Capping all, the dream-drugged have sought and seek to reverse natural laws which govern formation and re-formation of character.

Our people may not like it, yet may not leave it : they must take up the gavel for sane solution of a very grave problem; a problem so complex and yet so singular in its demands, that the layman protagonist better decline the issue unless he can attack it with an earnest, open, trained mind, plus a God-given understanding of men and boys which cleaves close to inspiration. The onrush of crime needs must establish such men and mentors actively in the work, while it eliminates the uninformed, misinformed, and mercenaries who mislead.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I Immigration • 15

II Crime by Suggestion • . 45

Chapter I

No one cause making for crime has left Americans so far apart in conclusions as has immigration. No figures more than immigration figures have been abused to point a moral or to strike an average. Those of negative persuasion minimize the handicaps accruing from the millions of non-adjusting aliens we have nurtured. Those of positive view contend that we should be immeasurably better off fundamentally, had we intrusted the expansion of the country chiefly to its natural friends.

However history shall construe the case otherwise, it will probably postulate that we could not have refused asylum consistently at any time to a normal, white human bent on getting out of lumself for his adopted country the best expression of which he was capable ; also, that we should have restricted citizenship from the first to those so dyed and determined. So much of conclusion clings when we recall that we were helped generously to criminals, renegades and adventurers during pre-Federation days; clings the more tightly, because certain of such were induced soon thereafter to help keep States at loggerheads which had grown garrulous over their grudges and growing pains.

But argument concerning the merits of in-bred and out-bred white races must end in the clouds until the ethnologist can put his finger on the former and prove his people. In any case, the like of "Not proven if the accused emigrates to the Colonies," will not, from now on, serve a thief and thug-ridden nation. Since it has been demonstrated that no country can safely carry the intrinsic obligations of another country, international ethics needs must exact of each nation that it shall corral and care for its own lawlessly-impelled and badly-equipped.

To the specific assertion that we breed a mongrel race, the answer is that history does not disclose other than cross-bred white stock. Nevertheless, we have underestimated the limitations of the "national melting pot." That trite phrase does credit to a national heart that has sought to express cosmic altruism; but it is at once inexact and misleading. It is inexact because the "melting pot" fails to fuse all of its ores. It is misleading for the vital reason that American soil is quite the last on which foothold should be given addle-brained agitators. More than another the republican unit counts. Numbers reach their highest significance under a republican form of government. Where the greatest number knead the national dough, there the scrawney fingers of Chaos will be most bold to effect the seasoning; hence the primal duty of a democracy is to select for quality every individual it elects to befather.

A blended race will inevitably express the attributes of its elements. Therefore America holds the world's record for physical weaklings, those mentally defective and deviated, and offenders of all classes against organic law.

The dumping of criminals and undesirables on our shores has been met with partial check, albeit the biographical registers of our remedial plants show that we still fall far short thereof of safeguarding our national interests. Very close to sixty per cent of such inmates are either foreign-born of foreign parents, or native-born of foreign parents. Twenty-five per cent of imprisoned felons are foreign-born. A goodly number of others have father or mother who was foreign-born, and foreign-born grandparents are taken for granted.

But we shall be obliged to keep the gates ajar for good men, at whose ancestry it is too late to shoot. Further, so to shoot would be to waste much metal, since but certain variations as to type and typal expression differentiate men who sprang on the one hand from a not too closely in-bred stock like the English, and on the other hand from reasonably selective, if relatively out-bred stock, such as the American must be made if it is to endure and contend for progress.

The true mongrel will issue in any event, if from no other cause than that otherwise level-headed men and women violate laws governing metabolism and fecundity.

A child, for instance, conceived while the male is under the secondary effect of alcoholic stimulation, and the female under opposed mental and physical stress, will likely example the spineless neurotic. That consummation will be but likely instead of reasonably certain to endure because, while the scavengers of the blood are not infallible alchemists, they labor untiringly to transmute toxic matter in the life flow, and to restore the latter to comparative purity.

Concerning human conduct, it is often impossible to demarcate congenital and racial pressure. The one usually carries the other, yet our immigration problem reduces less to consanguine stigmata as that phrase is technically employed, than it does to the acquired thoughts and acts of even the remote forbears of present aliens ; thoughts and acts transmitted down the generations, and become instinctive and habitual.

Take a case to differentiate congenital defect, and that which obtains mainly because of the sum of environment and bringing-up. We shall strike crosscurrents, as we always do when analyzing human character, but consider the case:

Until the Roman marauder had ridden rough-shod over Eastern Sicily, the natives of that island were as homogeneous as any the world had known. They were a sturdy, trustful folk, who gloried in their close communication with one another and with nature. But Sicily, "the gem of the Mediterranean," was a prolific granary for any one of the nomadic nations by which she was held as if in a vise, and which could plant its standards on Sicilian soil and maintain them there. Hence, all of the avaricious brute and bigot latent in man was visited in turn upon the island people by contiguous peoples bent on conquest. The Sicilian fought back as best he could, necessarily with the like of weapons aimed against him; necessarily, also, having learned too well new tricks of old masters at trickery, he was finally crushed by them with his fingers closed on his brother's throat, and his trust in mankind but a mocking memory.

Therefore, the pen of Signor Antonio Cutrera, Chief of Police of Palermo, but tells of human action in natural sequence, when it attests the anarchistic character to-day of a very large percentage of Sicilians. They come honestly by instincts a blend of the fox and wolf.

In connection therewith the virile fact for the government of the United States to ponder is, that while the Strait of Messina separates Sicily from the mainland by not so much as small-gun fire, the home government had, up to the inception of the late conflict, made no serious effort to stamp out anarchistic graft and blackmail on the island. Probably Italy found plenty of pre- World War work for her carbineers not otherwise assigned, to confine the lawless machinations of her own Camorra to Naples, where that society picked and chose nearly at will, thanks to a driftmg policy, and to the denatured who drive devil-may-cares.

In any event, members of the Sicilian Mafiauso, headquarters at Palermo, stalked abroad, practically unmolested, over the island, laying tribute where they listed, and woe unto the man who challenged them.

"Omerta" is the particular term in the Mafia's code of action synonomous with honor. According to that code, "a man who appeals to the law against his fellow man is either a fool or coward; and he who cannot take care of himself without the protection of the police, is both." The same code "brands him with infamy who wouldn't go to prison for his pal"; also demands of its devotee and victim of vendetta within the clan that he shall, with his last gasp, express contempt for authority in these words : "If I live, I will kill thee; if I die, I forgive thee." While the Mafia maintained a reign of terror over the purses and activities of those without the drawn circle, many of its edicts were benevolent.

The Camorra is a straight-laced combination of brigandage and general criminality, interlaced with the "white slave 55 traffic. The latter is controlled actively by the gutter-bred, swaggering, chip-on-hisshoulder "Riccottaro," whose elbow you had better not brush on a Naples boulevard. Both clans exemplify the last fling of ingrowing individualism perverted, both bank on the subterranean offices of the political charlatan, and both are a standing menace to the happiness, prosperity, and security of the law-abiding 'mongst whom they dwell.

The Sicilian anarchist's social vendetta is cited because his oblique motives are easiest to trace to their source; and because they furnish the master key to the reason for nearly all of lethal blows aimed at government by law in America.

Thousands of Russian rustics come to us nursing nascent passions born of centuries of cruelty and misrule visited on them by Romanoff dynasties. Egged on to it by ruthless radicals, and amortizing Americans who elect to remain under cover, they express latent hatred of governing power by which they had been repressed for so long. First off, they usually bend only to force, and respect that only when it is crushing.

The Hungarian peasant reaches for the harpoon because of his hangover of hurts inflicted by thicklipped Hapsburgs. It matters not that he quickly comes into blessings here he could have but dreamed of in his native land ; like the domesticated dog-wolf, he sniffs at luxuries thrust upon him and instinctively breaks for rough going and a killing accompanied by his lobo howl of defiance calculated to terrorize.

So on, down through the long immigration list, members galore of which have been swayed by reactive laws of doing and being, Americans have been at pains either to misunderstand or to hold lightly ; hence, instead of stitches taken in time of regulation and exclusion guaranteed by immigration laws sufficiently drastic and inevitably operative, they have drifted along under indifferent execution of restrictive measures never clearly thought out, always miserably mismanaged.

Furthermore, could and should the home government deport at once the last and least of "undesirables," that action would not wash the country of "ists" and "isms" traceable in their inception to alien agitators; it would not for the vital reason that large ideas, like large bodies, move slowly coming and coming to rest ; and picking your neighbor's pocket at will or bust, is a large idea become very firmly fixed in the minds of millions in America, — due largely to the mean instinct in so many humans to shoulder for the hog's share.

The pity, not to say asininity, of the present, cosmic muddle is, that it might have been avoided by Americans with the exercise of just a modicum of horse-sense. American lads coming up decades ago with alien playmates in pasture lots sensed the danger and voiced it; sensed it that many of those coarse-grained comrades were struck through and through with more than a dash of cruelty which left them cold to cries of pain they wrung from lads of finer sensibilities subject to instinctive brutalities such as "giving the boot" to a fallen and conquered adversary; sensed it in the saloon hang-about thug, and pawn of the second-generation ward heeler; sensed it a little later on in the broader use political crooks made of human tools shaped and sharpened for political chicanery and brigandage; and sensed it finally and logically in the movements of the militant mass of aliens and near-aliens for individual and class expression which the wording of the Constitution can not, in sane interpretation, be otherwise than beaten into backing, as witness : the picket line with its bald bid for the most far-reaching forms of duress, and exemption of laborites from law which must be equally binding upon all, else the natural economic balance and the commonwealth are at one and the same time at the mercy of grouped plunderers.

A people that remains stupidly heedless of danger signals plainly read by its upcoming kids, deserves to pay as the American people are now paying, and must, at best, unto several generations ahead; how much and in what coin from now on will depend upon whether they do or do not, at this crucial transitional era in their history, stand pat for citizenship

M Stop Thief

of the quality the forefathers labored to postulate. In the interim, they will do well to come to grips with the fact that shackling with a bare majority is quite another matter than unshackling with a seventy-five-per-cent verdict.

In due time, natural forces will regulate prices, here and everywhere. Man will produce because he has to; but always an appreciable percentage of the grand total of humans won't behave unless they are made to behave. Having swung wide our doors of ingress to millions of the latter, we are now faced with the chore of making the best of it. The best of it is to select for quality in the future, in accordance with our needs.

Our police court and prison records tell indubitably that army corps of anarchists have sieved willynilly into America. The same records also show that racial instincts impel hundreds of thousands of aliens to take on license and tear things. The anarchistic wheel is but the outer wheel within which related others revolve, and the bald issue is : Shall American institutions give place, and if so, to what?

Fortune's favorites do not answer with platitudes hurled at "pessimism"; neither do they shrive the government of blame for brigades of out-and-out anarchists spread over the land, throtigh pointing to the progeny of aliens whom we number with our best citizens ; nor can they compare with the stanch, sturdy, pioneering stock from which the latter sprang, the low-strata Italian, Slav and like aliens, who are mentally and morally below grade, whose trend is to the lowest level of their class, and whom instinctive habit places and keeps at war with human progress as the true American senses it. Sneezing at lawlessness that worms to the foundation of the national structure will get us nowhere.

Beyond question there has been slow poison for the United States by the admission of vast hordes of exploitable, mentally backward, physically sub-normal, and morally obtuse immigrants, not to mention a grand army of incorrigible agitators against the general law. Certain it is that we have strained our powers of assimilation to the point of rupture; and it can be argued that we thereby complicated international problems, and perhaps retarded the ultimate destiny of man.

One of the self-evident truths which the Japanese- Russian War carried with emphasis is, that the virility of a nation sums to the average quality of its units, the which, first of all, must express common and comprehensive efficiency. A few concrete exam-- pies suggest what would have happened in 1898 had we opposed a fit, militant, first-class power, such as Germany then was, instead of the arms of Spain. Comparison is made as between the then Japanese army and the army we sent to the Spanish-American War, because those armies nearly paralleled each other in the matter of popular draft; whereas our draft for the World War was made strictly from our best. Even so, the physically disqualified reached within a fraction of forty per cent of the total number summoned for examination. While considering the following points, keep that vital point in mind; also, that Japan's draft for her soldiers was then, as it is now, strictly popular. If a lad is not fit for service, Japan wisely makes him fit, if he can be made fit. Then consider that as between two nearly equal powers at war, the ultimate victory will go almost certainly to the one which can keep engaged with the greatest number of units fit to fight.

Japan sent fifteen-hundred-thousand men, rank and file, to the Japanese-Russian War. Of that number less than one-tenth of one per cent reported to the field hospitals for treatment for preventable disease. The United States sent one-hundred-and-seventy-thousand men to the Spanish-American War, ninety per cent of whom reported to the field hospitals for treatment for preventable disease.

Concerning the same wars, and as to the per cent of those who died from preventable disease compared with those who died from wounds received in battle, the toll is against us in the ratio of about fifty to one.

Asked by an American officer what punishment Japan meted out to peace-time deserters from her army, a Japanese officer replied: "I can not say; I have never heard of a deserter from our army."

Five hundred to the ten thousand of Uncle Sam's enlisted men desert yearly. Enlistment in the military service of Japan is compulsory, in the army of the United States it is voluntary.

In the first and second instances allow for the then vastly superior equipment of Japan's medical corps in the field, plus the more adverse conditions of climate which our lads had to overcome; and in the third instance allow for lack of tradition, and the greater temptation for the more nervously constituted American to break ties that bind him to another's will, and still a great gap yawns before.

Peace-time fracture of a military oath taken by an unfolding, impetuous lad may be adjudged too seriously, though it is reliably the deteriorating, or the deteriorated, who desert; but ameliorating circumstance can not alter the fact that the very life of a nation courses as the blood courses in the veins of its average citizen. There is nothing "just as good" as physical quality and moral stamina. The one usually implies the other, and both are indispensable to a human organism that will stand up under repeated rough usage. However exalted, patriotism will else but nerve us one day for a shambles, — shall we continue to pump bad blood into the national arteries.

They were not even such patriots, were the three^ months Union soldiers whose term of enlistment expired just before the first battle of Bull Run, and who marched off that field by the thousand at the first belching of Beauregard's guns; nor were the 200,000 Federals who turned their backs on the colors during the war; nor the legions of hyphenated Americans who made no bones about assuring the American people at the inception of the late crisis in Europe that they left their patriotic roots in the soil of their nativity.

Withal, the burden of proof is clearly upon those who hold literacy should be made a cardinal test for citizenship in the United States. Without the aid of the nearly-illiterate we should have been in a bad way during the War of the Rebellion; indeed, comparative illiteracy obtained then throughout our country, does now, and necessarily will if we are to get the work of the land done until the cunning of dynamics is further exploited. At the present time, only seven of one-hundred public school children reach high school, but five of the seven go to college, and many of the latter do not conclude a course of study there. However, crass ignorance that clings to foreign roots is essentially another matter.

The national census of 1910 attests that the illiterate children of aliens were then as one to three of the illiterate children of native-born Americans ; but let us not forget the ratio of foreign-born to native, that of the greater number of aliens we are now receiving at least twenty-five per cent are crassly illiterate while brazenly non-social, and that the majority of them receive such education as they get in an atmosphere if not un-American, or anti- American, then at least not calculated to inspire children so taught to stand for, and abide by, exactly that which the minds of American patriots envisage.

Education which connotes whole-hearted loyalty to and reverence for the traditions entire of the American flag is one thing; any other is fatally false in basic principle, and must prove no less in practice, in so far as the bone and sinew of Americanism is at stake. Shall we put up with parceling of patriotism, we shall go down first in parcels, and then in a heap.

In his "The Old World in the New," Professor Edward Alsworth Ross of the University of Wisconsin commands the attention of the thinking men of the country with his presentation of the alien problem. None other has given to that problem more profound analysis. Professor Ross holds bluntly in substance that they live in a fool's paradise who imagine the assimilation of the immigrant proceeds free of anti-American influences. He makes his brief carry, as witness in part: