The united American : a magazine of good citizenchip., June 01, 1926, Page 12, Image 12

Page Twelve
THE UNITED AMERICAN
to moral extremeness in American life, the rebound from
which conduces even to licentious laxity.
VI. Our moral life has been depending too extensively
upon a momentum set in motion by a wholesome puritanism
which was inspired and strengthened by a spiritual fervor
that is ebbing without due replenishment. In other words,
we are being progressively materialized and retrogressively
moralized because of our failure to enrich our life with the
fertilizing soil of a proper spiritual stimulus. We have come
to spell God, G-O-L-D; and creed, G-R-E-E-D. Man cannot
uplift himself tugging at the straps of his own boots. If he
is uplifted by another agency he cannot keep himself there
by holding to the hair of his head. He needs an external
leverage. This he has ever found the most effectively in the
consciousness of the conviction of the presence in this world
of a Divine Being of Unlimited power, wisdom and justice,
upon whom he depends and to whom he is responsible for the
exercise of his powers and the utilization of his opportunities.
This is the essence of religion. We shall progressively com­
bat criminality to the extent that we have nationally a
baptism of the religious, spirit. Our religious life has been
conducted vicariously by a sort of method of absent treat­
ment. We have erected churches and maintained ministers;
and failing to give them due personal practical cooperation,
we have yet felt our duty to be done. In consequence the
church as an institution has been so magnified that it has
minimized and displaced God. We have with identical care­
lessness supplanted religious consciousness with theological
conviction. Denominationalism looms larger in our thought
than the Deity does in our feeling.
VII. To the end Of a better religious life as the nourish­
ing soil of our higher moral expression, we must have better
religious schools throughout the nation, where religion is in­
spired through proper religious literature taught by com­
petent instructors who have informed heads as well as willing
• hearts. The inefficiency of most of the religious schools of
America is a copious contributor to our widespread moral
flabbiness and flexibility. It is my insistence that at least
as much seriousness should be brought to bear upon the or­
ganization and conduct of our religious schools as at present
is bestowed upon our secular agencies of instruction.
VIII. Since the home is the well-spring and dominant in­
fluence of the entire life of the individual, we need in American
life to place greater emphasis upon the reintegration of our
homes in a moral and spiritual way, in which we have been
steadily weakening. Congestion is conducive to costliness. In
consequence we are sacrificing our homes for apartments and
tenements which almost always carry a suggestion of such
transiency that the finer growths of domesticity as formerly
existent, are discouraged and prevented- A symptom of this
waning of the spell and influence of the former home is to
be found in the increase of that outsideness of living which
contributed so largely to the decay and downfall of ancient
Rome- The most powerful counteragent of criminality is a
multiplication and cultivation of real homes. Hotels, res­
taurants and kitchennette apartments are tragically and pa­
thetically poor substitutes for such real homes. Our civilization
will rise and our tide of criminality will fall in proportion
to the development of home life*
IX. Criminality can in many cases be anticipated and
curbed if our police courts where the average offender has
his first contact with our punitive system were conducted
with greater seriousness, impressiveness and severity. The
average initial offender comes out of these courts with a
broad smile of contempt at their inefficiency or even absurdity.
Let us give the prospective criminal a deep and lasting im­
pression of the danger of conflict with law upon his first
contact with its embodied agency of execution.
X. Our conception and method of punishment must be
reformed and revitalized. Punishment is Nature’s or God’s
way of correction. Neither sentiment nor influence should be
allowed to stand in the-way of the course Of justice. There
is always time for sympathy and sentiment after justice has
received its due. Accordingly our prisons must cease to be
made more attractive than is often found by self-denying arid
suffering virtue on the Outside. Offenders against law which
.stands for social safety must be taught by consequence either
to conform to social propriety or to be thrust and kept out of
society. Accordingly we ought to incline more to indetermin­
ate sentences.
June 1926
XI. Criminality must be treated to swifter trial even if
it subordinates and postpones other litigation. Civil conflicts
can wait. Criminality which is symptomatic of social disease
must be treated and its eradication sought quickly.
XII. Punishment should be just as swift and certain as
trial. In the interest of the defense of the innocent we often­
times carry too far the coddling of the guilty.
XIII. We have erred in our assignment of punishment.
Through it we have too extensively treated the crime instead
of the criminal. A criminal should be judged not solely by
the consequences of his conduct but by the standard of his
constitution and general condition. From this standpoint a
rich man who does wrong should be punished more severely
for a crime than one under the stress of circumstances which
subjugated him to greater strain. As we at present mete
out punishment it often fails to be such and sends the wealthy
culprit away smiling while the poor offender victim of one or
another kind of impoverishment, is kept sorrowing. Let us
adapt punishment to the criminal and not only or largely to
the crime
XIV. Consistently with what I have just said, criminality
should be treated psychologically with a view to its origin not
only in present conditions but in its inheritance. Too many
prisoners are in jails or penitentiaries for temporary punish­
ment, when they should be confined temporarily or perma­
nently in psychiatric hospitals. Every offender should be
handled psychologically just as a physician does with his
patients medically.
XV. Public prosecutors should be removed from the un­
certainties and exigencies of politics, by being retained long
enough and paid well enough to secure the highest available
skill of men of high moral standing in the community. That
position in general in our legal life is open to such serious
detraction that it is not duly efficient for the successful
handling of the criminal population.
XVI. Finally, to the end of developing that social spirit
from the standpoint of which criminality should be viewed and
handled, let 'us steadily enlarge and encourage the area of
cooperation on the part of all agencies concerned with pub­
lic and individual life. Let everyone be reared under the
consciousness that he is in constant relation to the social
background that is concerned with him and which he must
not neglect. To that end I would specially urge a progressive
realization of cooperative, endeavors of all churches in civic
and communal life, not merely in keeping with their agree­
ments but in spite of and overlapping their differences. The
church as a reservoir of the spirit of true religion in the sense
of the consciousness of the Divine on the part of the Human,
should be an exemplar and conservator of that social spirit
without which the problem of criminality cannot possibly
be solved and settled.
XVII. Inasmuch as the criminal is largely in many cases
a product of more or less perverted lineage, we shall never
attain to a sufficiently satisfactory solution of the problem
until we bring about either through . legislation or through
positive and pronounced social sentiment a more cautious
pairing of human beings in marriage. The marital relation is
still too largely the result of accidental incidents instead of
essential convictions. The chief justification and compulsion
of marriage should be its opportunity on the part of those who
enter it to make a social contribution. From the viewpoint
of its social implication which must consider physical, mental
and moral integrity, the forces which make for criminal per­
version are likely to be reduced and the tendencies to criminal­
ity weakened. We are still a long distance from eugenic legis­
lation. In the meantime the church ought to furnish the main
safeguard of marriage in candidly and courageously protest­
ing against all such marital unions as begin and end in mere
personal profit and pleasure.
I have suggested a pretentious program. Properly so. It
deals with a portentous problem. Our civilization is making
great strides materially. Unless it is paralleled with a pro­
portionate spiritual strength and moral realization, it will be
a scintillating superficiality, screening a dangerous vacuity.
The program I propose is no short cut, it is however propor­
tioned to the dangerous dimension of our problems of crimi­
nality. Let us accept it and preceed to realize it, and to the
extent that we become truly socialized we shall become less
criminalized.