Crime and Its Causes | Page 2

the form in which crime is perpetrated; in
substance it remains the same. Primary Schools will not accomplish
much in eliminating crime. The merely intellectual training received in
these institutions has little salutary influence upon conduct. Nothing
can be mope deplorable than that sectarian bickerings, respecting
infinitesimal points in the sanctions of morality, should result in the
children of England receiving hardly any moral instruction whatever.
Conduct, as the late Mr. Matthew Arnold has so often told us, is three
fourths of life. What are we to think of an educational system which
officially ignores this; what have we to hope in the way of
improvement from a people which consents to its being ignored?
But even a course of systematic instruction in the principles of conduct,
no matter by what sanctions these principles are inculcated, will not
avail much unless they are to some extent practised in the home. And
this will never be the case so long as women are demoralised by the
hard conditions of industrial life, and unfitted for the duties of
motherhood before beginning to undertake them.
In addition to this, no State will ever get rid of the criminal problem
unless its population is composed of healthy and vigorous citizens.
Very often crime is but the offspring of degeneracy and disease. A
diseased and degenerate population, no matter how favourably
circumstanced in other respects, will always produce a plentiful crop of
criminals. Stunted and decrepit faculties, whether physical or mental,
either vitiate the character, or unfit the combatant for the battle of life.
In both cases the result is in general the same, namely, a career of
crime.
As to the best method of dealing with the actual criminal, the first thing
to be done is to know what sort of a person you are dealing with. He
must be carefully studied at first hand. At present too much attention is
bestowed on theoretical discussions respecting the various kinds of
crime and punishment, while hardly any account is taken of the persons
who commit the crime and require the punishment. Yet this is the most
important point of all; the other is trivial in comparison with it. If crime
is to be dealt with in a rational manner and not on mere a priori
grounds, our minds must be enlightened on such questions as the

following: What is the Criminal? What are the chief causes which have
made him such? How are these causes to be got rid of or neutralised?
What is the effect of this or that kind of punishment? These are the
momentous problems; in comparison with these, all fine-spun
definitions respecting the difference between one crime and another are
mere dust in the balance. There can be little doubt that a neglect of
those considerations on the part of many magistrates and judges, is at
the root of the capricious sentences so often passed upon criminals. The
effects of this neglect result in the passing of sentences of too great
severity on first offenders and the young; and of too much leniency on
hardened and habitual criminals. Leniency, says Grotius, should be
exercised with discernment, otherwise it is not a virtue, but a weakness
and a scandal.
When imprisonment has to be resorted to, it must be made a genuine
punishment if it is to exercise any effect as a deterrent. The moment a
prison is made a comfortable place to live in, it becomes useless as a
safeguard against the criminal classes. This is a fundamental principle.
But punishment, although an essential part of imprisonment, is not its
only purpose. Imprisonment should also be a preparation for liberty. If
a convicted man is as unfit for social life at the expiration of his
sentence as he was at the commencement of it, the prison has only
accomplished half its work; it has satisfied the feeling of public
vengeance, but it has failed to transform the offender into a useful
citizen. How to prepare the offender for liberty is, I admit, a task of
supreme difficulty; in some oases, probably, an impossible task. For
work of this character what is wanted above all is an enlightened staff.
Mere machines are useless; men unacquainted with civil life and its
conditions are useless. It is from civil life the prisoner is taken; it is to
civil life he has to return, and unless he is under the care of men who
have an intimate knowledge of civil life, he will not have the same
prospect of being fitted into it when he has once more to face the world.
In the preparation of this volume I have carefully examined the most
recent ideas of English and Continental writers (especially the Italians)
on the subject of crime. The opinions it contains are based on