Part 3

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.