Chapter 5

Do criminals viciously and voluntarily arise among us, eager to lead hunted lives, eager to be jailed at intervals, eager to crawl in the dark, dodge policemen, work in stripes and die in shame? Hardly.

Will you kindly and patiently follow the lives, quickly sketched, of a boy and a girl?

THE GIRL

Born poor, born in hard luck, her father, or mother, or both, victims of long hours, poor fare, bad air and little leisure.

As a baby she struggles against fate and manages to live while three or four little brothers and sisters die and go back to kind earth.

She crawls around the halls of a tenement, a good deal in the way. She is hunted here and chased there.

She is cold in Winter, ill-fed in Summer, never well cared for.

She gets a little so-called education. Ill-dressed and ashamed beside the other children, she is glad to escape the education. No one at home can help her on. No one away from home cares about her.

She grows up white, sickly, like a potato sprouting in a cellar. At the corner of a fine street she sees the carriages passing with other girls in warm furs, or in fine, cool Summer dresses.

With a poor shawl around her and with heels run down she peers in at the restaurant window, to see other women leading lives very different from hers.

Steadily she has impressed upon her the fact, absolutely undeniable, that as the world is organized there is no especial place for her--certainly no comfort for her.

She finds work, perhaps. Hours as long as the daylight.

Ten minutes late--half a day's fine.

At the end of the day aching feet, aching back, system ill-fed, not enough earned to live upon honestly--and that prospect stretches ahead farther than her poor eyes can see.

"What's the charge, officer?"

"Disorderly conduct, Your Honor."

There's the criminal, good men, politicians, women and bishops, that you are hunting so ardently.

THE BOY

Same story, practically.

He plays on the tenement staircase--cuffed off the staircase.

He plays ball in the street--cuffed, if caught by the policeman.

He swings on the area railing, trying to exercise his stunted muscles--cuffed again.

In burning July, with shirt and trousers on, he goes swimming in the park fountain--caught and cuffed and handed over to "the society."

A few months in a sort of semi-decent imprisonment, treated in a fashion about equivalent to that endured by the sea turtle turned over on its back in the market.

He escapes to begin the same life once more.

He tries for work.

"What do you know?"

"I don't know anything; nobody ever taught me."

He cannot even endure the discipline of ten hours' daily shovelling--it takes education to instil discipline, if only the education of the early pick and shovel.

He has not been taught anything. He has been turned loose in a city full of temptation. He had no real start to begin with, and no effort was ever made to repair his evil beginning. ----

"What's the charge, officer?"

"Attempted burglary; pleads guilty."

"Three years in prison, since it is his first offence."

In prison he gets an education. They teach him how to be a good burglar and not get caught. Patiently the State boards him, and educates him to be a first-rate criminal.

There's your first-rate criminal, Messrs. Bishops, good men, politicians and benevolent women. ----

Dear bishops, noble women, good men and scheming politicians, listen to this story:

In the South Sea Islands they have for contagious diseases a horror as great as your horror of crime.

A man or woman stricken with a loathsome disease, such as smallpox, is seized, isolated, and the individual sores of the smallpox patient are earnestly scraped with sea shells--until the patient dies. It hurts the patient a good deal--without ever curing, of course--but it relieves the feelings of the outraged good ones who wield the sea shells.

You kind-hearted creatures, hunting "crime" in great cities, are like the South Sea Islanders in their treatment of smallpox.

You ardently wield your reforming sea shells and you scrape very earnestly at the sores so well developed. ----

No desire here to decry your earnest efforts.

But if you ever get tired of scraping with sea shells, try vaccination, or, better still, try to take such care of youth, to give such chances and education to the young, as will save them from the least profitable of all careers--CRIME. ----

Rich good men, nice bishops, comfortable, benevolent ladies--every man and woman on Blackwell's Island, every wretched creature living near a "red light," would gladly change places with any of you.

Scrape away with your sea shells, but try also to give a few more and a few better chances in youth to those whom you now hunt as criminals in their mature years.

God creates boys and girls, anxious to live decently.

YOUR SOCIAL SYSTEM makes criminals and fills jails.

THE WONDERFUL MAGNET HOW WILD SUPERSTITION SETTLES DOWN INTO SCIENTIFIC REALITY

Everybody knows something of the peculiarities of the magnet. As a boy you led tiny painted ducks around the water basin, holding a magnet in your hand, or you owned a horseshoe magnet that would pick up nails and needles.

You know now in a general kind of way that the magnet is a very useful as well as a somewhat mysterious thing.

The old Greeks and Romans simply knew that some remarkable iron ore found in Lydia, near the town of Magnesia, and hence called magnet, was capable of drawing and holding pieces of metal.

The ancients had the wildest theories concerning the magnet, just as we have wild theories about things that are new and strange to us to-day.

They thought that the magnet could be used in cases of sickness, that it could attract wood and flesh, that it influenced the human brain, causing melancholy. They believed that the power of a magnet could be destroyed by rubbing garlic on it, and that power brought back again by dipping the magnet in goat's blood. They believed that a magnet could be used to detect bad conduct in a woman; they believed that it would not attract iron in the presence of a diamond. They believed much other nonsense quite as ridiculous as the nonsense that we believe to-day. ----

It must have seemed a great waste of time in wise men in the old days to discuss the magnet or think about it at all. Please observe how the apparent nonsense of early speculation finally ripens into actual utility, and learn to respect those who deal as best they can with questions that seem beyond our comprehension.

First the magnet was made actually and wonderfully useful in the compass. Who discovered the compass nobody knows. It was probably invented by the Chinese and brought to Europe through the Arabs. Anyhow, some genius found out that a small needle brought in contact with the so-called lodestone, or magnetic ore, absorbs the qualities of the lodestone, and when placed on a pivot will always point to the north.

In the magnet there were and there still are many mysteries. A form of perpetual motion seems to be embodied in the principle of magnetism. One strange fact is this, that the weight of the metal is exactly the same before it is magnetized and after it is magnetized.

Early students thought that the magnet pointed toward some particular spot in the sky, perhaps some magnetic star. One genius felt sure that there must be huge mountains of lodestone near the North Pole. This suggestion was followed by ingenious yarns to the effect that in the extreme North ships had to be built with wooden nails, instead of iron nails, as the magnetic mountains would draw the iron nails out of the ship.

After this came the more rational conception that our own earth is a great magnet, and that the little magnet in the compass simply obeys in pointing, the greater force of the earth magnet. ----

This editorial generalizing on the magnet is brought about by an incident telegraphed from Vallejo, California. John Gettegg, apprentice in the Navy Yard, had imbedded in his cheek a flying piece of steel. To get it out would apparently have demanded a painful and difficult surgical operation, as the piece of steel had entered the bone. But the head electrician, Petrio, simply placed near the wounded boy's face an electro-magnet capable of lifting five hundred pounds, and the sharp piece of steel instantly flew out of the cheek and attached itself to the magnet.

So much for one proof of the value of developing what may seem at first to be a foolish set of experiments.

In thousands of ways to-day this magnetic power is utilized.

You can buy strawberries in baskets very cheap, partly because the baskets cost very little for labor. The man who tacks them together uses a magnetized tack hammer. This magnetic tack hammer picks up the tacks of its own accord, and the man drives them in the basket as fast as he can touch the magnet to the heads of the tacks and strike the basket.

In the great steel works where armor plate is made powerful magnets are used to carry the hot plates from one place to another. The magnet lifts up the hot, soft metal without denting it or damaging it and drops it down where it is wanted. The power which moves trolley cars through the streets is nothing in reality but an application of the force of the magnetic principle. ----

That the earth itself is a great magnet cannot be questioned. And there is no doubt that each of us human beings is a compound magnet on his own account, depending for his welfare on magnetic force.

The millions of red corpuscles in the blood, each with its infinitesimal particles of iron, absorb in the lungs and distribute throughout the body the electric forces on which we depend, and with which we do our work.

When you read of men and women dealing in a blundering kind of a way with abstract, abstruse speculations and problems, do not laugh at them too heartily. They are no more ridiculous than the old Greeks who thought that a magnet could be regulated by garlic or goat's blood. And their wild theories of to-day may settle down into great utility centuries from now. This applies to Christian Science, faith cures, telepathy, and the many other speculations of the present day. There is unquestionably much future fruit and value in many or all of them.

WHO IS INDEPENDENT? NOBODY

We all have our moments of imagining ourselves INDEPENDENT characters. We take pride in our independence and are never as foolish as when trying to prove how independent we are.

Every man, to begin with, is born absolutely at the mercy of his ancestry. You have not a thing in you, and you never will have a thing in you, that you did not inherit from some one of the thousands and thousands of ancestors, all of whom are dimly stored away in your complex make-up.

You may develop marvellously the faculties which they gave you.

But you ARE DEPENDENT on those who brought you into the world, and upon those back of them.

The Kaffir, sober, industrious, honest, with all the virtues rolled up within him, has not a fragment of one chance in ten thousand billions of equalling the achievements of a tenth-rate white man whose ancestral start was better. ----

After birth you start with dependence on your ancestors, and after youth you are dependent on your education.

Facts are your tools, and you can't work without them.

If your mind has the right formation, if your brain is provided with the deep convolutions, and good luck has supplied you with a good education in youth, the whole thing is dependent on your health--on your liver, your stomach, or some other part of your internal machinery.

Very often your success is dependent on your temper and tact. These depend on your digestion. Digestion, of course, depends on your cook, and the cook's attention to business may depend on the politeness of the policeman in front of the house.

You may FEEL absolutely independent and THINK you are independent, when as a matter of fact you are miserably dependent on the mood of the policeman who has snubbed the lady who cooks your food.

WHEN WE BEGIN USING LAND UNDER THE OCEANS BIG WORK AHEAD FOR MAN, KIND FRIENDS

There is a great deal of water on this earth of ours and a great deal of land underneath it.

All the treasures of these hidden plains are simply put away for our future use by bountiful nature, as prudent parents put money in the savings bank for their young ones. ----

Already in Chili they are mining coal under the bed of the Pacific Ocean, and the traveler may ride on electric cars through solid tunnels of coal beneath the waters of the greatest ocean.

The tin mines in Wales extend far out beneath the sea.

Workers in the Calumet and Hecla mines work beneath the waters of Lake Superior.

Oil wells are worked out beyond the edge of the Pacific Ocean. You may see the oil derricks just off Santa Barbara's surf.

In the bay of San Francisco artesian wells, going through the preliminary depths of salt water, bring the water of fresh submarine springs to the surface.

But these little enterprises are but faint beginnings of the great work that man has to do in exploiting the wealth beneath the waters covering two-thirds of the earth's surface.

This earth will be quite a romantic abode when sub-oceanic exploitation reaches full development, when the great gold mines beneath the waters are indicated simply by latitude and longitude.

Mars, with his huge canals distributing a planet's waters scientifically, will be matched perhaps by our network of tunnels under the water from here to Asia, and by our boring, with the aid of cooling mediums, toward the earth's centre and bringing up metals in a molten state.

Before he finishes with her, man will make old earth know that he is at work "in her midst." He will make the harnessing of a tiny Niagara or the boring of a poor little isthmus seem feeble efforts.

WHERE YOUR BODY CAME FROM LET IT BE SCATTERED AS IT WAS GATHERED

Did you ever think about the construction of the body which you inhabit? Did it ever occur to you that your shoulders and hands and chest and legs and lungs are made of contributions from widely different parts of the earth?

Your brain, a wonderfully complex machine, the seat of thought and of the will, is packed away in darkness in the bony skull.

The heart, working ceaselessly, pumps the blood that feeds the brain and makes possible its work.

The eyes, with the aid of the nerves that perceive light, guide you. The ears, with the nerves that interpret sound waves, tell their story.

Like a central operator with a million wires leading to him, your INDIVIDUALITY, a wonderful mystery without form, matter or name, sits in your brain guiding the body. ----

Where did the body come from?

Part of it came from potatoes grown on Long Island, and part of it from spices grown in Ceylon.

In your nerves there is the extract of tea leaves gathered by a Chinese girl on the other side of the world. Your blood is purified and made red by the wind that blew across the Rocky Mountains only a few hours ago. That current of oxygen has helped build up your strength.

A month ago an ox was eating grass in Texas.

Many millions of years ago the pollen of huge fern trees was falling to the earth in the carboniferous era and making coal.

To-day, part of the backbone of the ox from Texas with the meat attached is laid on the fire of coal made by those fern trees, and the Texas ox and the fern pollen combined help to build up your body.

That same body is three-quarters water, and of that water part was once the Pacific Ocean; part, perhaps, was drunk up by a whale before it reached you; and part floated in clouds over the Southern Sea. ----

Your imagination can carry the picture as far as it will--to the fisherman catching your sardines in the North, and the dark man gathering your oranges in the South or your dates in some oasis.

We want to suggest this idea to you.

Since the body is gathered from all parts of the world, from all corners of our little speck of the material universe, should it not be scattered, at death, as it was gathered during life?

Is not the destruction of the body by fire far better than hideous burial in the earth?

The body that fire destroys goes back to nature, instantly reduced to its original elements. Is not such disposition of the body more in accord with nature's laws and with respect for the dead than our present custom?

Would it not be pleasanter to think that one we cared for had gone back to the air, with only a handful of ashes remaining, than to think of the dark, close, lonesome grave far below the sunlight, clogging and uselessly occupying part of the earth, which should be devoted to growth and cheerfulness?

HOW MARRIAGE BEGAN HAPHAZARD REFLECTIONS ON GRAVE TOPICS.

At stated times we mortals have stated visitations.

One day it is the grippe, next day the financial problem.

Just now it is the marriage and divorce question, with much learned expounding by the good and the pure, such as bishops and members of Sorosis. ----

What is marriage? How did it begin? Whence does it come?

Why is it a feature of human life wherever that life is found.

You must begin with such questions. Always study beginnings. Nothing can be learned by taking hold of a thing in the middle and examining its imperfections.

The first priest to join man and woman together was no benign being with lawn sleeves and soul-stirring words.

Marriage was brought about on this earth by the will and wisdom of God Almighty working through primitive babyhood.

In the old days, when the world was cruder, men and women ran wild through forests and swamps. They fought nature, fought each other, as savage as other beasts around them. There was no love; there was no marriage. The instincts of self-preservation and of reproduction worked alone to keep the race here through its hard childhood. ----

But in cold stone caves or in rough nests under fallen tree trunks savage children were born and nursed by their savage mothers with savage affection.

Through those infants of the stone age, or of ages much earlier, marriage and pure affection came into the world.

It is not hard to reproduce in our minds the picture of the first marriage.

A savage woman, half human, half ape, with rough, matted locks hanging round her face, sits holding her new-born baby, protecting it from wind and cold.

It is a queer baby, covered perhaps with reddish hair, its brow no higher than a rat's. Its jaw protrudes; its tiny, grimy hands clutch with monkey power all things within reach.

Along comes the father, full of plans to kill a mammoth or a cave bear; interested in his stone-tipped club, but caring nothing for the mother, who has been for some time only a whining nuisance.

He stops for a second to look at the small creature which he has added to earth's animal life.

Its misshapen skull, ferret eyes, miniature shoulders--something about it reminds him of his royal self, as studied in the pool. He stoops to look closer. His bristly hairs are grabbed, and a weird, insane, toothless grin lights up the little monkey face.

Then the savage takes a new view of life; there the marriage institution and the marriage problem are born simultaneously.

Says the mammoth hunter, with whistling words and hoarse throat sounds half articulated:

"I like this baby. He's like me. Let me hold him. Don't you go out with him looking for food, and don't leave him alone while I'm gone. I've got a bear located. No one can beat me killing bears. I'll bring the bear's heart to you this evening. You can give this baby some of the blood. It will do him good. Don't have anything to say to that mammoth hunter in the next swamp. I want you to stick to me. I'll look after you. I have taken a fancy to that baby. He looks very much like me."

Off goes the father, and that savage mother, in a primitive way, is a wife. Hereafter she is to be cared for. Bears will be killed for her, even while she has children to keep her busy and unattractive. Society takes a new turn and the red-haired baby has done it.

To childhood, helpless and beautiful, we owe marriage and all that growth of morality which is gradually making us really civilized.

The basis of all real growth is altruism; and altruism, the inclination to think more of others than of yourself, came into the world through the cradle.

We owe such civilization as we have acquired to children.

"A softened pressure of an uncouth hand, a human gleam in an almost animal eye, an endearment in an inarticulate voice--feeble things enough. Yet in these faint awakenings lay the hope of the human race." ----

The influence of childhood has transformed mere animal attraction into unselfish affection. It has substituted family life for savage life. The interests of childhood demand that marriage and its responsibilities be held sacred.

Duty to future generations demands that divorce be made difficult and considered a misfortune.

Marriage, brought into the world through the influence of children, should be dissolved only with due regard for the interests of children. ----

An unhappy marriage is earth's worst affliction. Quite true. But it is not affliction wasted.

Examples are needed to warn the young against the matrimonial recklessness which underlies most unhappy marriages.

Unhappy wives and husbands are human light-houses--lonely, but useful.

If a gentle little Alderney calf should marry a sleek young zebra and afterward get kicked to death for her pains, we should all sympathize with her. But we should expect other mild-eyed Alderneys after that to beware of zebras.

As a matter of fact, this present divorce talk, which sets the good to fluttering, really interests a very unimportant class.

The man who spends his life spending what he didn't earn, feeding his physical senses, who goes from rum to the races, from the races to the opera, and from the opera to roulette, wears out his nervous sensations.

He then thinks that he is unhappily married. He has possibly driven his wife to being seven kinds of a fool.

But that is not her fault.

A man who marries a woman undertakes to make her happy and keep her busy. If he keeps his contract, she will keep hers.

If he fails, he has no right to experiment on another unfortunate. The divorce class is a self-indulgent, malformed class, not worth notice. ----

Professor Cope, an earnest man and serious thinker, believed that marriages should be contracted on probation--say for five years, with the right on both sides to refuse a renewal.

Theoretically, this would be beautiful. It would make courtship permanent, abolish curl-papered wives in the morning, and tipsy, bragging husbands at night.

But it wouldn't work. It would be all right for women. They are only too willing to be faithful and permanent.

But men cannot be trusted. The animal in them, so essential long ago, when the race was struggling for a foothold, has not been obliterated. They have got to be MADE responsible and HELD responsible. ----

As a matter of fact, there really is no marriage or divorce problem which sensible beings need consider.

At present men are not good enough to be trusted with liberal marriage or divorce laws. When they are good enough the laws will not be wanted. For the man fully developed and fully moral will know what he is doing when he goes into a marriage contract.

His stability of character will insure permanency. There will be no need of laws.

At one time the English laws regulated the conditions under which a man might beat his wife. "The stick," said the law, "must not be thicker than the husband's thumb."

Some Englishmen have very thick thumbs, and the law was doubtless hard on some thin, worn-out women.

But that law is no longer needed.

Men have outgrown the need of regulations in wife-beating. In time they will outgrow the need of laws regarding infidelity and lack of self-respect.