THE CAUSES OF CRIME.
WEAKNESS OF THE MARRIAGE-TIE.
It is extraordinary, among the lowest classes, in how large a number of
cases a second marriage, or the breaking of marriage, is the immediate
cause of crime or vagrancy among the children. When questioning a
homeless boy or street-wandering girl as to the former home, it is
extremely common to hear "I couldn't get on with my step-mother," or "My
step-father treated me badly," or "My father left, and we just took care
of ourselves." These apparently exceptional events are so common in
these classes as to fairly constitute them an important cause of
juvenile crime. When one remembers the number of happy second marriages
within one's acquaintance, and how many children have never felt the
difference between their step-mother and their own mother, and what love
and patience and self-sacrifice are shown by parents to their
step-children, we may be surprised at the contrast in another class of
the community. But the virtues of the poor spring very much from their
affections and instincts; they have comparatively little self-control,
the high lessons of duty and consideration for others are seldom stamped
on them, and Religion does not much influence their more delicate
relations with those associated with them. They might shelter a strange
orphan for years with the greatest kindness; but the bearing and
forbearing with the faults of another person's child year after year,
merely from motives of duty or affection to its parent, belong to a
higher range of Christian virtues, to which they seldom attain. Their
own want of self-control and their tendency to jealousy, and little
understanding of true self-sacrifice, combine to weaken and embitter
these relations with step-children. The children themselves have plenty
of faults, and have doubtless been little governed, so that soon both
parties jar and rub against one another; and as neither have instincts
or affections to fall back upon, mere principle or sense of duty is not
enough to restrain them. What would be simply slights or jars in more
controlled persons, become collisions in this class.
Bitter quarrels spring up between step-son and mother, or step-daughter
and father; the other parent sometimes sides with the child, sometimes
with the father; but the result is similar. The house becomes a kind of
pandemonium, and the girls rush desperately forth to the wild life of
the streets, or the boys gradually prefer the roaming existence of the
little city-Arab to such a quarrelsome home. Thus it happens that
step-children among the poor are so often criminals or outcasts.
It needs a number of years among the lower working-classes to understand
what a force public opinion is in all classes in keeping the
marriage-bond sacred, and what sweeping misfortunes follow its
violation. Many of the Irish peasants who have landed here have married
from pure affection. Their marriage has been consecrated by the most
solemn ceremonies of their church. They come of a people peculiarly
faithful to the marriage-tie, and whose religion has especially guarded
female purity and the fidelity of husband and wife. At home, in their
native villages, they would have died sooner than break the bond or
leave their wives. The social atmosphere about them and the influence of
the priests make such an act almost impossible. And yet in this distant
country, away from their neighbors and their religious instructors; they
are continually making a practical test of "Free-Love" doctrines. As the
wife grows old or ugly--as children increase and weigh the parents
down--as the home becomes more noisy and less pleasant,--the man begins
to forget the vows made at the altar, and the blooming girl he then
took; and, perhaps meeting some prettier woman, or hearing of some
chance for work at a distance, he slips quietly away, and the deserted
wife, who seems to love him the more the more false he is, is left
alone. For a time she has faith in him and seeks him far and near; but
at length she abandons hope, and begins the heavy struggle of
maintaining her little family herself. The boys gradually get beyond her
control; they are kept in the street to earn something for their
support; they become wild and vagrant, and soon end with being
street-rovers, or petty thieves, or young criminals. The girls are
trained in begging or peddling, and, meeting with bold company, they
gradually learn the manners and morals of the streets, and after a while
abandon the wretched home, and break what was left of the poor mother's
hope and courage, by beginning a life of shame.
This sad history is lived out every day in New York. If any theorists
desire to see what fruits "Free Love" or a weak marriage-bond can bear
among the lowest working-classes, they have only to trace the histories
of great numbers of the young thieves and outcasts and prostitutes in
this city. With the dangerous classes, "elective affinities" are most
honestly followed. The results are suffering, crime, want, and
degradation to those who are innocent.
INHERITANCE.
A most powerful and continual source of crime with the young is
inheritance--the transmitted tendencies and qualities of their parents,
or of several generations of ancestors.
It is well-known to those familiar with the classes, that certain
appetites or habits, if indulged abnormally and excessively through two
or more generations, come to have an almost irresistible force, and, no
doubt, modify the brain so as to constitute almost an insane condition.
This is especially true of the appetite for liquor and of the sexual
passion and sometimes of the peculiar weakness, dependence, and laziness
which make confirmed paupers.
The writer knows of an instance in an alms-house in Western New York,
where four generations of females were paupers and prostitutes. Almost
every reader who is familiar with village life will recall poor families
which have had dissolute or criminal members beyond the memory of the
oldest inhabitant, and who still continue to breed such characters. I
have known a child of nine or ten years, given up, apparently beyond
control, to licentious habits and desires, and who in all different
circumstances seemed to show the same tendencies; her mother had been of
similar character, and quite likely her grandmother. The "gemmules," or
latent tendencies, or forces, or cells of her immediate ancestors were
in her system, and working in her blood, producing irresistible effects
on her brain, nerves, and mental emotions, and finally, not being met
early enough by other moral, mental, and physical influences, they have
modified her organization, until her will is scarcely able to control
them and she gives herself up to them. All those who instruct or govern
"Houses of Refuge," or "Reform Schools," or Asylums for criminal
children and youths, will recall many such instances.
They are much better known in the Old World than this; they are far more
common here in the country than in the city.
My own experience during twenty years has been in this regard singularly
hopeful. I have watched great numbers of degraded families in New York,
and exceedingly few of them have transmitted new generations of paupers,
criminals, or vagrants.
The causes of this encouraging state of things are not obscure. The
action of the great law of "Natural Selection," in regard to the human
race, is always towards temperance and virtue. That is, vice and extreme
indulgence weaken the physical powers and undermine the constitution;
they impair the faculties by which man struggles with adverse conditions
and gets beyond the reach of poverty and want. The vicious and sensual
and drunken die earlier, or they have fewer children, or their children
are carried off by diseases more frequently, or they themselves are
unable to resist or prevent poverty and suffering. As a consequence, in
the lowest class, the more self-controlled and virtuous tend constantly
to survive, and to prevail in "the struggle for existence," over the
vicious and ungoverned, and to transmit their progeny. The natural drift
among the poor is towards virtue. Probably no vicious organization with
very extreme and abnormal tendencies is transmitted beyond the fourth
generation; it ends in insanity or cretinism or the wildest crime.
The result is then, with the worst-endowed families, that the "gemmules"
or latent forces of hundreds of virtuous, or at least, not vicious,
generations, lie hid in their constitutions. The immediate influences of
parents or grandparents are, of course, the strongest latent tendencies
to good, coming down from remote ancestors, be aroused and developed.
Thus is explained the extraordinary improvement of the children of crime
and poverty in our Industrial Schools; and the reforms and happy change
is seen in the boys and girls of our dangerous classes when placed in
kind Western homes. The change of circumstances, the improved food, the
daily moral and mental influences, the effect of regular labor and
discipline, and, above all, the power of Religion, awaken these hidden
tendencies to good, both those coming from many generations of
comparative virtue and those inherent in the soul, while they control
and weaken and cause to be forgotten those diseased appetites or extreme
passions which these unfortunate creatures inherit directly, and
substitute a higher moral sense for the low moral instincts which they
obtained from their parents. So it happens, also, that American life, as
compared with European, and city life, as compared with country,
produces similar results. In the United States, a boundless hope
pervades all classes; it reaches down to the outcast and vagrant. There
is no fixity, as is so often the fact in Europe, from the sense of
despair. Every individual, at least till he is old, hopes and expects to
rise out of his condition.
The daughter of the rag-picker or vagrant sees the children she knows,
continually dressing better or associating with more decent people; she
beholds them attending the public schools and improving in education and
manners; she comes in contact with the greatest force the poor
know--public opinion, which requires a certain decency and
respectability among themselves. She becomes ashamed of her squalid,
ragged, or drunken mother. She enters an Industrial School, or creeps
into a Ward School, or "goes out" as a servant. In every place, she
feels the profound forces of American life; the desire of equality,
ambition to rise, the sense of self-respect and the passion for
education.
These new desires overcome the low appetites in her blood, and she
continually rises and improves. If Religion in any form reach her, she
attains a still greater height over the sensual and filthy ways of her
parents. She is in no danger of sexual degradation, or of any extreme
vice. The poison in her blood has found an antidote. When she marries,
it will inevitably be with a class above her own. This process goes on
continually throughout the country, and breaks up criminal inheritance.
Moreover, the incessant change of our people, especially in cities, the
separation of children from parents, of brothers from sisters, and of
all from their former localities, destroy that continuity of influence
which bad parents and grandparents exert, and do away with those
neighborhoods of crime and pauperism where vice concentrates and
transmits itself with ever-increasing power. The fact that tenants must
forever be "moving" in New York, is a preventive of some of the worst
evils among the lower poor. The mill of American life, which grinds up
so many delicate and fragile things, has its uses, when it is turned on
the vicious fragments of the lower strata of society.
Villages, which are more stable and conservative, and tend to keep
families together more and in the same neighborhoods, show more
instances of inherited and concentrated wickedness and idleness. In New
York the families are constantly broken up; some members improve, some
die out, but they do not transmit a progeny of crime. There is little
inherited criminality and pauperism.
A QUESTION.
Among these public influences on the young, it has been often a question
with some, whether the Public Schools did not educate the daughters of
the poor too much, and thus make them discontented with their condition,
and exposed to temptation.
It is said that these working-girls, seeing such fine dresses about
them, and learning many useless accomplishments, have become indifferent
to steady hand-labor, and have sought in vice for the luxuries which
they have first learned to know in the public schools. My own
observation, however, leads me to doubt whether this occurs, unless as
an exceptional fact. The influence of discipline and regular instruction
is against the style of character which makes the prostitute. Where
there is a habit of work, there are seldom the laziness and
shiftlessness which especially cause or stimulate sexual vice. Some
working-girls do, no doubt, become discontented with their former
condition, and some rise to a much higher, while some fall; but this
happens everywhere in the United States, and is not to be traced
especially to the influence of our Free Schools.
We have spoken of the greater tendency of large cities, as compared with
villages, in breaking up vicious families. There is another advantage of
cities in this matter. The especial virtue of a village community is the
self-respect and personal independence of its members. No benefits of
charity or benevolent assistance and dependence could ever outweigh
this. But this very virtue tends to keep a wicked or idle family in its
present condition. The neighbors are not in the habit of interfering
with it; no one advises or warns it. The children grow up as other
people's children do, in the way the parents prefer; there is no
machinery of charity to lift them out of the slime; and if any of their
wealthier neighbors, from motives of benevolence, visited the house, and
attempted to improve or educate the family, the effort would be resented
or misconstrued. The whole family become a kind of _pariahs_; they are
morally tabooed, and grow up in a vicious atmosphere of their own, and
really come out much worse than a similar family in the city. This
phenomenon is only a natural effect of the best virtues of the rural
community.
In a large town, on the other hand, there exist machinery and
organization through which benevolent and religious persons can approach
such families, and their good intentions not be suspected or resented.
The poor people themselves are not so independent, and accept advice or
warning more readily; they are not so stamped in public repute with a
bad name; less is known of them, and the children, under new influences,
break off from the vicious career of their parents, and grow up as
honest and industrious persons. Moreover, the existence of so much
charitable organization in the cities brings the best talent and
character of the fortunate classes to bear directly on the unfortunate,
far more than is the fact in villages.