THE MORAL CRIMINAL

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.

Contrary to the claim of the gamester, there is a vast difference between the working power of the dollar that finds its way into the industrial groove, and the dollar that helps pack the purse of a prostitute. In the one case, the moral dollar will earn ever-increasing increment, while contributing to the general well-being. In the other case, the immoral dollar had passed and will pass mainly from the pocket of one mulcting parasite into the pocket of another mulcting parasite. It had and will, because human parasites produce nothing tangible in exchange for that which is dumped into their palms. The money they spend for their general upkeep is largely turned back into approved channels of trade; but that is but a fraction of the grand total. The bulk of their capital is and must be nearly as dead to the business world. It is practically of little more use to going business than is hoarded money.

Even so, the enacting indictment of the sporting drone is not a dollar indictment. The capital brief society should hold against him is that he plys intrinsically criminal tools, with which he frequently “double-crosses” even his fellow craftsmen.

“Well,” says the imprisoned felon of the stripe in question, “what did big and little business men do to the people during the progress of the World War? What did they do to each other when diving foreign exchange upheaved home values? What did they do to every body for long months after prices should have dropped pretty close to their normal level? Did they or did they not play the game as I played it, until consumers got after them with buying strikes, and the cry of stop thief? Did they or did they not?”

Well, “did they or did they not”? If they did, what had they on “the imprisoned felon of the stripe in question”? That’s a live wire, is that question; a live wire of the kind concerning which the criminal presses for answer, and he is entitled to an answer that doesn’t squirm and doesn’t quibble.

As a dealer in the world’s mart can you return an honest answer? If you cannot, hadn’t you better take inventory of conscience, and try to understand that the meanest kind of thievery is that which raises the ante on what should be common commodities and conveniences, beyond the purchasing power of the average purse, say nothing of the plight of millions of underdogs on whom the last curse of criminally-manipulated price levels falls?

If you think yourself immune to such queries, make study of the ever-tightening grip of the proletariat on the use that has been made of them. Start with the French Revolution and come on down to glean the why of it that workers mean to be served, as well as serving, in the future.

It is true that hosts of toilers swallow hook, line and sinker of the crooked gamesters cast, and do it day in and day out: fatefully, to the end that 95% of them are but six months removed from the poor-house at the age of 65, in so far as their own financial resources are concerned. But they now have the fists of their minds doubled to batter those who would build and operate, from within a drawn circle, the like of the baronial toll gate. Unlock such as interlocking thievery, say they, come out into the open and do business with us man to make like men.

Next, let us hope, in order of the wrath of the honest toiler, will be the meticulously groomed and brushed parasite; next, whether he plys deft fingers backed by unbeatable odds, or a glib tongue to get a heap for nothing.

First of all to feel the hand of the worker should be the blood-spilling, pug-parasite; him who suggests war between brothers, dulls the finer sensibilities, lowers both the mental and moral tonus of mankind, and cheats even women into believing that he can, by any possibility, be of any basic use in the big scheme of life.

Many good people think differently; many who will not trouble to think as it is necessary to think, in order to classify men and motives. They are therefore plastic clay for the clan parasite, inclusive of clever criminals.

Crime? Why, only on criminals by legal edict are the keys of the turnkey turned. Myriads of humans who never face a presiding judge, plan and execute moral crime that is much more far-reaching than the average even of capital crime.

Hence, by-choice felons flit sneeringly to and from prison, where they have to be practically force-fed with moral precepts; that, very largely, because they know millions of free men meaner than they, are immune to legal force-feeding for the meanness.

So long as such conditions obtain in America, so long will recidivistic criminals mount there in numbers; and so long will they justify themselves to themselves, and to all who will listen to their half-baked contentions.

“I see and approve the good—I follow the bad,” says a far-famed poet, whose bold declaration of spineless principle leaves him spokesman for thousands of moral weaklings who are always on the fence, undecisive as to which way to jump. It also leaves him open to the charge of angling for a cheap, dirt-distributing notoriety.

Another, ostensibly an editor of a New England newspaper—shades of the Pilgrims stand by—flares at men of the cloth who denounce such as the late bestial scandal enacted at Jersey City. He is “convinced” that Catholic and Protestant ministers are “impugning motives here and blackening character there, because they have lost their tempers at the disinclination of the people to follow them.”

Passing motives “impugned” by the Infinite Mind, and character “blackened” with the devil’s own smudge, what would the scribe have vicars of God Almighty do? What the implication of his own monstrous and most illogical libel, if not that those on whom America does and must rely for moral guidance, should remain as mentally shackled, and morally blind, while blacklegs and backsliders establish schools for crime, and write the texts books for them?

Hardly! True Americans of the “people” for whom the gentleman assumes to speak, wax fatuous, not to say fat-headed betimes; but let us hope that they may be relied upon finally to search out and set down those who would yield American birth-right for the brew of the base at heart.

If the sporting-soaked must utter and shove counterfeit moral coin, they owe it to common decency not to affect the mantle of the mentor; they specifically do, because predal parasites bank on being able to point to them as having said and done the last fool thing. They further do, for the reason that they are the readiest gulls of the grafting gang they champion.

Moral thieves are moral morons. Count them, and get the cut of the saw of the “Passaic News.”

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