V. M. Masten

“EXCESS PROPHETS”

We are beridden by excess prophets.

Washington Star.

Nature builds some men bigger than any office or title. Theodore Roosevelt was such a man, whose wont it was to coin cutting saws such as, “The shots that hit are the shots that count.”

Taken for what it was meant to convey, that epigram needs no champion; yet the implied negative of it may or may not hold water. That will depend upon the ratio of hits to misses.

Missed shots prolong conflict, multiply fatalties, and pile up huge waste of the materials of war. Hence, largely, the staggering toll taken by the World War in priceless young manhood, and of the going resources of the nations engaged.

It goes without saying that a fighting force must be an expert force in the care and use of the tools it employs; but that is of the primary exactions. The master key to victory, alike in business and battle, is moulded of leadership; leadership that envisages the tactical machine made up of units of balanced efficiency.

The American military system essentially does and must presuppose the squad leader to be as efficient in his domain, as is the commanding general in his. Indeed, an American army made up of prime privates, and the more petty leaders, might pound through, in a pinch, even though faultily disposed betimes by the bestarred and besilvered; whereas, under the reverse circumstance, it would almost certainly suffer defeat at the hands of an evenly-schooled foe.

But a properly trained, led, and served army would not necessarily close a given case. Assume such an army at points on the field with an inferior enemy, and the hazard might still be settled by swivel-chair soldiers, as it very nearly was in the War of the Rebellion; also very nearly was by round-table strategists who insisted that Foch should keep his general reserves massed where he knew he could not use them to advantage, as he had planned, to pummel the German divisions, piled up in a close pocket, where they were glaringly open to raking flank fire.

Fortunately, that issue was settled by the purblind German General Staff, which was so obsessed by the idea of the spectacular capture of Paris, that it could not see Amiens; Amiens, seen at the time by all of the Allied leaders as plainly the objective of the German grand plan of attack. Whether or no Hindenburg now lashes himself thereof in order to spare his former imperial masters, false leadership defeated Germany; and it came right close to spoiling the battle broth for the Allies.

So much of seeming diversion is employed to set off the fact that social and prison progress has been held up in America, particularly during the last three decades, by “false leadership.”

For example, consider this master stroke, framed by a much-quoted minister of the gospel: “Possibly something is to be granted to punishment as a deterrent. No doubt some people are to some extent restrained from wrong doing by fear of punishment.”

The person who penned those lines—underscoring of which is ours—knew that had religious creeds relied solely for their carrying power on strictly voluntary service for God from the heart of man, they had limped to an early demise.

Had the writer marked it that not even “fear of punishment” condign by the Almighty “restrains” by-choice criminals from “wrong doing,” he would have made the best case possible against punishment as a “deterrent”; yet only the best case possible, since the efficiency of deterrence is to be judged by its effect upon the normal mass, and not upon the abnormal few.

In such instance, the qualifying word points the difference as between the mere “tough” brawler, “restrained” from going the limit, and the ruthless blood-spiller whom fear of punishment eternal does not feaze. Monstrosities occur in all forms of animal life. When the monstrous human strikes, he must be struck accordingly.

Moreover, before we reach final conclusions, we must know the order and ordering of our deterrence; must know it up through the gamut of the apprehension, the conviction, and the sentence of lawbreakers, and then through the gamut of their prison activities.

False procedure as to any one of the four processes named will invalidate any general statement of negation concerning the efficience of punishment for crime. Procedure in America has been false in every named particular. Therefore, the actual effect of just and necessary legal punishment for crime cannot have been declared.

Much of crude guesswork has been exploited by single-seeing fetichists of one or another kidney; but cardinal facts have remained hidden from such, for the very good reason that to uncover those facts requires hard digging strangest to their striving.

When we shall have caught our thieves as surely as Canada catches hers; then fitted the punishment to the offense; then fitted the institution to the offender, and the offender to the institution, will be time enough to place stricture on punishment values.

At a time when, and in a country where, the murderous footpad knows the chances are three to one against his being brought to trial; ten to one against his sentence to life imprisonment; eighty to one that he will not suffer the death penalty; and that the all-around odds are nearly prohibitive as against the practical application, both in and out of prison, of the least elastic predicates of penal codes: it is sheer gratuitous dilettantism to allege that punishment of crime in America doesn’t punish.

How can legal punishment punish, if only about five shots in the hundred of it hit so as to hurt?

Here, again, “The shots that (miss) are the shots that count”; and that would still be true if criminals were favored only by so much as the gambler’s throw; in fact, they would continue to jump at an even chance to outmaneuver agents of the law. Why not?

Exhibit No. 2, offered by a highly-paid correspondent of a Chicago newspaper, is fully as informing as are our “minister’s” conclusions: “There never was a time when theft was considered proper.”

From 323 to 354 B.C., Spartan youth were most carefully schooled by State agents in promiscuous sneak-thievery. Petty thieving by the lads of Greece was then considered a necessary accomplishment. More than that, the boy who came back empty-handed from a foraging expedition, was brutally punished, even unto death.With germane facts of comparatively recent history in mind, the “correspondent” probably wouldn’t have been guilty of assertion so grossly incorrect; yet the fact remains that loosest of declaration has for long years been employed by a certain class of writers, in furtherance of impish itch for cheap, if ephemeral prominence.

Furthermore, for a State directly to put limited stamps of approval on its young thieves, as did the agents of Lycurgus, would be but one of many ways by which to establish them; in very truth, the indirect method of doing so is hands over the most pernicious and far-reaching method.

The most expeditious anti-social job of the latter kind is done as it is being done the country over in the United States; which is to say: maim the criminal law until it goes on crutches, and at the same time order prison rÉgimes to square with the instinctive reactions of lawbreakers. That is to play both ends against the public security; and that is precisely the condition with which the American people are confronted.

To tale off a summary of associated influences would crowd a bulking volume. Also, it would yield what mostly wasted effort yields, since Americans have been fully cognizant of the constantly widening cracks in the national structure, as well as of the manner in which those openings have been effected.He knows that neither added nor rescinded statutes can eliminate bad lines of blood, established mainly by an immigration policy framed and executed as if to establish those lines of blood. Hundreds of thousands of those of the “lines” are daily plying disruptive wares; wares which they will continue to ply, more or less, unto at least the fifth generation ahead. A country cannot sit up of a sudden and determine to serve overnight antidote for the slow poison of its people.

He knows class legislation is deadly to democracy; yet he sits supinely tight while organized labor successfully clubs with votes for special privileges, successively the more indefensible.

He knows the avaricious brute is at the bottom of all of war, and he knows blood-letting within such as the sixteen-foot prize ring is the cruelest of war in miniature. Nevertheless, he piles his own dollars on the pyramid of dollars pulled down annually by the pug-ugly fraternity, the while winking the nether eye as his own kiddies are imbued, through suggestion and example, with the spirit of the fistic parasite.

Nor must women be denied her meed of praise. She, too, is getting the punching habit of mind. Hundreds of the bejeweled of her wait breathlessly at the ringside for the benignant “K. O.” Her voice, raised for the making a national pet of the parasitic pug, is recorded: “I am not especially fond of seeing the blood flow; but I just dote on ‘draws.’”

When the femme de ring shall have wormed herself a bit further into the mysteries of the roped arena, she will be bally-well fed up with “draws,” the majority of which are “crooked” in order to coin “easy money.” Also, she will likely transmit to her brood the instinct to shunt productive work and tear things.

He knows fattened money-hogs shoulder to bar the way to the money-trough, where they pile fat on fat.

He knows of the cheap flings of the charlatan; of the ruthlessly lawless reach of the radical labor leader; of the rotten bases from which the bebadged are frequently forced to work; of the political chicanery by which the sting is drawn on the one hand from the edicts of upright judges: and on the other hand—if much less frequently yet frequently enough—written into the edicts of legal agents whom the ermine but drapes.

He knows all, and more, and sundry; yet he will not so much as step to the primary and register his vote against the nefarious combination.

Shall the load be fastened to his back, he will have none but himself to blame. Hundreds of voices have for long years dinged into his ears the danger ahead.

For threatened retrogression none are more responsible than those who have known better, but who, willy-nilly for a price, have shunted public thought from facing actual conditions, to an abiding faith in the reverse of all of human experience. Hence the drifting with the flood tide of those conditions; and hence the miserable mix of the moment.

Take just one more gem, illustrative of the kind of self-contradictory stuff which the public has purblindly swallowed. It is out of the scrambled brain of one who assumes to see reformatively from “the hill of vision.”

(1) Pro: “If other men, living under the same conditions, succeed in maintaining their integrity, what excuse can the criminal claim for his failure to do the same?”

(2) Con: “In conclusion, the criminal is a man whose faculties are not well balanced. ‘Just as the twig is bent, the tree’s inclined.’”

Broadly speaking, the “conclusion” is correct; but observe that it fights the companion question, tooth and nail. First off, the average man does not carry the handicap of congenital predisposition to thieve, as do most of instinctive thieves. As a “twig,” he was not “bent” and “inclined” that way. Secondly, “other men” had not “lived under the same conditions”; so the positive case is at once cleared of the cardinal hypothesis. And thirdly, since the criminal of the class indicated “is a man whose faculties are not well balanced”; and since “Just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined,” he has at least two-fold limited excuse for his oblique thoughts and deeds, likewise claim upon our commiseration.

Examples of the kind given could be multiplied indefinitely; indeed, it is the exception to come upon socio-criminological writing that will stand up, even under large-lens analysis.

Thoughtless plungers, with their half-baked opinions, we have a’plenty; idiosyncratics are, of course, irrepressible, since like the true criminal, “their faculties are not well balanced”; the self-seeking advertiser never misses a throw no matter how cheap; purse-packing politicians play the penological game for the “rake off”; hectic emotionalists berate those who do not see with eyes blind to the wide-open machinations of criminal malingerers; kindergarten panaceas are seriously advanced as means by which to stop death-dealing bandits; and a dash of the seasoning of the conglomerate mess is done by every dilettante who has worried through the like of Freud’s “dream” stuff.

It wouldn’t occur to a bookkeeper that he could remove his coat and weld a better joint than can a blacksmith; nor to a lawyer that he could lay brick to line with a journeyman mason; but any man or woman who has fondled a fetich of reform, backed by the most casual knowledge of, and contact with criminals, has been cock sure of call to draw plans and specifications for seasoned criminologists to follow.

Therefore the game of penology has attracted and held very few big men, who have refused a vocation in which one must constantly adjust, then readjust, to the dissonant tinkling of little bells, rung by individuals who cannot be brought to listen for the fundamental tones of reform. And therefore puerile, patch-quilt prison methods, with rivalry between single-seeing cults as to which could place the greatest emphasis on bizarre banalities.

“All of true force is silent.” If you know baseball to its vitals, sit in the grand stand and test out that truism; observe there how the mouthy “fan” will miscall the turn, both on the player and the play. Observe, also, how the real student of the game is too busy following the finesse of the general play around the whole circuit, to be led into a Dervish dance over outstanding features. And observe that while “stars” may “twinkle,” it is the evenly-balanced team, and team work that nails the pennant to the staff.

Team work! Support of every man by every other man engaged in a given work! That would be made as if to the hands of social and prison reform; but it wouldn’t enable the “twinkler” to worm himself under caption type. True, self-praise is seldom written into the final record; albeit he who cunningly employs the kin of it can appreciably hold up his betters, and the big work they take earnestly.

Contrary to the general understanding, prison reform stands at inches below the mark set for it decades ago by fitted and far-seeing men. It could not have been otherwise under grossly overdone probation and suspensions, made binding by most ill-considered sentences to institutions wherein industrial and auxiliary averages have been cut to the pattern of habitual felons.

The remedies? Enumeration of them would fill another big book. A few, basic ones, are struck off by the writer in his Stop Thief! Agreeably with the specific lines of this chapter, the public can make a prime start at actually speeding up social and prison reform, through searching out self-alleged social seers for what they actually know about the game they essay to umpire; as well as how they came by knowledge sufficient to do it.

The cumulative effect of little pills of social effort can help clarify the reform atmosphere; but when it does the pellets are charged with the dynamic alternative of divine law.

“Excess Prophets!” Pseudo protagonists! Aye! And spot the man, no matter what his station or calling, who lends influence of kind whatsoever to fasten the minds of lads and lassies on “sporting” non-producers.

Essentially, bear down hard on him who would knight the wont-work principal of that lowest-down abomination called “the prize ring”; else history will have it America went out of her way to flout a gentle Jesus, and thereby to dig her own thug-planned grave.

Hyperbolic rot? You don’t believe it? Then think on it that while millions of men, willing to work, can’t get work, the gate receipts of the brutal affair about to be pulled off, as between Dempsey and Carpentier, will aggregate close to sixteen-hundred-thousand dollars; and that a cool half million of that sum will go to the principal “pugs,”—say nothing of the aftermath in such as moving picture rights, and vaudeville stunts to drive the devilish business home.