SERMON ON CRIME

Hokitika Guardian, 3 April 1930, Page 3

SERMON ON CRIME

NOVELIST IN PULPIT. Mr Edgar Wallace, (die novelist, lectured on crime and its deletion in Glasgow recently from the pulpit of Trinity Cliurcli. Every pew m the small, oak-raftered building, where the hymn books used at the last service still remained, was packed. Mr Wallace said:—,

“I have seen crimes from various angles. I have lived with criminals, and in 30 years’ experience as a newspaper reporter 1 have failed to iind anything that is in the slightest degree romantic in them. Crime is ugly. Criminals are stupid treacherous, and dull people. The- only really interesting criminals are those I write about in rnv books.”

Mr Wallace recalled the details of the Hay (Herefordshire) poisoning case as the result of which Major Armstrong was hanged and said :

“Seventy-five per cent of petty crime is due to vanity or the desire oi somebody to show off. All my petty crimes have been committed for that reason. Two clays before they arrested Armstrong, a, reporter, who is usually on the side of the criminal, went to him and said, ‘lf you have any-arsenic in your house take niy tip and destroy it.’ Yet when that man was arrested, he had two fatal doses, doses of arsenic in his pocket and that fact hanged him.

“English and Scott ish pci iceman can go up .until they can be chief constables,” Mr Wallace said. “Jn France and Germany the (higher) officials arc recruited from the young law students. They are nob very often men who have any knowledge of the criminal classes. You can only defeat the criminal by knowing him. There is no means of reformiiig the habitual criminal except by hanging him or by imprisonment lor life.”

With regard to finger-ppints, Mr Wallace said that only one person in a thousand has had his finger-prints taken, and no man has yet been convicted on the capital charge by bis finger-prints alone.