WHY CRIME SPREADS

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 342, 1 May 1928, Page 11

WHY CRIME SPREADS

ENGLISH SAVANT IS WORRIED CIVILISATION BREAKING \o one can have failed to be struck -ith the recent increase in crimes of . tality, says Sir Leo Chiozaa Money, in an English exchange. Perhaps the increase is all the more striking because England is not a country which brutality has been common Reading the details of some of them we might almost have fancied ourselves citizens, not of Britain, but of the United States. In America crime has become one of the chief industries. In the welter of American materalism crime is rampant. From the careful estimates of Americans themselves, however, it is believed that 12,000 murders a year take place in the United States in a population of about 120 millions. All Europe, with a population of 500 millions, has not so many murders in two years. So American crime easily beats all Records. 250 Murders a Week As for comparison with the United Kingdom, in a population of nearly 50 millions we have only three murders week whereas the United States, with a population of 120 millions, has about 250 murders a week! This is easily the most appalling item in statistics the whole world has to show, Mr. Alfred Smith, the well-known Governor of New York State, recently sent a special message to his legislature suggesting the appointment of a Commission to investigate what he called the “appalling wave of crime” sweeping the land. An ingenious writer in the American “Manufacturers’ Record” has taken the trouble to aggregate the cost of American crime. Between thefts, burglaries, frauds, forgeries, drugs, w-ild-cat flotations, and the rest of it, he arrives at the uncomfortable figure of £2,600,000,000 a year as a minimum. The transportation of big pay-rools in America has to be done in armoured cars, but even these are successfully attacked. A mine-owner’s armoured wage-car, with its guard of professional private soldiers, was dynamited by bandits, who killed live of the guards and captured £20,000. Little wonder, then, that the Federal Cabinet has decided to employ men armed with machine-guns to defend the American mails from the depredations of robbers. Mr. New, the United States Post-master-General, said recently that if it took the whole army and navy to do it, the mail must be protected and the lives of the postal men safeguarded. Wholesale hanging, he hopefully suggested, might have a good effect.

Tennyson’s farmer was quite sure “that the poor in a loornp is bad,” and for some forms of crime poverLy may be deemed an excuse. What is astonishing about American crime is that it takes place in the richest country in the world—the country which jingles its dollars in its pockets and boasts of Us unparalleled wealth and prosperity. We have good causa, therefore, to reflect very seriously upon such an amazing phenomenon. Wealth—Without Soul

This sad case of America should help us to realise that civilisation is insecure, and that something more than material prosperity is necessary to preserve the souls of men. We see a great people, divorced from tradition, worshipping the dol lar. We see the finest arts, cherished and brought to perfection by the European peoples, degraded in a new savagery, and we have to learn that barbarism may easily be associated with wealth.

The root of the thing is this. When a child is born it is born a savage, no matter who or what its parents may be. There is no such thing as a civilised infant. Speech itself has to be acquired by every child; it is not natural or inherited.

If a new-born child to-day were taken from its parents and associated solely with deaf mutes it would never learn to speak, hut would continue until the end of its days to utter incoherent sounds. So with every acquirement of mankind; the child does not inherit; it has to ietu'n, and what it learns is a matter for civilisation itself to decide. When we once grasp that essential fact we can understand how it is that in America there have arisen millions of modern savages who have never learned, morally, more than the art of acquisition at any price. Every nation possesses these modern savages, but America possesses an undue proportion of them. Degraded Amusements

And therefore I am alarmed when I see Britain importing from America the things that make modem savages —the degraded amusements, the distorted music, the spoiled speech, the worship of vulgarity, the films loaded with guns and criminals and astonishing police, and the crook plays. Upon what are we feeding the imaginations of our children? Is there any reasonable doubt that in our time the chief stimulant of the imagination of young and old is the picture theatre? We see again and again repeated in actual crime the incidents of American life as faithfully reproduced in motion pictures—the stolen motorcars, the brutal assaults, the free use of pistols, the glorification of crooks, and the splashing of stolen dollars. No Guidance The churches are empty and the Sunday schools are dissolving. We have destroyed revealed religion and Put nothing in its place. The new generation goes almost entirely without ethical guidance. Let us not be surprised, therefore, if we ourselves know something of a new wave of crime which Has seriously affected public and private services of every sort. There is far more dishonesty current than before the war, and we have recently read with astonishment of men in responsible Positions, decently paid, giving themselves to common larceny. It is clear that these are days in which civilisation is on the defensive. Scence has furnished us with extraordinary means of circulating good things and bad; it is for those who have those means in their charge to see that they are so used that the human mind, capable of either so much good or so much evil, is not continually dosed and doped with degrading conceptions.