Youthful Criminality

New Zealand Tablet, 1 October 1908, Page 10

Youthful Criminality

mmmmm We ™d ' " a : TT VSV S tl ", mOSt reckless of the reckless passions. may sa 3 of a what CVConnell said of bigotry: < She has no

head and cannot think, no heart and cannot feel. When she moves, it is in wrath; when she pauses, it is amidst ruin; her prayers are curses, her God ,is a demon, her communion is death. In France, the Radical-Socialist • blocard f * hatred of religion has paused at nothing. Ministers, like Viviani, have declared their object to be a war d entrance against belief in Ood and in a world to come. And the campaign has been carried to such lengths as to ban religious teaching from the schools and to set up in its stead an active propaganda of atheism. They have been (in Bacon's words) setting fire to their neighbor's house in order to roast their eggs-reckless of the evils which their crusade against religion has brought upon their unhappy and degenerate land. * One of the results of the anti-religious campaign is the enormous increase of * juvenile crime. The ' red seiics ' is the title now given by the press to the lengthening list of murders and other crimes of violence that constitute so menacing a phase of life in Paris and the provinces. Early in August a Reuter telegram from Paris to the British press ran in part as follows :- Statistics show that the tide of crime in France during the last thirty years has been s(eadily rising, the figures having almost doubled in that period. What criminologists regard as a most disquieting symptom is the enormous proportional mcrease of juvenile crime. The proportion of murders and attempted murders on the part of young people between the volume 7 tWCnt y- one is 4-»o per cent, of the general volume of crime, as compared with 2 per cent, for all ages above twenty-one. The bands of armed Apaches who infest Paris are Betwee ce n m « St r Part H "** ° f Sixtee " a » d abt and > ,- 99 ° 5 " ndiscovered crime * increased considerably and t is est.mated that the returns for the last year or two will be still more formidable. As to the causes, he" 'berrLrnd^oTsibi:^ 0113 ** "° "«" «** «**« *« Nelson clapped his blind eye to the telescope when he did not want to see a signal that was clear and peremptory. A ns atheist politicians and journalists are as persistently looking w h then- blind orbit-casting about for causes of tl/porten tot crease in juvenile crime, when these two facts are all the t,™ staring them in the face : (l) that it is a perUous xp ii'en to bnng. up a young generation in the conviction thai there s no Beyond, and no higher restraining force to passion or m ter st and (T £ ;C; Ce t r n> the , Pr ! SOn - Ccl1 ' or of the guil!^ and (2) that .the moral degeneracy of French youth has <20,u h * nd WUh thC *" UP °" Ca ' h0 » c '«'* -d clisS