Page:Frank David Ely -Why defend the nation? Sound Americanism... (1924).pdf/42

38 in man; and all but a few have their jails, their criminal courts, their houses of correction, and their segregated undesirable classes—segregated because these persons shun the haunts of real men, even as they themselves are shunned. In darkness do they live and find their solace. As the churches and schools and other evidence of right instincts are positive signs of the good that is in man, cheering our minds and our hearts and filling us with hope for the future, so the jails, courts, etc., are evidence of the world’s recognition of the inherence of the primitive instincts and passions and the uncertainty of their yielding to any “gentling” process yet known to Christian teaching.

Man’s primitive instincts being what they are, there will always be good men and bad men wherever men are congregated in numbers, as surely as there have always been both classes since the days of Cain and Abel.

Education and training serve to accentuate both the good and the evil in men—the good becoming better and the evil often degeneracy. Some of the greatest scoundrels the world has ever known have been lettered men and women. This fact negatives any hope that education alone can suffice to remove crime, much as it unquestionably lessens it. Sentiment and fear are far more potent agents, and teachings of Christianity often effect what all else combined cannot accomplish. Surgery is of increasing application in the cure of crime; but it is feared that the only surgery effective with the majority of hardened criminals would be little short of decapitation.

If the percentage of our population that is criminal is not alarming, what would it become were we to add the percentage figures covering the really undesirable citizens? Take these in the sense of persons filled with unfairness, dishonesty, untruthfulness, lying and deceitfulness—terms applicable to many rather than to a few. And these persons—these men and women, all have voice in the affairs of the Nation, even as you and I. In all nations they are the factors of unrest, provocative of disturbance, friction and lawlessness, if not legally guilty of crime.

The pacifist blindly demands a condition which can only result through difficult, sustained, and highly intelligent effort.