Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/459

Rh other agencies are at work in destroying those least capable of surviving. As among the animals below man, where many individuals best adapted to live perish with the thousands unfitted to survive, so with man does this ruthless but beneficent law take in its grasp many deserving ones, and these are the ones that all the impulses of charity and love should animate us to save.

In combating crime, then, the line of effort should be along those paths indicated by Nature. It is a curious commentary on man's intelligence that, while exercising the selective function on his domestic stock by careful feeding, proper housing, and judicious crossing, and for his plants selecting the best seed, etc., while ruthlessly destroying the noxious weeds, yet when he comes to his own kind he fancies that different laws operate with him, or, swayed by sentiment, looks for different methods to cope with crime. He exterminates the noxious weed, kills his vicious dog, puts under restraint the maniac until cured; no definite terms of banishment will do in these cases, yet he formulates laws in which there is apportioned a definite number of days or years for definite offenses against society!

Colossal organizations, with lavish appropriations, are in the field for the purpose of suppressing crime and pauperism. Until within a few years this great army has been officered by the Church, and plans of campaign have been mapped by it. Slowly the public intelligence is awakening to the fact that these methods have been ridiculously inadequate, as proof exists that crime and pauperism are steadily increasing. The law of indefinite terms of imprisonment for criminals committed for a third offense has been the wisest prison law ever passed, for, by such a law, criminals are the longer prevented from the chance of perpetuating their evil traits; and yet in Massachusetts there are misguided sentimentalists who oppose the enactment of this law.

In this view of the subject the death-penalty—so odious to thousands—may be abolished. The sentence of life-imprisonment may be passed instead, but this must be beyond the interference of any pardoning power. How far the prison-cell may be made attractive, as apartments and corridors in lunatic asylums are made to-day, depends upon the necessity of punitive methods. If punishment, even to flogging, is deemed necessary, criminals must not have offered them such allurements as should lead them to violate the law for the sake of a recommital.

The conditions favorable to crime having been apprehended in the slums of the cities, the law of natural selection having been shown to be as relentlessly at work with man as with the lower animals, it would seem that the line of work is very clearly defined. We are to aid the law of selective action with all our might. Public outdoor relief is in most cities suppressed;