Many a man thinks that it is his goodness which keeps him from crime, when it is only his full stomach. On half allowance, he would be as ugly and knavish as anybody. Don’t mistake potatoes for principles.—Carlyle.

A normal child of five years once asked the meaning of this expression—“hanging a murderer,” and after explanation said eagerly, “But will hanging the man make that other man alive again?” On receiving a negative reply, the remonstrance burst forth, “Then why kill him, since when he is dead we can never make him good again?”

This is a true picture of the thinking and feeling about crime which is natural to the best types of our present-day humanity. These demand that our punishments shall either reform the criminal or protect society effectively from his malfeasance. As a matter of fact, our criminal code and whole machinery and procedure relative to crime accomplish neither, and this is freely admitted by men whose position enables them to judge accurately and entitles them to express an opinion.

Mr. Justice Matthew has said at the Birmingham Assizes that the present state of the criminal law is a hundred years behind the times. Sir Edmund Du Cane, Chairman of the Directors of Convict Prisons, says of the solitary system practised in our penal prisons: “It is an artificial state of existence, absolutely opposed to that which nature points out as the condition of mental, moral and physical health.... The minds of the prisoners become enfeebled by long-continued isolation.” In the Official Report of the Departmental Committee on Prisons, 1895, these words occur: “The prisoners have been treated too much as a hopeless or worthless part of the community. The moral condition in which a large number of prisoners leave the prison, and the serious number of recommittals, have led us to think there is ample cause for a searching inquiry into the main features of prison life.” The late Judge Fitz-Stephen published his History of the Criminal Law in 1883, and pointed there to “notorious evils of which it is difficult,” said he, “to find a satisfactory remedy.” Nevertheless, he put down his finger on the crucial spot when he wrote “the law proceeds upon the principle that it is morally right to hate criminals. It confirms and justifies that sentiment by inflicting upon criminals punishment which expresses it.”

But it is not right to hate criminals. It is morally wrong, i.e. it is contrary to these laws of nature, by which alone an elevated and happy social life may be attained. The emotion of hatred creates vibrations producing evil on the moral plane, as certainly as discordant sounds, acting on sensitive ears, produce discomfort; and, if persisted in, produce organic disorganization on the physical plane. Hence, all punishment or legal procedure directed against crime, having hatred at its foundation, or historic base, must fail. On the negative side, hatred has proved ineffectual in protecting society from crime. On the positive side, it increases the anti-social feelings, whose natural outcome is crime, and frustrates, or annuls, the human forces of love, which already widely existent, and swaying humanity’s best types, are the true evolutional factors by which to annihilate crime.

Mr. Justice Matthew was simply asserting a fact of social science when he stated that the criminal law is out of date. It consists with a primitive stage of social life; but it is totally inconsistent with even the semi-civilization of to-day. The fundamental discord between our action and feeling relative to crime declares itself in the uncertainty of a criminal’s fate and the steady survival of his type. But, my reader, while accepting Justice Matthew’s premise, may doubt the conclusion at which Judge Fitz-Stephen arrived—that vindictiveness or hate lies at the root of our criminal code, and that our punishments express it. Moreover, he may condemn by anticipation a supposed tendency on my part to censure all punishments, and rely solely on a laissez-faire system of dealing with crime. Scientific meliorism, however, does not imply anarchy or the absence of governing law. Its methods repudiate the laissez-faire principle in every department of life, for this reason: Our developed faculties and accumulated knowledge make untenable the negative or inert position. We are impelled in an epoch of conscious evolution to take positive action favourable to progress.

My contention is this: love of all men, not hatred of any man or class of men ought to be the basis of our criminal code. Modern science, experience and skill are competent to redeem the criminal class, speaking generally, and in exceptional cases, where redemption is impossible, can render the criminal innocuous to society, while giving him throughout life such innocent happiness as a being organically defective may enjoy.

This thesis embraces a very wide range of action. It means the systematic rational treatment of evil-doers, from the refractory infant and juvenile pickpocket to the burglar, the fraudulent bankrupt, the felon, the traitor, the murderer, and if any exist, the born criminal. It signifies, in short, a complete science complementary to that of true education. For whereas the latter comprises all manner of attractive stimuli to noble living, this is the science of necessary social restraints to be applied in nursery, school and prison with the universal gentleness which springs from universal love. The purpose to be aimed at is, first, improving character by restraining obnoxious tendencies; second, reforming character already become anti-social; third, protecting society from all corrupt infusion that might proceed from morally diseased character.

A leading principle of the criminal law of Great Britain is that punishment be adjusted in proportion to the supposed magnitude of each individual offence. If we study this principle, we must perceive the truth of Judge Fitz-Stephen’s allegation, for what connexion has it with the reformation of the criminal? A judge or a jury makes no attempt to compute the amount of prison restraint and discipline necessary to reformation, nor are they possessed of facts for forming a judgment. Their whole attention has been focussed on the crime, not on the character of the criminal, or the antecedent and future conditions affecting the character. Neither does the judicial sentence connect itself proportionately with the mischief done to society. A fraudulent banker or commercial speculator, whose downfall involves the ruin of thousands, is not dealt with, as compared with a petty thief, on a scale of severity expressive of the magnitude of suffering entailed. And the petty thief, who steals the rich man’s goods, as compared with the criminal who beats and abuses his wife, is adjudged a severer penalty—a measure of punishment indicating the superior value of goods over wives, which is a sentiment appropriate only to barbarous times.

These anomalies, however, are explainable. Our laws have descended to us from a barbarous age, when might was right, irrespective of justice; and from a race whose punishments sprang from revenge, and were roughly proportioned to the feeling of revenge. They are little else than reactionary forces, of which some are always present in an inchoate society. Their inapplicability to the task of reforming criminals is easily proved.

In Scotland in a single year not fewer than “six hundred and ninety persons were committed to prison who had been in confinement at least ten times before. Of these, three hundred and ninety-three had been in prison at least twenty times before, and twenty-three at least fifty times!” (Hill on Crime, p. 28.) These figures speak for themselves. Our whole system is glaringly unscientific. We do not remove the conditions that act as causes of crime. We punish, and sometimes severely, yet we let loose again offenders not one whit more prepared than before to withstand the temptations of freedom. We calmly support and approve an enormous expenditure of public funds upon criminals and crime; we carefully select good men to be prison managers, officers and chaplains; we secure cleanliness and sanitation within the prisons, and so forth; but these efforts are utterly futile because the system is wrong—the criminal law of Great Britain is based upon a false, an irrational principle.

The causes of crime within our province to deal with are of a two-fold nature—objective and subjective. Poverty, i.e. hunger and want, a slum environment, rough handling in infancy and childhood, a mischievous training and the absence of all conditions favourable to gentle, virtuous life—these are some of the objective causes creating crime which society is bound to remove. Among causes deciding the innate character of every newly-born babe, the forces of heredity stand out conspicuously. I have demonstrated that aggregate humanity, in a scientific age, has the means of controlling these forces and directing them to the production of physical, mental and moral health in the individual, and consequently in the community. The born criminal type may become gradually improved by careful and wise treatment under life-long restraints. Meanwhile, to seek reformation of this type, by prison discipline alone, and treat it by methods adapted to corrigible culprits, is a folly dishonouring to the developed reason of man. We have abundant evidence that the type exists. Mr. Frederick Hill, late Inspector of Prisons, says: “Nothing has been more clearly shown in the course of my inquiries than that crime is hereditary to a considerable extent ... it proceeds from father to son in a long line of succession.” (Hill on Crime, p. 55.) Mr. J. B. Thomson, Resident Surgeon of the Perth Prison, states of the facts of prison life: “They press on my mind the conviction that crime in general is a moral disease of a chronic and congenital nature, intractable when transmitted from generation to generation.” And Mr. George Combe, speaking of prisons in the United States of America, wrote: “I have put the question to many keepers of prisons whether they believed in the possibility of reforming all offenders. From those whose minds were humane and penetrating, I have received the answer—they did not, for experience had convinced them that some criminals are incorrigible by any human means hitherto discovered. These incorrigibles,” says George Combe—and this is the point to observe, “were always found to have defective organizations; ... they are morally idiotic; and justice, as well as humanity, dictates our treating them as patients. They labour under great natural defects; ... to punish them for actions proceeding from these natural defects is no more just or beneficial to society than it would be to punish men for having crooked spines or club feet.” (George Combe’s Moral Philosophy, p. 306.) And I could refer to many more authorities on the subject were it necessary.

Accepting the theory that our born-criminals are victims of moral disease, the question arises—how should we treat them? Fifty years ago we sorely maltreated our victims to mental disease. We bound them hand and foot, we punished them sternly for their congenital defects, we shunned and hated them, and because they were martyrs to a pitiful disease we made them also the victims of unnecessary and cruel sufferings. Few men to-day could glance without a shudder at the record of our treatment of lunatics. We consign the history gladly to oblivion, and point to changes betokening the better feeling of to-day. “No one thinks of sending a madman to a lunatic asylum for a certain number of days, weeks or months. We carefully ascertain that he is unfit to be at large, and that those in whose hands we are about to place him act under due inspection and have the knowledge and skill which afford the best hope for his cure; that they will be kind to him, and inflict no more pain than is necessary for his secure custody ... we leave it to them to determine if, or when, he can be safely liberated.” (Hill on Crime, p. 151.)

These are the lines on which also should run our treatment of moral disease. If a man is unfit morally to be at large, we must narrow the conditions of his life, but make it as enjoyable within the coercive restraints as is compatible with improvement. And on no account must we restore his liberty until those who professionally and officially watch his daily conduct are convinced that he will not again be likely to abuse that liberty.

But apart altogether from individual delinquents, the subjective racial tendency to crime demands special treatment, and in this regard I maintain that the enlightened action of an advanced society will be analogous to the ignorant action of an earnest church in the Middle Ages with precisely opposite results. “The long period of the Dark Ages, under which Europe lay, was due, I believe, in a very considerable degree,” says Francis Galton, “to the celibacy enjoined by religious orders on their votaries. Whenever a man or woman was possessed of a gentle nature that fitted him or her to deeds of charity, to meditation, to literature or to art, the social condition of the time was such that they had no refuge elsewhere than in the bosom of the church. But the church preached and exacted celibacy. The consequence was that these gentle natures had no continuance, and by a policy so singularly unwise and suicidal that I am hardly able to speak of it without impatience, the church brutalized the breed of our forefathers. She acted as if she aimed at selecting the rudest portion of the community to be alone the parents of future generations. She practised the arts which breeders would use who aimed at creating ferocious, currish and stupid natures. No wonder that club law prevailed for centuries over Europe; the wonder is, that enough good remained in the veins of Europeans to enable their race to rise to its present very moderate level of natural morality.” (Hereditary Genius, F. Galton, p. 356.)

A humane society, guided by rational forces in the epoch of conscious evolution, will practise the policy of the church of the Middle Ages on a different class of subjects. It will gather poor criminals into its bosom, and secure for them a safe and happy refuge while exacting celibacy. The racial blood shall not be poisoned by moral disease. The guardians of the present-day social life dare not be careless of future social life and the happiness of generations unborn; therefore the criminal breed must be forcibly restrained from perpetuating its kind. Now mark the result. Not gentle natures—as in the case of the church—but the innately vicious natures will have no continuance. The criminal type slowly but surely disappears.

To promote the contentment and comfort of congenital criminals within their asylum or prison home an alternative to celibacy might be offered, viz. surgical treatment, to render the male incapable of reproduction. (The treatment indicated is not the operation ordinarily performed upon some domestic animals; this, applied to human beings, would be morally and physically injurious. Particulars of the appropriate method were published in the British Medical Journal as early as May 2, 1874, at p. 586.) Were this course voluntarily chosen, the sexes might intermingle without danger to posterity; and since fuller social life tends to make all human beings happier, these convicts would become more manageable, and coercive restraints cease to be indispensable.

But the criminal stock is not great when compared with the actual crimes of to-day. Crime in a vast measure is simply produced by the outward accidental conditions of life—an evil environment and a grossly inadequate training. If we alter the environment of our masses—by establishing a new industrial system that banishes poverty from the land, by initiating a Malthusian and neo-Malthusian practice that puts the physical life on a healthy basis, by creating a family life suitable to man’s emotional nature, and supplying a true education that embraces scientific restraints on all anti-social tendencies—then, but not till then, will crime and the criminal type alike become things of the past.

We are surrounded to-day in our reformatories and board schools, in our homes and on our streets, by children of naïvely-disobedient or rebellious tendency. These are the embryo criminals of a few years hence. When a clever romanticist makes one his hero, and describes the development of trickiness in the child, and how he uses it as a weapon of defence against the “polissman” whom he defies, trips up and otherwise evades (Cleg Kelly, by Crockett), we read the account without compunction, nay, we relish the humour of the situation, and half approve the issue! Yet this assuredly is no legitimate outcome of childish bravery and sportiveness. Our levity arises from the underlying conviction, or the universal feeling begotten of genetic evolution, that the policeman’s jurisdiction here is flagrantly inappropriate.

Infantile disobedience and full-fledged crime seem far apart, but they are united by an inward deteriorating process, an outward chain of trespasses more or less petty. The links are all there, connecting the tender babe and fascinating street-arab with the thief and murderer. Similarly, on the moral plane, flow the sequences of cause and effect that bring retribution—that inalienable feature of the law of evolution. The crime that society deplores is the natural penalty for society’s neglect of children; and there is no escape from the penalty as long as the cause continues. Nor can society plead ignorance here. Herbert Spencer and Ruskin have spoken out plainly on this subject. “What we need is cessation from all these antagonisms which keep alive the brutal elements of human nature, and persistence in a peaceful life, giving unchequered play to the sympathies.” (Herbert Spencer on Arbitration.) “It is,” says Ruskin, “the lightest way of killing to stop a man’s breath. But if you bind up his thoughts by lack of true education, if you blind his eyes, if you blunt his hopes, if you steal his joys, if you stunt his body and blast his soul ... this you think no sin!” Verily, there is sin, acknowledged by the noblest, wisest of men, and brought home to us on the lips of babes—“Why kill the man, since when he is dead we can never make him good again!”

Society has to compass the task of making men good from the beginning; and in exceptional cases, where the task is impossible, the victims are simply society’s patients, to be impounded without hurt. We are as able to protect our social life from moral as from mental lunatics. The initial step, however (hardly yet taken), is to pass from the mental attitude of a barbarous race, whose habits of defence are those of arbitrary punishment, to that of a civilized nation bent on reforming its criminals, and treating its morally diseased members with uniform humanity and brotherly love. As yet the resources of man’s reason and scientific knowledge and aptitude have never been called into play to devise a system of consecutive restraints on the “brutal elements,” a system to make men good from the beginning by “working out the beast.”

The crux of the problem is how to imbue children painlessly with the truth that social life has responsibilities and limitations, obedience to which is indispensable. And I submit that this may be done in the homes and nurseries of the future, under a scientifically adapted system of training. Hard blows and even chiding tones of the human voice must have no place in childhood’s environment, but authority may be exercised through the use of a simple appliance for limiting infant freedom. When baby trespasses against some natural law of health or social life, of which he knows nothing, he is gently but promptly and firmly placed in a baby-prison standing within reach, viz. a goodly-sized basket, high at the sides, softly cushioned all round and weighted, so that it cannot be overturned by the infant culprit, who, if refractory, may kick or scream in safety there till the paroxysm passes, and he falls asleep. On waking he recalls vaguely, when older, more clearly the occurrence, and he becomes lightly possessed by a subtle sense of authority quite distinct from individual kindness or unkindness. His human relations are unhurt by the necessary training in infancy. He has been checked in wrong-doing without any wrong association of ideas, and without an awakening of anti-social feeling.

I have seen an ignorant nurse teach a child to seek solace for pain in an anti-social emotion! “Beat the naughty chair that has hurt poor baby’s head,” was the evil counsel, and the child held out to the chair struck his tiny revengeful blows, and was kissed and caressed in consequence. This happened in a rich man’s nursery. Could one blame the ignorant nurse? Her infancy was passed in a city slum, and in every such locality children swarm who freely strike out both in self-protection and brutal aggressiveness. From birth these little ones live more or less in an atmosphere of savage assault. Tyranny and force are the ruling conditions of their childhood, and the natural result—under the unalterable law of cause and effect—is this: vindictive, barbaric feeling is carried hither and thither throughout society at large, and degrades every social class.

When home-life in the middle classes has been reorganized, and nursery training is the outcome of scientific thought, children there at least will escape this taint. They will pass from nursery to schoolroom with nerves that have never been unnecessarily jarred. They will be physically stronger, and in temperament more serene. Reared without harshness, they will know no craven fear; and since the native attitude of childhood towards elders never seen angry or cross is that of confiding love, teachers will have no difficulty in bringing into play the tender emotions that are natural checks upon evil doing, and natural incentives to effort in action that is right. If playfulness intrudes, and the serious work of a class is hindered by some little urchin’s fun, the master or mistress needs neither to scold nor to cane the offender, for unspoken satisfaction and dissatisfaction are quickly perceived and responded to by children unused to punishment or an elder’s frown.

But even in the schoolroom an appeal to mechanism may sometimes prove useful. An instrument called “a characterograph” was described by its inventor to an Edinburgh audience half a century ago. This instrument for registering had been in use in Lady Byron’s Agricultural School at Ealing Grove, with moral effects markedly beneficial. There were many comments in the press of that period. It supersedes all necessity for prizes, place-taking, or any kind of reward or punishment, and renders unnecessary the master’s expressing anger or irritation—“the worst example a teacher can set to his pupils.” (Mr. E. T. Craig was inventor of the characterograph.)

If we bear in mind that the supreme object of training is social solidarity, and that social solidarity rests fundamentally on tender relations between the old, the young, and the middle-aged, we shall recognize the wisdom of elders resigning at the earliest possible moment all manifestations of personal authority. The average boy and girl, if well trained, has at fifteen, or about that age, moral powers sufficiently developed to control innate propensities. At that epoch to the young themselves should be relegated the ruling of youthful conduct in the interests of society. Not to the young singly, however, but in their corporate capacity. The organizing of juvenile committees and conduct clubs will ensue. I need not, however, treat of these here. They belong to the subject of general education, and I am merely touching on training in its relations to specific crime.

The point in social science to emphasize is this: At every stage of the nation’s history its moral health or disease is the actual resultant of previous conditions of its child-life throughout the length and breadth of the land. At the present moment the public mind is astray on this subject. There is no understanding of the restraints necessary on infantile wrong-doing, the wholesome because painless checks to apply to juvenile delinquents. Science must guide us to the right path of action, society must enlist parental authority, or, if need be, coerce the child to take the indicated course. By the absence of wholesome checks and the presence of brutal conditions in childhood we suffer a vast amount of preventible crime. We evolve the criminal by sins of omission outside the prison; we brutalize him further inside the prison by undue, ill-adapted restraints.

Very significant was the experience of Mr. Obermair, of the State Prison in Munich. When appointed governor there, he found from six to seven hundred prisoners in the worst state of insubordination, and whose excesses he was told defied the harshest, most stringent discipline. The prisoners were chained together. The guard consisted of about 100 soldiers, who did duty not only at the gates and round the walls, but in the passages, and even in the workshops and dormitories; and, strangest of all, from twenty to thirty large dogs of the bloodhound breed were let loose at night in the passages and courts to keep watch and ward. The place was a perfect pandemonium, comprising the worst passions, the most slavish vices, and the most heartless tyranny within the limits of a few acres.

Mr. Obermair quickly dispensed with dogs, and nearly all the guards. He gradually relaxed the harsh system, and treated the prisoners with a consideration that gained their confidence. In the year 1852 Mr. Baillie Cochrane visited the prison, and his account is as follows: “The gates were wide open, without any sentinel at the door, and a guard of only twenty men idling away their time in a room off the entrance hall.... None of the doors were provided with bolts and bars; the only security was an ordinary lock, and as in most of the rooms the key was not turned, there was no obstacle to the men walking into the passage.... Over each workshop some of the prisoners with the best characters were appointed overseers, and Mr. Obermair assured me that when a prisoner transgressed a regulation, his companions told him ‘es ist verboten,’ and it rarely happened that he did not yield to the will of his fellow-prisoners. Within the prison walls every description of work is carried on ... each prisoner by occupation and industry maintains himself. The surplus of his earnings is given him on release, which avoids his being parted with in a state of destitution.” (This account is taken from Herbert Spencer’s Essay on Prison Ethics.) It is then clearly proved by actual experience that rough handling and brutal words—bolts and bars and bloodhounds—are alike unnecessary in the case of first offenders and in the case of the “desperate gang.”

But, turning once more from the criminal to the ultimate causes of crime, these are—destitution, or more or less grinding poverty, inherited disease, ignorance and all the degraded nurture that crushes the humanities and develops the brutalities of man. A scientific treatment of crime will eradicate these various causes of crime. No summary methods are applicable. There is no short cut to the end in view; but by patient perseverance in the scientific meliorism indicated in my chapters on Industrial Life, Sex Relations and Parentage, and to be further explained in those on Education and Home Life, the forces brought into play will prove effective in social redemption. They are essentially radical and all-embracing. Within reformatories and prisons there may be partially supplied the training for forming and reforming character that is nowhere present in the homes and schools of the lower classes to-day. Those criminals who are not structurally defective may recover moral health, and become virtuous or at least harmless social units. In all such cases liberty should be restored; but the State can never be justified in discharging its rescued criminals without resources and without protection. They must be supplied with work, i.e. some means of self-support, and guarded from dangers besetting the critical period of liberation. The educating of ignorant criminals, the reforming of corrigible criminals, the restraining from further crime of incurable criminals—these are duties of the State.

The time, however distant, will finally arrive when science, applied for generations to the task of skilfully removing all the causes of crime, will accomplish that glorious aim. By attention to the laws of heredity, by checking the too rapid increase of population, by the moral training of every member of the community, and by well-ordered, happy, domestic, industrial and social life, the criminal nature will die out, and crime itself be simply historical—a thing to study with interest, an extirpated social disease.