the product of American life and living, ways and means.

True enough, the tussle has been and is with alien criminals and undesirables who recently have sieved into America; but that fact doesn’t let America out for her own brood of social backsliders; neither for the manner in which she has compromised with the full bandit crew, constantly mounting in numbers, and constantly less regardful of law and order.

In part, at least, the mind of the criminal who operates in America, is American-made. There is no getting away from that fact, and there is nothing hidden or strange about it.

Take a case common to alien criminals and potential criminals: up to last accounts, Italy’s Camorrists and Mafiausists ran to illegal rope under indifferent hindrance by Italy; yet they much prefer America as a camping ground. Why? Why for the simple reason that loose as is Italy’s legal hold upon them, the like grip of America is even less binding. Furthermore, money-making, money-spreading, and license-breeding America is ripest for loot.

In no civilized country on earth, right now, when other countries are in the throes of disintegrating aftermath of the World War, can an individual, of his own volition, commit capital crime, and count chances of immunity from commensurate punishment in his favor, as he counts them in America.

That being the precise case stripped of lame excuse and lamer balderdash, why should it be extremely difficult to declare the functioning, as to his specific acts, of the mind of the capital criminal in America? And by “capital,” we do not mean to point the ruthless bungler who employs clumsy weapons clumsily; but the plausible, brainy crook, who cunningly “plays ’em all” against rightly-ordered social edicts, which he instinctively hates.

Actually look into and beyond the eyes of the “king-pin” criminal, while you seek to impress him with the just might of impartially executed law. Note how a hard glint will strike through the eyes, even though from ulterior motives he tries to hide it, and pretends to follow you reservedly.

Far from being the pitiable dunce and dupe he is so commonly rated, the by-choice American criminal of high grade is the most dangerous, least excusable, coolly-calculating menace to the social order the world has ever known. He is the most dangerous because he is the most resourceful, and has the least regard for human life; he is the least excusable for the reason that no country has ever borne with him and tried to help him pull up, as America has borne with him and tried to help him pull up; and he is flippantly the rest, and more, because the bids for him in America are made by exactly those whose first business it should be to overreach him.

Did he fail to make the most of those bids, he indeed would be the misfit “moron” agreeably with alleged “scientific” classification of him. Contrariwise, he “plays ’em all”: the judge; the patrolman; the politician; the social worker; the reformer, active and passive; probation officers; the prison agent of high degree he knows must play up to the merry-go-round cult of reformers, if he would hold his job; and, in a pinch in order to bag bigger game, he will “double-cross” any one or all, if he is sure he can keep the double-crossing under cover.

In so far as he shunts essential human values out of his mind, he is a fool, since true happiness is not for the thief or thug; but his material concepts fit human nature closely enough to enable him to go after and get pretty nearly what he wants, in and out of prison, while advisedly making use of all of the long odds in his favor. Doing it, he fears only higher-up spoilsmen who sacrifice criminal pawns.

Maybe he could, and maybe he couldn’t enter a room, envisage the objects therein at a glance, then step into an adjoining room and tale off most of those objects. Probably you couldn’t do so; but if you couldn’t, you wouldn’t put it down conclusively that you had thereby demonstrated your arrested mental development.

Largely because of such easily-misleading “tests,” America has been at meticulous pains to school the criminal to believe himself irresponsible for his illegal acts; this, seemingly oblivious of the fact that the mark of the true moron would rightly attach to him, did he fail to grind all of such gratuitous grist coming to his mill.

If America elects to classify the criminal exactly as he would be classified; and then to dispose of him exactly as he would be disposed of, that’s America’s business. His business is to promote the calling of false turns on him in favor of easy going at his chosen calling; and he attends strictly to business, without care otherwise for what you tag him mentally.

Ostensibly as opposed to the “business,” he will play any card for a consideration along any line you suggest; but not for a moment does he lose sight of his cardinal aim, which is to be a crook hailed by crooks.

Lay gentlemen particularly state the case in words opposed to those which precede; but just because they are lay gentlemen they do not, and they cannot, by any possibility, state the case as it is.

Being a real criminologist presupposes long years of consecrated study of and contact with criminals, in their midst. It also postulates a broad culture, inclusive of the specific bearing of genetic parallels and the reverse; and, as a matter of course, close study of such as the etiology of crime, and of individual and race psychology.

Notwithstanding, lay gentlemen have written, during recent years, most of the basic specifications for the social rehabilitation, by institutional correction, of the habitual, predal felon. Result? Let a parallel case give answer:

Before the discovery of the anti-toxin for diphtheria, suppose a criminologist to have had a strong humanitarian leaning to be of active service in the discovery and use of that anti-toxin. Assume further that he conned a few chemical paragraphs, messed about in hospitals, tinkered at synthesis and the reverse in the laboratory, and wrote copiously from his treasured notebook: how far, think you, would he have gotten in his quest?

The parallel is not perfect, to be sure, but it will serve to point these vital facts: (1) The ninety-and-nine of puttering, basically uninformed, amateur penologists have been primarily a nuisance, and the thousandth has been useless in the work. (2) Secondarily, they have been much more than a mere nuisance, in that they have made it their business to pull down the framework of rational reformative régimes put up by actual criminologists. (3) And in the stead of that deleted or destroyed, they have rung in either puerile activities and inactivities, or sporting-monger activities to the point of offense against God, against Nature, and against the social exactions upon the criminal.

The criminal has not concerned himself about the social exactions upon him. He has not because he isn’t built that way, and because he hasn’t had to do so. Those highest up in reformative councils have obligingly lettered reformative measures to his hand. Therefore he is always on his toes to ding fulsome praise of them in indiscriminating ears, while naturally condemning those he cannot fool all of the time.

So much, in part measure, is of the criminal pot as it boils; and so much tells why the criminal stands pat with commanding cards gratuitously dealt him. When society shall have matched his all-around play in the matter, will be time enough for society to belittle mental gifts with which he is enabled to euchre the land’s combined agents of the law.

In any case, relief is in sight. The bulk of