A Plea for the Criminal: Being a reply to Dr. Chapple's work: 'The Fertility of the Unfit', and an Attempt to explain the leading principles of Criminological and Reformatory ScienceKayll, James Leslie Allan
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A Plea for the Criminal: Being a reply to Dr. Chapple's work: 'The Fertility of the Unfit', and an Attempt to explain the leading principles of Criminological and Reformatory Science
Kayll, James Leslie Allan
Chapple, William Allan, 1864-1936. The fertility of the unfit; Crime; Criminals; Reformatories
entertain the idea that this belief will ever become a dominating one.
Charitable influences are more powerful. Nor must we charge the authors
of selfish systems with being as uncharitable as their systems. They
give expression to a fairly strong and somewhat universal sentiment, a
sentiment which we would perhaps disown at once upon its being unmasked
and which many refuse to obey upon its appeal to them to act in
accordance with its principles. This indicates that society sees many of
its assailants in but a half-light. It observes neither their malice nor
strength but only a dark ugly form which irritates us and which we would
if we could banish by an act of will.
This being impossible we must meet our assailants in a clearer light and
destroy them. How can this be done, since it would mean the destruction
of evil and the powers of evil? Then it cannot be done, but since evil
feeds itself upon its victims we can greatly diminish its power and
influence by rescuing all who fall within its grasp. Many we know we
cannot rescue for there are certain types of disease mental and bodily
which defy our skill and some of all types of moral disease also defy
our effort. Still it would be better to say that we do not rescue them,
than that we cannot, for what was incurable yesterday is curable to-day,
and the most deadly diseases are giving clear evidence that their powers
to baffle science are fast giving out. That they will give out,
scientific men confidently hope. Neither is this hope groundless for
past success warrant it and there again point to another assurance,
almost a guarantee. The miracles of healing which Our Lord wrought were
not only to confer relief upon the suffering, not only to give evidence
of His Divinity, but also to promise the triumph which would reward the
efforts of man seeking to assist his afflicted brother. We will never
heal by a word, neither will we raise the dead, for in these works of
might we have peculiar evidence of the Divine Providence; but Christ's
miracles seem to promise that He, the Light of the World, will yet grant
the fullness of that illumination by which the works of healing are
done.
The sick, it is true, receive greater compassion from their fellowmen
than the abnormal, the insane and the criminal. But these latter also
demand our consideration if for no other reason than that they menace
society. To exterminate them is impossible. A persecution with that end
would defeat itself, and the persecutors would become morally infinitely
worse than the persecuted.
Secondly: their consideration is demanded from the fact that society has
produced the evil plight of very many of them. In the great advance,
they have fallen and been trampled on. Their right to fall may be
denied, but whose right was it to trample on them? To declare it to have
been inevitable that they should be trampled on, simply excuses guilt
but not obligation. And the obligation is to make reparation as far as
possible.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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