Crime -- United States; Criminals -- United States
_Dr. Adler says there are 10,000,000 feeble-minded people in our
country. Well, well: it isn't as bad as we thought. Passaic News._
Crime is commonly imaged as felonious offense committed against the public
law. Definitions of the word "crime" are likewise restricted in meaning.
The common idea of crime is natural, and the legal definition of it is
necessary, albeit crime reaches far beyond casual views and word-analysis.
In the final sieving, anything that abets, suggests or examples devilish
conduct on the part of normal humans, is criminal.
It is a devilish thing to do individual murder; but it is infinitely more
devilish to so gouge and mulct as to help kill the chances of millions of
fellow beings to bring up their broods as children have a right to be
brought up.
It is a spiteful fling of Nature that monogamous mating cannot hold the
oversexed of the human species; yet their bestial impulses are benign, as
compared with the persistence of the public press in successively
pyramiding detail on detail of the nasty aftermath of the expression of
those impulses. "News is news," yes; also, nasty news is nasty news,
concerning which the moral obligation is upon the newspaper fraternity not
to flaunt it, time and again, at the top, under spread-type caption, for
the edification of younglings. The writer has been in position to know
that the bulk of newspaper men do not relish the kind of mental pabulum
they feel they are practically compelled to serve to a percentage of their
patrons. Editors and the like are usually staunch, far-seeing men who
realize fully the fateful suggestion of the crime-breeding,
sexually-perverting print they hold themselves obliged to feature, else be
beaten to it by competitors with narrative a part of the public demand.
Nevertheless, it is more than probable that the sheet which should decline
either prominence to, or reiteration of, such as erotic copy, would
increase rather than yield its clientele. To believe else were to believe
the mind of the average citizen to be reduced to a very low level.
As a matter of fact, the average reader lends but casual eye to crime and
sex-charged stuff. He turns from the mere headings thereof in disgust. Did
he follow through with arrested attention, he would be impressed with the
carrying power of the stuff, and take measures to protect his kids from
it. That the case boils down to impressionable effect upon the babe in
embryo, is sufficient to give good men pause over the publication of such
as prurient matter, poisonous to the last degree by suggestion to immature
minds. Moreover, to deprive unsocial and anti-social plungers of a public
audience, is one of the best ways by which to extract the tang from their
obliquely-conceived flings.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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