Crime -- United States; Criminals -- United States
The multiform and multifarious sporting parasite ranges from "Rastus" who
rings in with the rollers of "loaded bones," to the professional promoter
of prize fights: that specious, cane-dangling, manicured
man-that-wont-work, who deals in degeneracy. Not so long ago, he had to
sneak through alleys, or up to sky lofts in order to display his devilish
wares to a few score of attendants who couldn't shut out the image of the
raiding "cop." To-day, this derailer of decency drives his stakes in the
heart of a crowded community and hales reverend seigniors to blood-soaked
canvas. Moreover, mothers flock to bestial exhibitions that imbue lads
with values utterly false, mark them more brutally than bronchos are
branded in the corral, and speed them to useless lives, commonly garnished
with the unspeakable. So much as a syllable of defense in Holy Writ is not
to be found of the drone-sport; and so much as a staunch syllable cannot
be advanced by him as to why he should be suffered to cross the mental,
moral, and physical well-being of unfolding lads and lassies. Down deep in
his soul, this all-pervasive faker pays out of knowledge of the fact that
the grand majority of his fellows size him to his intrinsic worth: bar him
where self-respect moves with its eyes on the stars.
But another step down in natural sequence reaches to him who makes no
bones about being an out-and-out thug. In his mental purview, man was
fisted and framed to no other purpose than for individual selection
agreeably with his brawn and bent. Let them that will strike indirectly
with such as statutes that hamstring equitable exchange, or with
long-distance law that licks the leaner purse. Boiled to the bone, force
is all one in principle, so why don kid gloves in doing your bit for
yourself? Why not go after what you want with the like of the mailed fist,
and let it go at that? Don't a lot of so-called "highbrows" do the same
and go to the head of the social class? "And say!" if there's essential
difference between the moral crook who cranks for ill-gotten gain under
undue process of law and legislation--and the "guy" who greets him with a
gas pipe, spite of the "finest" and four walls that threaten, upon which
of the two, in the final analysis, rests the burden of justification? Of
course all of such trimming will be out of the twisted brain of the
crook-thug who elects to be and remain a crook-thug; and of course, in
flouting the finer sensibilities, he pays in missing the fulness of life
they alone can round out.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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