Twenty Years a Detective in the Wickedest City in the WorldWooldridge, Clifton R. (Clifton Rodman)
History
Twenty Years a Detective in the Wickedest City in the World
Wooldridge, Clifton R. (Clifton Rodman)
Crime -- Illinois -- Chicago; Police -- Illinois -- Chicago
What are you doing with your child's sense of right and wrong? Are
you certain that you are not training a criminal, beginning with him
at two years old? What is your boy at six years of age? Is he liar,
thief--perhaps of insane ego as he was when he first toddled from his
mother's arms? Inferentially President Roosevelt may have complimented
you on the acquisition of a large family, but rather than this, has
it occurred to you that the father and mother of one child, brought
up in the light of wisdom, may be deliverers of mankind against the
numerical inroads of the other type of parent?
Insanity is the mental condition out of which it is impossible for
the person of any age to recognize the rights of others in any form.
This insanity may be due wholly to the overdevelopment of the primary
ego in the child. At one year old the infant may be a potential
criminal of the worst type. It lies to the mother by screaming as if
in pain in order that she may be brought to its bedside. If the adult
should steal personal property as this babe steals food wilfully,
the penitentiary would be his end. Angered, this same babe might
attempt murder in babyhood, the spirit fostered by the same selfish
intolerance that is filling jails and crowding gallows traps.
RESPECT RIGHTS OF OTHERS.
Ego in the community life is the basis of all ill or all good, even
to the dream of Utopia. The basis of all ill is the primary ego which
is inseparable from the child until teaching has eliminated it. The
basis of all good is that secondary ego which recognizes the rights of
others.
Morality--good--virtue--all that is considered desirable in the best
type of citizenship develop out of the community life. Even in the
lower orders of animals a greater intelligence marks the creatures
that live community existences than is to be seen in the isolated
creatures. And this is from the development of the secondary ego which
exacts rights for others.
The child has no knowledge of this secondary virtue save as it is
taught it. The mother who, by responding out of a mistaken affection
to every wail of the infant, encouraging all, no longer is susceptible
to home influences in teaching the lesson. If this youth shall become
entangled in the toils of the law and the mistaken parents intercede
for him, gaining their ends in saving him from all punishment for his
misdeeds, the boy receives through it only another selfish impetus
toward more and greater offenses against society.
REFORMATORY AFTER FIRST CRIME.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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