The Republican. [volume] (Oakland, Md.) 1877-current, 1899-01-26
Present-Day Thoughts.
BY MEMO"

tnat makes clllQren SulIer LOT Uue
sins of parents-an with these the
society of the future will deal as it
now does with the sick and the luna
tic, shut them up until well or until
death, if never likely to recover.
People with inherited criminal ten
denotes never understand their rela
ton to society. They always have a
little bee buzzing in their bonnets
that confuses their ideas and makes
them violent and burglarious with
out the slightest intention of doing
evil. Their natures are so warped, in
fact, that good and evil are not un-
derstood in their full meaning, good
being rather interpreted as the DO
ing without detection, evil as a dis
covery of wrong after it has been
done. Such characters learn nothing
from being shut up nor do they learn
anything from being free, and for
them the Goth Century will provide
houses of detention where as pleas
antly as possible and more profitable
than if free, the days and years shall
pass, giving some measure of physical
happiness and comfort, and at the
same time protecting society from
attacks that are mere impulse, and
from the deferred but insidious
danger that comes from permitting
people of decided criminal bent to
reproduce their kind at will. The
moral imbecile of the future will be
considered Il filter subject for the
verdict of a committee of skilled
physicians, than the verdict of twelve
unskilled iurymen, who are called
on to decide merely whether the deed
of evil was committed or not and are
not at all equal to understanding why
the wretched human creature before
them had the impulse and yielded to
it. The new century will see much
more discriminating III relation to
wrong doing and the whole tendency
will be TO set apart by themselves
those who are filled with accursed i'm
pulses from the womb. They will be
regarded more as objects of pity than
subjects OF punishment, and their
proper treatment will, like every good
deed, react upon society in hundred
ways, lessening the number of crimi
mails, reducing the constant legal cost
of looking after their defendants, and
at the same time throwing around
the pitiable creatures some of the
comfort and regularity and self-re-
preston that belong to those who
have no heritage of woe to carry.
~
Some people fall under the ban of
the law and become criminals by hap
penings that are almost accidents.
A pinch of the pocket, a crowding
by obligations, a favorable opportu-
nifty and the hitherto respectable
member of society is arraigned and
sentenced and confined.
A little quarrel, harmless enough at
the outset-and liable to occur with
the best of us-tires uncontrollab
passion and bodily injury is done to
the opponent. Then the culprit pos
sibly less guilty or at any rate less an
noying than the one he knocks down
is put where he can do no further
harm.
Or perhaps the complaining voices
of hungry children and the wistful
woe of a suffering wife made man
lend ear to the tempter who urges
him to take from those who well can
spare to give those who need; and
society's organized protectors descend
upon t h unhappy, needy, be
wildered being and he is put where
the result is to reduce his family 10
still greater need.
Society of the century yet to come
will be found more willing to set free
such as these than to shut them up.
The system of suspending a sentence
over a first offender and enforcing it
only after the commission of Il second
misdeed will be found much more in
vogue forty years from now by those
of us who survive so long. No proph-
ecy can be surer, for such action
will only be along the line of common
sense toward which the interpreta-
ton of law is beginning to tend more
and more. The wisdom of the act
consists in understanding human ma
ture and therefore knowing that to
an unhardened criminal the dread of
a sentence still in suspense will be
punishment and deterrent enough, |
Society will have all needed protec-
ton, and the human creature that
society is dealing with will have been
given Il chance to show that his wrong
doing was not the result of evil tend |
ency, and the eyes of our grandchild-
rem will be saved from the shameful
sight of remedial institutions being
filed with those who are damaged in |
selfrespect by the associations to