e innate
feelings of men. This is all the more important for America, as a large
part of our population has come from lands where beauty and art and
music have for generations been made a part of the common life of all.

VII

THE CRIMINAL

Those who have had no experience in the courts and no knowledge of what
is known as the "criminal class" have a general idea that a criminal is
not like other men. The people they know are law-abiding, conventional
believers in the State and the Church and all social customs and
relations; they have strict ideas of property rights, and regard the law
as sacred. True they have no more acquaintance with law-makers and
politicians in general than with the criminal class, which, of course,
is one reason why they have such unbounded confidence in the law. Such
persons are surprised and shocked when some member of the family or some
friend is entangled in the courts, and generally regard it as a
catastrophe that has come upon him by accident or a terrible mistake. As
a rule, they do all in their power to help him whether he is acquitted
or convicted. They never think that he and everyone else they know is
not materially different from the ordinary criminal. As a matter of
fact, the potential criminal is in every man, and no one was ever so
abandoned that some friend would not plead for him, or that some one who
knew him would not testify to his good deeds.

The criminal is not hard to understand. He is one who, from inherited
defects or from great misfortune or especially hard circumstances, is
not able to make the necessary adjustments to fit him to his
environment. Seldom is he a man of average intelligence, unless he
belongs to a certain class that will be discussed later. Almost always
he is below the normal of intelligence and in perhaps half of the cases
very much below. Nearly always he is a person of practically no
education and no property. One who has given attention to the subject of
crime knows exactly where the criminal comes from and how he will
develop. The crimes of violence and murder, and the lesser crimes
against property, practically all come from those who have been reared
in the poor and congested districts of cities and large villages. The
robbers, burglars, pickpockets and thieves are from these surroundings.
In a broad sense, some criminals are born and some are made. Nearly all
of them are both born and made. This does not mean that criminality can
be