a blinded reason, overpowered by that animal nature
which we all possess in common with the brute. If
crime were a fatality, instead of an act of free-will,
it would cease to be a crime, an act worthy of punish-
ment, and become only an occasion of commiseration.
We should pity rather than punish. Society should
protect itself against the criminal, as it does against
the idiotic and insane, by simple restraint, not by the
inffiction of punishment. But we are conscious that
such is not the case with the criminal. We know he
acts against his own moral judgment in violating the
law, doing that which he knows to be wrong, knows to
be worthy of blame and punishment. Knowing that
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12- CRIME AND THE FAMILY.
he ought not to do these acts, he does them ; and
therein lies his criminality and his guilt, and the pos-
sibility and certainty of his being conscious of his own
demerit, of his own guilt, of his desert of punishment,
so that when he stands at the bar of justice for judg-
ment, he knows and feels that his punishment is just,
his own mind and consciousness being his judge.
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CRIME ā SOME OF ITS MANIFESTATIONS. I3
CHAPTER III.
CRIME ā SOME OF ITS MANIFESTATIONS.
We will now turn to some of the facts connected
with the development and manifestation of crime.
Each criminal has a history, and crime itself has also
its history ; and if we can read these histories aright,
we may learn the secret cause, ever operative in society
in the promotion and education of criminals.
The first fact to which I shall call attention, is the
startling fact that the great majority of criminals are
boys and young men of the age of thirty and under.
The following facts are taken from the reports of the
Ohio penitentiary : Out of one hundred and thirty con-
victs admitted to the penitentiary of Ohio during the
year ending the.22d day of December, A. d. 1841,
forty-four were of the age of twenty and under ; fifty-
two over the ages of twenty and under the age of thirty-
one ; nineteen over thirty and under forty-one ; ten over
forty and under fifty-one, and five over the age of fifty-
one. In 1842 there were received one hundred and
thirty-seven, the ages of which are reported as follows :
Twenty-two were under the age of twenty-one ; sev-
enty-three over twenty and under thirty-one ; nineteen
over thirty and under forty-one ; sixteen over forty and
under fifty-one, and seven over that age. Out of one
hundred and fifty-six who were discharged in the same
year, twenty-nine were under twenty-one ; seventy-one
over twenty and under thirty-one ; thirty-five over
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14 CRIME AND THE FAMILY.
thirty and under forty-one ; seventeen over forty and
under fifty-one, and four over fifty. There were one
hundred and thirty-four discharged in 1841, whose
ages were as follows : Fourteen were under the age of
twenty-one ; seventy-four over twenty and under thirty-
one ; twenty-three over thirty and under forty-one ; fif-
teen over forty and under fifty-one, and eight over fifty.
Out of two hundred and fifty-eight received, bne hun-
dred and eighty-five were under the age of thirty-one,
and sixty-three over the age of thirty ; while of two
hundred and ninety discharged convicts, one hundred
and eighty-eight were under thirty-one, and one hun-
dred and two were over thirty. In the case of the dis-
charged convicts, the age of conviction is less than the
age of discharge by the length of the imprisonment
which the convict has undergone. I presume it will
be found that these returns represent the general aver-
age of the ages of conviction, not only in Ohio, but in
the other States of the Union. These returns of crime,
whenever and wherever examined, will be found, I
think, to present the same results as to ages ; and the
experience of every judge connected with the admin-
istration of the criminal law, will only add confirmation
to the melancholy fact that the great mass of our crim-
inals are young men and boys under the age of thirty-
one.
The reason why there are so few old criminals is in
part and mainly due to the fact, that a life of crime is
a short life. The criminal is almost universally ad-
dicted to those vices which contribute so fearfully to
abridge the term of human life. Drunkenness and li-
centiousness are vices peculiar to the criminal, and none
shorten human life like these. A life of crime is also
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CRIME ā SOME OF ITS MANIFESTATIONS. IS
a life of hardship and exposure, of excess and of want,
conditions inconsistent with heaUh and length of days.
The great proportion of criminals then begin early,
while yet mere boys, their career of crime, and die off
before attaining the age of forty. Those of a greater
age will be found to be exceptional cases, where men
in mature life have been led by the pressure of circum-
stances to the commission of a single crime, and serve,
therefore, to confirm the general result to which these
figures and returns lead us.
There is another fact which is brought out by a care-
ful reading of the history of crime, that the larger pro-
portion of criminals come from our cities and large
towns. The rural population furnish few criminals in
proportion to the whole number, and there are reasons
why this should be so. Crime usually commences in a-
vicious indulgencies. The boy who becomes a criminal,
has first been guilty of vice and dissipation ; he has by
these been prepared to become a criminal ; through
them he has been educated into crime. The tempta-
tions to vice are not found in the rural districts ; drink-
ing and licentiousness are not within the reach of
youth there as they are in a city or large town, where
they meet the boy in every street and at every corner,
and call to him from every alley, inviting and urging
him to indulgence ; hence the youth of a city are as-
sailed by temptations, of which a boy raised on a farm
can know nothing. The boy in the country may re-
main virtuous, simply because the temptations and
means of vice, of moral degradation, are not accessible
to him ; while, if he had been bred in a city, he would
have eagerly ran astray into vice and crime. The po-
sition of many a boy then decides his destiny for life.
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. l6 . CRIME AND THE FAMILY.
whether he shall be an ornament or a pest to society,
an honor or a disgrace to his friends. This explains
the fact that so many boys and young men, who in
their rural home were virtuous and upright, go astray
in the by-ways of vice and crime, when transferred
amid the temptations and seductions of a great city;
they have been virtuous because the meaps of vice
were not within their reach, not because they had re-
ceived that intellectual and moral training which wakes
up within us a power to resist all outward influences
and vicious temptations, since we guide our life by the
light that is within us, and not by the influences which
v^itCt from without. Many a youth is kept from vice by
the mere pressure of the outward influences which sur-
round him ; but take this pressure off*, and he will
swing away into the regions of vicious indulgence, as
the earth would into the regions of space, if the law
of gravitation should cease to act. Abstinence fro/n
vice is not virtue ; that consists in a life wrought out
from principles embraced by the reason and believed
in as true ā in a life which is the manifestation of a
power within the spirit, and not the product of outward
circumstances and influences.
Another fact may be here noticed, and that is, that
the great proportion of criminals come from two
classes ā the -poor and the rich. It needs only a little
experience in the administration of criminal justice to
be satisfied of this fact. And there are reasons why
this should be so. The prayer of Augur explains the
reason of it: ''Give me neither poverty nor riches ;
feed me with food convenient for me, lest I be full and
deny Thee, and say who is the Lord ? ā or lest I be
poor and steal, and take the name of my God in vain."
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CRIME ā SOME OF ITS MANIFESTATIONS. 1 7
Want often tempts to stealing, and stealing leads to
other and higher crimes ; while an abundance of wealth
furnishes the means of vicious indulgence, and, through
vice, leads to want and crime. The one class can af-
ford to be vicious ; the other can not afford to be honest
and virtuous. The great body of our industrious pop-
ulation are by industry preserved from dissipation and
vice, and hence from crime, while wealth enables its
possessor to be idle, and in idleness is found one of
the widest gates and broadest ways leading to vice
and crime.
The last fact to which I wish to call attention, is the
fact that most of the boys who grow up to become
criminals are allowed to stray away from the family
and waste their time in the streets and alleys, and the
various places of recreation found in our cities and
large towns. Family government is relaxed, and the
boys are permitted to be out at nights, in these cities
and toviTns, and thus acquire their education in the
haunts of intoxication, licentiousness, and kindred
vices. The moral consciousness is soon deadened by
such a life ; vicious appetites and wants are stimulated
in activity, and, to gratify these, the boy will resort to
falsehood, and ultimately to crime. There he also
comes in contact with older and more hardened boys,
and by them is introduced into a society, the vocation
of which is vice and crime. The school of crime is
the streets of a city or large town, and the teachers of
crime are the reprobates in vice and the perpetrators
of crime, who are there found swarming in multitudes,
eager and ready to train others to walk the way they
are engaged in themselves. I have witnessed the his-
2
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1 8 CRIME AND THE FAMILY.
tory of boys thus educated into crime, and it was a
case of this character which -first called my attention
to this subject.
The children of two classes are exposed to this fear-
ful ordeal ā those of the rich and those of the poor.
Poor parents who live in a city are compelled by daily
labor to earn their daily bread. They have no em-
ployment for their children, and, in mj\ny instances,
can not afford the expense of regular schooling.
Hence their children grow up in idleness and without
education. Having no means of instruction and re-
creation at home, the children must seek activity else-
where ; and where else can they find it, except in the
streets and in company with the boys who are there
found? The older ones become the instructors and
educators of the younger ; and there will be found a
graduated system of criminal education fully organ-
ized, beginning with the hardened criminal and ex-
tending down from grade to grade to the infant who
can scarcely waddle in the streets. The pupils of the
higher class or grade become, in their turn, the teach-
ers of the next lower, and in this way the child is
taken on through all the grades of a criminal educa-
tion, until he graduates in the penitentiary or upon the
gallows. Such children are to be pitied, because
abandoned by the guardians whom God has given
them. They are left to grow up Jike weeds and briers
by the roadsides and in the fence-corners.
But, while the poor have some excuse and pallia-
tion for their neglect, parents blessed with wealth have
no excuse for theirs. They have tlie means of render-
ing home pleasant for their children, of procuring for
them the means of education, and of furnishing them
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CRIME ā SOME OF ITS MANIFESTATIONS. I9
with suitable employments. But, too much occupied
With increasing and taking care of their growing
wealth, they give no attention to the wants of their
offspring. Indeed, many parents who have grown
rich by their own industry, ability, and economy seem
to consider labor a disgrace, to which their children
must not be subjected. Though the}' themselves have
been slaves to it all their lives, and are still too busy
in the pursuit of wealth to train their children to indus-
try, honesty, and virtue, they want their sons to be
gentlemen, and, in their narrow views, idleness and
dress and extravagance are the tests of a gentleman.
Hence their sons are supplied with money, and left to
their own guidance, amid the temptations of a great
city or a large town. Having received no intellectual
or moral culture themselves, many of them are wholly
ignorant of its value and vital importance to the wel-
fare of their own children. Preserved** by poverty
from vice themselves, they seem to think that their
children will escape its contamination, while supplied
with all the means of indulgence and left to the rude
teachings of their appetites and passions. Children
thus allowed to grow up become the fast young men
in our cities, and, in the end, become involved in
some crime of murder, committed amid the revelry of
the drinking-saloon or the^indulgences of the brothel.
It is needless to refer to cases. They will readily rise
up before the memory of one at all acquainted with
the current history of crime in our cities. Parents too
late, alas ! are often waked up to the folly and wick-
edness of such a course by the downward career in
vice and crime of a son once dear to their hearts.
Their wealth, toiled for with so much care and
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20 CRIME AND THE FAMILY.
1 I ā . ā ā
hoarded with so much economy, instead of blessing
their children, serves but to procure for them a richer
winding-sheet and coflSn and a more sumptuous fu-
neral, and to pay the grave-digger to remove from
sight the diseased and loathsome remains of a son
once the joy of the parental home, now its dishonor
and disgrace and misery, all brought about by parental
misconduct and neglect. What consolation is wealth
to a father or mother agonizing under the awful con-
sciousness that theirs is the fault, theirs the responsi-
bility for the wretched end of degraded, vicious, and
criminaZ sons? And yet I have seen a parent who
boasted of such criminal neglect in the training of his
children, while his son stood arraigned at the bar of
justice to receive sentence for a crime. But such
monsters in human shape are made such by their in-
fidelity and irreligion. Believing in no God, their
children are but animals, and their lives as little worth
as those of the dog or the horse ; when ended, all is
ended.
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CRIME ā ITS TRUE SOURCE. 21
CHAPTER IV.
CRIME ā ITS TRUE SOURCE.
The facts presented in the last chapter tend strongly
to show wherein is found the true source of crime. It
is not found in any law of necessity, in any blind fa-
tality working in and through humanity, and forcing
It irresistibly into the practice of crime. Men are
free ; they can not be forced into vice and crime
against their wills. If they indulge in vices and com-
mit crimes, the reason of their so doing is because
they choose so to do, and the reason why they choose
so to do is found in the fact that their education and
moral training have failed to lead them to do other-
wise. Most are not criminal, most now are not
vicious, and the reason why they are not is found in
tlie Tact that they have been trained by parental au-
thority and teaching to deny their animal appetites
and passions, and to shape their lives by laws and
rules outside of and above humanity ā laws and rules
which teach us to restrain our passions and appetites,
to hold them in rigid subjection, while we conform our
actions and lives to these laws and rules of everlasting
right. If all parents would do their duty, would so
teach and govern their children as they ought to do,
vice and crime would disappear, and virtue and order
mark all the developments of society and all the ac-
tions of men. If this is the case with most children,
why can not it be the case with all ? The wise man
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22 CRIME AND THE- FAMILY.
has said that if a child is trained up in the way he
should go, he will not, when he is old, depart from it.
This declaration is either true or it is not true. If it
is true, then all misconduct on the part of children can
be traced to neglect on the part of parents, and upon
them rests the awfiil responsibility, if their child goes
astray in the paths of vicious indulgences and closes
his career at the bar of criminal justice. That this
assertion of the wise man is true, is apparent from
the facts already stated. Criminals come forth from
those classes and conditions of societ}' among which
there is a laxness of family government. Children
are permitted to stray away from home influences, to
mingle with bad men, who become their educators,
and educate and train them to gratify passions* and in-
dulge appetites, instead of restraining- the one and
den3ang the other. Criminals do not come forth from
well-trained Christian families. In such families the
child is kept away from the temptations which beset
one in our cities and large towns, and are taught the
great laws of right living, and constrained, by proper
authority, to keep their animal instincts and appetites
and passions in subjection to the law of reason ; while
the criminal comes from families who fail to teach and
govern, and allow the child to roam abroad, where
temptations meet him at every step, and vice beckons
him on with her blandest and most winning smiles.
If there was any doubt upon this point, a single
fact must dissipate it. The great body of criminals
consists of males. There are very few female crim-
inals. The following figures are taken at random
from the returns of th^ Ohio penitentiary, and for
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CRIME ā ITS TRUE SOURCE. 23
years, the returns for which are now within my reach.
Read and consider them well :
The returns for A. d. 1841 show four hundred and
eighty convicts, of which four hundred and seventy-
four are males, and six only are females ; for 1842, four
hundred and forty-nine males, and nine females ; in
June, A. D. 1849, there were eight hundred and two
maleSi and fourteen females.
These figures show, correctly the relative number of
the two sexes who become the subjects of criminal
prosecution. We know, indeed, that very few females
are tried in pur courts for the violation of law, in com-
parison with the number of males. Now, females con-
stitute over one-half of every population, and why is
it, then, a fact patent to all that such a vast dispropor-
tion is found to exiM between the number of criminals
furnished by each ? There must be some reason for
this remarkable fact. It can not be attributed to na-
ture. Is it to bS admitted that bo37s are organized for
crime, and girls are not? Are not their moral natures
the same? That women are capable of vice and
crime we know. We see most fearful examples of
both at times. Nay, when woman does fall away
into vice and crime, she seems to sink lower than men
can. We see, then, in woman the same depravity
that we see in man. In their development^ if un-
checked, it will have the same tendencies as in man,
and lead on. to the same fearful results. There is
naturally no difference, in this respect, between the
two sexes. The one is as capable of vice and crime
as the other. Hence there must be some reason
within the control of society why the one class runs
to crime and the other does not.
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24 CRIME AND THE FAMILY.
The reason for this difference is found in our social
habits. Girls are not permitted to do what boys are
permitted to do. The girl is kept within the family
circle, under the power of home influences, and out
of the reach of the temptations to vice and crime.
Boys commit, every day, acts which, if girls were to
do the same, would give a shock to society, and cause
every father and mother to raise their hands and voices
in astonishment and horror. What would you think
if the girls in a city or town should visit the gin-palace,
the drinkmg-saloon, sit at the card-table where gam-
bling is permitted, be out in the streets of our cities
and towns till midnight, rambling one knows not
where, and doing one knows not what? And 3'et
boys, by our social conventionalism, are permitted to
do all this without rebuke, even without remark. Our
social morality watches the conduct of the girls, re-
strains them, keeps them away from vicious tempta-
tions, confines them within the family circle, and sub-
jects them to its holy influences, while boys are allowed
to break away from home and home influences, and
run madly to embrace temptations where they present
themselves under the most Captivating and seductive
forms.
In this difference in our mode of treating and train-
ing the one sex from our mode of treating and training
the other, is found a sufiicient reason for the fact that
nearly all the criminals come from the one sex and
scarcely any from the other. In the different educa-
tion and training which society gives to each, is the
cause for this startling, this painful fact, and not in
any law of necessity or of social development. Sub-
ject the girls to the same treatment and training to
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CRIME ā ITS TRUE SOURCE. 2$
which boys are subjected, and there would come as
many criminals from the one sex as from the other.
If education and training, if social conventionalism
can save girls from becoming criminals, it can also
save the boys from a like destiny. Let boys be kept
within the influence of the family ; be tauglit to feel
the disgrace that attaches to a girl for a violation of
social proprieties ; be kept away from the streets, from
the temptation there found ; and they will be as virtuous
as their sisters, and as much the ornament and the
honor'of home as they are.
These facts and observations demonstrate that the
source of all crime is in the family, arises from some
neglect on the. part of those to whom God has intrusted
the infant, when first it opens its ej^es upon the light
which beautifies and gladdens the earth. This tendency
in humanity to vice and crime can be counteracted and
restrained, if the parent knows and will do his whole
duty to the young immortal committed to his custody
and nurture. If, then, the child goes astray, there has
been neglect or ignorance on the part of parents ; the
child has not been properly trained, because if he had
been he would have continued to live and act as he
had been taught to live and act, as he had been trained
to live and act.
This truth, painful as it is, should be impressed upon
the mind of every parent. Parents should feel that
upon them lies the fearful responsibility if their son
becomes sunken in vice and hardened in crime ; if
their son suffers in the penitentiary or on the gallows,
they must recollect that he thus suffers through their
criminal neglect of those duties which they owed to
their child. If parents fully realized this fearful truth,
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20 CRIME AND THE FAMILY.
they would not dare to neglect, as so many now do,
their parental duties ā their duties of teaching and train-
ing and .governing their children, their duty of con-
straining them to do as the parent knows -the child
ought to be made to do. It is to the neglect or mistakes
of parents in the training of their children that we may
attribute all the vice and crime which now fill the
world with so much pain and sorrow. This fearful
truth can not be too often repeated in the ear of every
parent and of every child.
Such being the fact, it becomes a question' of the
deepest moment, how shall the parent so act as to in-
isure his offspring against vice and crime? Much evil
results from the ignorance of parents and from the mis-
takes consequent upon that ignorance. Many well-
meaning and religious parents have vicious and crim-
inal sons ; they meant well, but they made a mosi
fearful mistake in their mode of education and training.
To prevent such mistakes, the science of educating a
human being should be better understood. For this
purpose two things are requisite ā a knowledge of the
human soul or a human being ; of its nature and the
true mode by which God ordained that it should be
developed, educated, and trained. It is to these ques-
tions that the balance of this little work will be devoted-
I shall endeavor to ascertain the nature of man, what
powers and capacities he possesses, and the mode and "
manner by which these powers and capacities are to
be developed, regulated, and trained, so that the child