Crooked Minds

Heart and Soul by Maveric Post
by Victor Mapes

(Page 11 of 14)

Los Angeles Times, Feb. 5, 1921.

The prompt detection and punishment of the two kidnappers, who were fools enough to believe that they could carry out a melodramatic abduction and get away with it, is a satisfaction to the public. But it does not remove the possibility of similar crimes, attempted and perhaps executed, by the large class of individuals who, like the Carrs, have crooked minds - minds that see only glamour and excitement in the life of a criminal, that are willing to take any chance and gamble with their own lives and liberty as the stakes, for revenge or merely to get money to satisfy their physical demands.

Ten years, more or less, spent in the penitentiary is not likely to straighten out the false conceptions of such men. The Carrs will probably leave the prison with criminal tendencies strengthened by the associations and repressions of penitentiary life.

It is just that such criminals should be put where they cannot prey upon society. But, while we are dealing out due punishment, the main effort of the social body should be put into the prevention of crime. We are talking greatly, just now, of the world-wave of crime following the war. Tomes are being written concerning its causes and its cures. But the primary cause of all crime is the lack of true comprehension of the meaning of life - a distorted viewpoint - a crooked mind.

The causes of such minds are many: heredity, environment, associations, lack of proper self-control and understanding; they can all be summed up, however, as the lack of moral sense in the individual and in the race. The guiding star of existence, the conscience, in such cases, has ceased to function; the goal ahead, a future existence, has been lost sight of. Souls are adrift. Here is the secret of the unrest, the crime, the upheaval of to-day.

The old forms of religion, with their rituals and professions, have lost their hold upon a large portion of humanity. The newer and clearer conceptions of the great truths that are the basis of all religion have not, as yet, taken the place of the old beliefs in the minds and lives of the majority. The people of the world are to-day at sea, with no definite port ahead, with no guiding hand upon the helm of their ship.

In the chaos of this rudderless age state and church are making desperate efforts to palliate the evils of nonreligion and its consequence, non-morality. In our own country we are multiplying state-provided nurseries, schools, playgrounds, gymnasiums, colleges and hundreds of other substitutes for the homes and the home training that fails under the strenuous tests of present-day life. We are enormously attempting to train bodies and brains from the cradle to full citizenship. But with all our provisions and equipment we are failing to touch the real keystone of all character - the spiritual nature of man. We are teaching morality because it is morality, proved by experience to be expedient, on the whole, for a satisfactory career on the earth. But our schools and our churches, also, are failing to teach the highest secret of life - the self-control of mind and body through willed righteousness, based upon a knowledge and comprehension of a God-created and governed universe.

Nor do our schools and colleges train their pupils to an understanding of their own mental powers and the development of right will, of sound reason, of controlled and regulated action. We flood our children and youth with equipment, with teachers, with opportunity for learning things from the outside; yet our educational training is failing, as a whole, in giving to the youth of this country the one essential thing for right living - a true and high ideal and the strength of will to attain it.

Men like the two just sent away; women like Mrs. Peete (whether she be guilty of murder or not) are the products of a generation that has torn itself away from its old anchors of religion, of duty and responsibility and has not yet set up a new standard to true its conduct. State and church, with all their will to do and their efforts and expenditure of means, can never take the place of right-minded parents and homes where children are taught by example and by word their true relations to God and to their fellow-men. Crooked minds can only be prevented by heritage from men and women, who understand their responsibility to God and to their country, and who start their sons and daughters out upon the journey of life with a chance, at least, for decency and uprightness.

New York Tribune, April 22, 1921.

Macaulay On America

"Your Constitution Is All Sail and No Anchor"

The subjoined letter from the historian Macaulay to Henry S. Randall, of Cortland, N.Y., is taken from an old file of The Cortland Standard. It was published originally in Harper's Magazine.

Holly Lodge, Kensington,
London, May 23, 1857.

Dear Sir: The four volumes of the Colonial History of New York reached me safely. I assure you that I shall value them highly. They contain much to interest an English as well as an American reader. Pray accept my thanks and convey them to the Regents of the University.

You are surprised to learn that I have not a high opinion of Mr. Jefferson, and I am surprised at your surprise. I am certain that I never wrote a line, and that I never, in Parliament, in conversation, or even on the hustings - a place where it is the fashion to court the populace - uttered a word indicating an opinion that the supreme authority in a state ought to be intrusted to the majority of citizens told by the head; in other words, to the poorest and most ignorant part of society.

Copyright 1921 by The Century Co.