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our modern industrial and economic mechanism which are not only present either directly or indirectly in the etiology of all crimes, but which make certain types of crime very nearly inevitable. Whereas the economic factor has always operated as a conditioning force in the activity of man within the group, it needs only a superficial reading of historical and current events to realize that the underlying struggle for existence has taken on a unique complexion in the last 150 years. Whether we choose to accept the Marxian interpretation or the broader "economic interpretation" as offering either efficient cause or sufficient reason for the present state of affairs, we are forced to meet in a very real manner the objective and results of the cultural evolution since the Middle Ages in the shape of labor problems, class struggle, poverty, communistic reorganization of society, and (as I shall try to point out) a widespread and increasing breakdown of social control manifested in criminal statistics.

There are several logical lines along which an investigation of this nature may proceed. First, we may point out certain of the broad underlying assumptions of the working basis of the modern economic scheme-notably the efficacy of business enterprise and free competition. Here we would be concerned with E. A. Ross's criminaloid. In the second place, and still in a very general vein, certain connections may be seen between crime and the repressive effect on human nature of centralized urban factory production on a large scale characterized by a minute subdivision of labor. Of equal importance in accounting for general unrest and a heightened valuation upon "worldly goods" (in which the motives for the commission of many economic crimes lie implicit) is the whole psychological inferiority-superiority mechanism at work behind the putative "decent" or "American" standard of living. Again, in the third place, there is a distinct relation between the volume of crime and the economic stratification of classes with the attendant large dependent and pauper classes and gross inequalities in the distribution of wealth. Finally, we may correlate fluctua

tions in criminal statistics with that whole class of phenomena, the familiar and unique concomitant of the present industrial system, included under such heading as trade cycles, rising and falling prices, subsistence wages, seasonal fluctuations, and peculiarities of occupational distribution. It will be observed also that these factors here outlined are of paramount importance in any discussion of labor problems.

Before taking up in detail a discussion of the above mentioned factors, it would perhaps be appropriate to mention certain facts in regard to criminological nomenclature in the classification of crime. It is conceivable that any of the various types of crime-against property, against the state, against the person, against religion or public morals-may have in the role of an efficient cause any one, or all, of the suggested economic forces. It is generally assumed, however, that crimes against property are especially due to economic motives and roughly speaking they may be designated as "economic crimes." Many attempts have been made to estimate the value of the economic forces in the causation of all classes of crime. The study made by Fornasari di Verce upon criminality in Italy is probably the most successful. He attempts to rank with reference to the strength of the economic motive the different types of crime such as thefts, embezzlement, fraud, commercial crimes, blackmail, extortion, homicide, assault, etc. The conclusion to be drawn from the study is that economic pressure tends to increase crimes against property more than crimes against the person. Substantially the same conclusion is to be drawn from studies made by Parmelee2 and W. A. Bonger. It is therefore with crimes against property or "economic crimes" that we shall be most concerned in this article. If it can be demonstrated that statistical estimates of the volume of crimes committed against property tend to vary directly with either the intensity or extensity of the operation of economic forces and characteristics it may be

3

2Op. cit., p. 78.

3W. A. Bonger, Criminality and Economic Conditions, Boston, 1916.

possible to prove that there is a clear connection of cause and effect (correlation) between the two variables.

We who have had our being within the limitations of the modern industrial society find it very difficult to realize that any other state of being is possible in the future and it is only with a very careful development of our historical imagination that we are able to construct a situation in the past which differs materially from that which by virtue of its very existence is "natural" and "reasonable" to us. And yet the whole cultural ensemble as we see it today is very recent in the history of the race. So recent, in fact, that many of our later day psychologists are prone to think that the major portion of our social malaise is due to the fact that the change has been all too abrupt for human nature to effect an adjustment to the new demands that are put upon it. As Tarde has it . . . "ce n'est pas le capitalisme comme tel qui est démoralisateur, c'est la crise morale qui accompagne le passage de la production artisane à la capitaliste, ou de tel mode de celle-ci a tel autre mode." The elements of this moral crisis form the subject matter of a great many very learned treatises (see, for example, Henry Adams, The Degradation of Democratic Dogma and the many books which seek to establish criteria of Social Progress) only a few of which may be touched upon in this connection. Whatever else our modern civilization may mean it certainly is vastly more complex than any form of life that has yet been the part of man; a complexity which manifests itself in an increasing pressure which is felt on all sides and finds multiple exemplification in every nexus of our existence. Consider, for example, the heightened intensity of the pressure brought to bear on human nature by the narrow margin allowed to human relationships on their temporal side. In the statement this seems to be a simple, almost mechanical fact, yet the implications for human existence and welfare are tremendous.

Things must be done on time,

4G. Tarde, La Criminalité et les phénomènes économiques; Arch. d'anth. crim., Vol. XVI, 1901, p. 158.

Our meals, our sleep, our work, our amusement-every act of life for the urban dweller is regulated down to the split second. The time clock has become a great and a pregnant symbol. The screws have been gradually tightened until the temporal interstice between stimulus and reaction has almost in the language of student themes "paled into insignificance." Human nature is being jammed in between the hours. And yet all this seems very natural to us and, in fact highly desirable and commendable if we are to judge from the evidence derived from a reading of "business" publications, mottoes in banks, and the confessions of various and sundry successful men as revealed in the pages of the American Magazine. It remained for the abnormal psychologists to appear on the scene and tell us that it is just such a "natural" condition of life as this which is at the bottom of the increasing number of cases of paranoia among business men and the various neuroses to which the feminine element of the population seems to be subject. This breakdown or rebellion of our original instinctive nature against being shoved down into any such iron-bound, mechanical order such as in the nature of the case has been forced upon us by our industrial system is most clearly to be seen, if we are to believe the Freudians, in the various aberrational tendencies of the sex instinct. However, and with more bearing on the question at hand, we are becoming cognizant of the affection at other points. I need only mention Veblen's, Instinct of Workmanship, Tawney's, The Acqusitive Society, Hobson's, The Evolution of Modern Capitalism and Carleton Parker's, The Casual Laborer and Other Essays to call to mind a whole literature which has sprung up to exhibit the evil effects of the degredation and degeneration of the instinct of workmanship under the modern economic system. Their analysis runs briefly in this manner: the worker divorced from the ownership of his tools, without standing in the community, a depersonalized cog in a great machine, has lost the normal (customary under the old regime) outlets for inherent urges; for these normal outlets no other means of expression have

been substituted; on the other hand, it is characteristic of human nature that no bottling up of these instinctive tendencies is possible, but rather all human activity is untiringly and unceasingly actuated by the demand for an adequate realization of these instinct wants. As Parker has it in his essay on the Motives of Economic Life,..."with the industrial revolution and the emergence into the pecuniary scheme of things a small property-owning class and a large proletariat, life presented habit opportunities which stressed, in the master class, the so-called egotistical instincts of leadership, hunting, ostentation and vanity, and for the working class removed the opportunities to express the instinct of workmanship and reduced and restricted the other avenues of expression or perverted them to non-evolutionary or anti-social behavior. Instinct perversion rather than freely selected habits of instinct expression seems broadly a just characterization of modern labor-class life. Modern labor unrest has a basis more psychopathological than psychological, and it seems accurate to describe modern industrialism as mentally unsanitary." What we have then at the present juncture is a large proportion of the population suffering from perverted and balked desires which cannot find, but must have a normal (respectable and accepted) outlet. When such a state of affairs exists only one thing can happen. The lid pops off. It is then only a question of the individual temperament, of the reaction strength and nervous tension of the individual whether the "popping" will result in such relatively minor difficulties as labor agitation, union organization, strikes and other economic orgies, or whether it will eventuate in out and out criminal acts as the mutilation of materials, and machinery, sabotage, burning of wheat stacks, dynamiting of buildings -all examples of industrial and economic crimes which fill the papers every day. In consideration of this class of phenomenon probably more clearly than any other we may see how very thin is the line which may be drawn between

5Carleton Parker, The Casual Laborer and Other Essays, New York, 1920, p. 156.

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