Oppression and Defense
372 THE COMMONWEAL August I4, I929 such things. The tide has risen steadily against capital punishment, and the movement for prison reform has been endorsed by millions. It is widely...
...It cannot be stamped out by pills or surgery...
...History, indeed, tells us not a little of the magnificent limits to which saints went in their dealings with malefactors...
...IF THE idea propounded at Baton Rouge, Louisiana, can be effectively harnessed to reality, more than 2,ooo,ooo farmers and stock raisers Associated will stand shoulder to shoulder in the National Chamber of Agricultural CoFarmers, Inc...
...He does not take his punishment as a rapscallion of I8oo took his...
...Thus equality would be achieved by time...
...That body is apparently far from corpulent already...
...Condemn a man to prison, therefore, and you have locked up an individual who, though conscious of his evil deeds and moral outlawry, has nevertheless been bred in a certain tradition of justice...
...and most of us begin to register some progress in the spiritual order not when we remind ourselves of what we have not done, but when we enumerate hte sores of which we have been healed...
...WEEK BY WEEK URING the past weeks, Mr...
...It is bruited on all sides that religion is the "eternal barrier against the social deluge," and one concedes that there is an element of rightness in the claim...
...It would seem that the hope is to delay the American cruiser-building program long enough to enable the British to drop vessels which will have grown obsolete...
...On the other hand, agricultural co6peration cannot be merely a form of collective bargaining over and...
...Hoover declared that common sense suggested that naval parity might be reached by agreement rather than by resigned competition...
...Yet in our time we hear chiefly of the Church as a "preventive of crime...
...But an order from the White House on July z 5 stopped work on three ships authorized by Congress...
...Faith starts, as Newman declared, with the sense of sin...
...For instance, we talk about "responsibility" one way and act another...
...It is impossible, as Secretary Hyde declared in his address, "to merge 6,ooo,ooo farms," and nobody would dream of doing so...
...If the criminal is actually the menace and the scourge he appears to be, ought not the Christian effort to be orientated in his regard less with an idea of general prevention, much of which duplicates itself, and more in the sense of salvage and redemption...
...372 THE COMMONWEAL August I4, I929 such things...
...Co6perative movements have always resembled trades unions--that is, they have banded together groups raising the same product or serving the same public...
...The resultant organization would be like nothing else in history...
...and in a subsequent reply to complaints made by Commander Paul McNutt of the American Legion, Mr...
...It is widely felt that the criminal is less an offender than a slave to ingrained tendencies, and the evidence substantiating this feeling is impressive...
...The new plan, however, proposes something that is a cross between an industrial "merger" and the American Federation of Labor...
...Under existing circumstances, however, this treatment cannot be effectively given...
...After all, that is the moral in the parable of the illustrious Pharisee and the outlaw Publican...
...In all truth, our contemporary treatment of crime is a blend of modern theories and psychology with genuine, almost primitive fears and outmoded methods...
...Meanwhile, however, the President seems to have abandoned the notion, also made public, of reducing the size of the army...
...and if the system continued to operate, the whole naval equipment of both countries would attain twin-like proportions by downward descent rather than upward evolution...
...The idea is to be considered an offer, a suggestion, rather than a program already established...
...The tide has risen steadily against capital punishment, and the movement for prison reform has been endorsed by millions...
...If there be a Catholic philosophy of the will which asserts that diseases of volition--madness left apart--cannot be healed, we have failed to learn of it...
...But you cannot either destroy his conviction that these actions are unjust, or please the public conscience with reports about them...
...Hoover has busily and courageously professed disarmament...
...The ordinary organization of the Church makes no provision for it, and the prison chaplain is the solitary rival of a thousand influences over most of which he can exercise no control...
...If the British feel that they can accept it, the prospects for disarmament progress are excellent...
...It is a curious fact that, in the interim, the relation between religion and crime seems to have got sadly tangled...
...As matters stand, the United States is entitled to fifteen cruisers, Great Britain being just about that many ahead...
...The thought suggests itself that, granted the modern attitude toward crime and its perpetrator, the most promising remedial agency is one that is hardly tried...
...The pending international conference on navies is now so much to the fore that the President Grooming evidently thought it best to lay his cards the Military flat and uncover the trump ace, which was nothing less than the mating of parity and reduction...
...On the other hand, the degree to which it indubitably is a volitional offense demonstrates that, relatively at least, it is capable of spiritual treatment...
...But why is it not more widely noted that the life which Christ gives is also supremely, miraculously curative of the evil mind and heart...
...The citizen with a sense of responsibility for what the community accomplishes immediately joins the party of the oppressed...
...You may force him into a padded cell, you may deny him water and food...
...If there were such a thing as a religious order devoted to the conduct of a prison, we should possess the only means for testing out theories that seems to be within reach...
...For though crime may be partly a disease, it is certainly not a physical disease...
...Now we go the whole way with the parole system, and then again we indulge in a veritable orgy of suppression...
...operatives...
Vol. 10 • August 1929 • No. 15
