THE CHILD AS CRIMINAL

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVII, Issue 3, 21 January 1909, Page 101

THE CHILD AS CRIMINAL

r— ♦ HE precocity of the present generation of children is so common and constant a phenomenon that it has now almost ceased to excite attention or arouse comment. The child of other days — the child who loved fairy tales and flowers and dolls and romps — is (we are told) becoming almost as extinct as the moa. Ask the solemn mite of to-day if .she likes the Arabian Nights, and she may possibly answer, with a strong implied rebuke, tha*t she prefers Plutarch's Lives and Prescott's Conquest of Mexico. Some years ago Punch jested at the confusion of the old-fashioned people, who tried to ' talk down ' to the child of that day, in the well-known picture of the hapless old lady who says weakly to her small niece: 'Do you hear the puffpuff, Ethel?' To which the up-to-date baby replies, with chilling condescension : 'If you . mean the locomotive, auntie, I hear it very well.' And in a recent issue, the great London comic hits off still more neatly the quaint ' grown-upness ' of- the twentieth-century child. Ethel has been to a birthday party at the bishop's house, and when she comes home her mamma asks : ~' "Well, Ethel, did you enjoy the party? and how did you like the bishop?' To which there came the surely unexpected reply : ' I enjoyed the party very much, mamma, and the bishop was most kind; but, oh, mummy, he has the brains of a kitten!' * Infantile precocity of this order, though of course unnatural, evokes only a smile. But there is another side of the question which is not at all humorous, and at which the most light-hearted of us cannot afford to be amused. The crimes of children are becoming as palpably mature as their pleasures, and they are both more numerous than they. were fifty years ago and, much more painful to contemplate. We have kept a careful eye on the daily papers for the past week or two, and the number of 'serious crimes committed by children chronicled during the last few days, even in this small corner of the world, is enough to stagger one. We quote a few specimen cases. The other day a Christchurch youth of eleven- was committed to an industrial school, after having committed the following crimes within the month: — First, he entered the premises of Amy Cox and lifted therefrom a watch and chain and brass syringe valued at £3 19s. Next he abstracted from a house a canary, worth 10s^ Later on, he stole seven yellowbirds, valued at £2 12s 6d. Finally, he broke into a residence and commandeeied a casket containing jewellery worth £15 12s 6d. A startling record, surely, for a youth of eleven within a single month 1 During the past week thirteen cases of juvenile crime were recorded in the Dunedin papers. Of these, five were charges against boys for breaking and entering, and two against girls for the same offence. The 1 girls were aged respectively twelve years and nine; and the evidence showed that their first crime was committed on a Sunday evening, when, the elder girl ascended by a ladder to the back window of a shop in King street, climbed in, and let the younger,, sister in by the back door. A similar, state of things appears to exist in other centres. A telegram in the Otago Daily Times of Monday states that theft cases in Invercargill during the past year show the alarming increase of 59 convictions — 85 in 1908 as compared with 26 in 1907 — and that this disquieting result is ' chiefly owing to the large number of juvenile convictions.'

By far the most painful evidence of this precocity in crime of which we speak is furnished when we read the pitiful recor.d of how some miserable little boy or girl has come to the very grown-up conclusion that life is not worth living, and, with the help of a piece of rope, or a pistol, or a few pennyworth of laudaimm, has braved the (to them) unknown and unf eared terrors of eternity. Such a case was recorded in our daily press only a few days ago. In the daily papers of Thursday last appeared a Melbourne cable to the effect that a schoolboy named Bridge, aged twelve years, ' deliberately placed his head on the line in front of an advancing engine at Elsternwick, and was decapitated.' Tho following day there came a further cable giving as the explanation of the tragedy the fact that the boy ' had had a quarrel with his sister.' The paragraphs headed ' A Youthful Suicide ' have become all too frequent of late years, and the almost uniform characteristic of the sad affairs has been the utter triviality of the causes which have provoked these young people to lay aside by their own act the sacred burden of life. Amongst the cases recorded is that of a mite of seven who deliberately drowned himself because his mother — hard-worked and vexed by interruptions — refused to give him a slice of bread and butter; a boy of sixteen shot himself in Philadelphia because his pet dog had died; while a half-grown girl in Buffalo hanged herself in the attic because her father would nob permit her to go to the skating-rink. The utter precocity accompanying some of these acts of youthful self-destruction is almost beyond belief. A little German girl saturated her clothing with benzine and set fire to herself on the railway station at Nordhausen just at the moment the train rolled in-^=kcr sole idea being to make a dramatic display. A French lad of thirteen hanged himself after making a will in which he solemnly bequeathed his body to the earth and his soul to Rousseau ! — thus reproducing after his own feeble fashion the sickly sentimentality of the stuff his mind had fed upon.

The best — we had almost said the only — means by which the growing tide of juvenile crime^can be stemmed is by careful and constant religious training. Something, it is true, might be done by easing off the educational burdens that have been piled on our long-suffering children, and allowing their little brains to develop quietly, gradually, and along sane and normal lines. But to depend on that alone to keep in check the rising spirit of lawlessness amongst the young would be to try and ' hold Niagara with a sieve. Religion is the only really effective barrier against the criminal instincts alike of old and young. The children whose religious instruction enables them to realise the plain fact that self-murder or "deliberate theft is a grievous sin are provided with one efficient weapon against tho promptings of a selfish disposition, unrestrained emotionalism, or morbid self-love; and if their daily surroundings be of a simple, healthy order, and their mental pabulum of a cleanly, bracing sort, there is no reason why they should ever be drawn at all into the maelstrom of lawlessness and crime. ' An eminent English writer on suicide — himself no friend of orthodox religion — regretfu^y acknowledges that religion is the only effective antidote to this insidious disease, and that for mankind generally there is no preventive like an honest hope of heaven and an uncompromising fear of a judgment to come. ' Antipathy to self-killing on religious grounds,' he says, ' constitutes the only real resistance to it that has so far beeu discovered, and it is precisely the diminution of this religious antipathy which explains its recent large extension. In suggesting that a wider and more general popular view might usefully be taken of the subject as a whole, we strongly insist, at the same time, on the practical usefulness and healthy effects of the purely Teligious objections to suicide. They alone have controlled it in the past ; they alone, so far as we can at present judge, seem capable of holding it in the future. No^other regulating force appears to be available. '• The broad principles here enunciated apply not only to the special crime referred to, but to criminal instincts generally; and the sooner our politicians, journalists, and educationists are seized of their truth and their importance, the sooner will the stigma of juvenile irreligiousness and its natural sequel be removed from our land.

Messrs. R. and E. Tingey and Co., Ltd., "Wellington, and also at Wangamii, Palmerston North,. Marton, and Waverley, stock all kinds of high-class wall papor, which is noted for its quality of design and c010r....

Do you wish to send a Christmas or New Year Memento or Parcel to any relative or friend either in the Home Country or some other country abroad? If so, you will find tho New Zealand Express Company's system the cheapest, best, quickest, and surest method. Parcels called for and delivered anywhere. Reduced tariff. Branches and agencies everywhere