THE LOST LEADER

The bodies of the murdered in the Rue Morgue are long dust, but the problem of crime and its prevention lives on. Three contributions to criminology have appeared within the fortnight, important in that they light up the direction of progress, curious in that they show the President of the United States flouting the figures of his nation's experts.

In the Atlantic Monthly for June Professor Francis Bowes Sayre of the Law School follows a familiar trail of thought to the conclusion that the task of judgement "is not to fit the penal treatment to an abstract crime but to a concrete criminal." In his newly published "The Delinquent Boy: A Socio-Psychological Study" Doctor John Slawson says that the first necessity of the juvenile court is "to treat the offender by the scientific investigation of the mental, environmental and physical antecedents which might have led up to the anti-social act." Judge Ben Lindsey, and less interviewed magistrates, have proved such procedure practicable. And there is in the adult criminal enough mutability to make the use of human and scientific understanding in the handling of him no longer a something not to be postponed.

Mr. Coolidge denies this. In two paragraphs of his Memorial Day speech at Gettysburg, he cast aside the conclusions of the expert psychologist and criminologist, to avow his faith in the existent American machinery of justice. There might be grit in the works, but the design was good, and the wheels would revolve in silence when chicanery and flummery among judges was cleaned out.

Such beliefs identify Mr. Coolidge with the well-to-do Man in the Street, but aside from merits thus appropriate to a democratic state, they have little value. They ignore scores of shamefully protracted trials, and they give the abstract lie to scores of meaningful psychological statistics. Harry Elmer Barnes may go on believing that the last twenty-five years have given man more knowledge of this problem than the preceding two thousand. The Thomas Mott Oshornes of America may yet succeed in making the prison punitive rather than corrective. But as long as men of Mr. Coolidge's eminence continue to find the problem inconsiderable at its source, the armored skins of complacent legislators can never be pricked into action.