Parents, School Administrators, Boards of Education Too Easy on Children, Leading to Our Nation of Law Breakers, Aug. 26, 1923

The Cheapest Thing

“The cheapest thing is not wheat,” says Arthur Brisbane, “German marks or roubles. It is human life.” He goes on to recite the recent story about a man selling his wife and children for $100, and concludes by saying that “you can buy a human baby any day for less than you would have to pay for a second class pup.”

While Brisbane probably is guilty of excusable exaggeration in his statement about the relative market values of babies and pups, his observation that the cheapest thing is human life is not too much over-drawn. There are people who would kill a human with less regret than they would kill a dog. Human life is held at too low a value. The average person never considers the value of human life unless it is his or her own, and judging by the suicide rate not a few place no value upon their own lives. During the past 20 years there have been 131,940 murders committed in the United States. That is only a portion of the waste of human life. The automobile, flying machine, the dare-devil stunts in almost any endeavor, carelessness and other reckless forms of disregard of the value of human life run the total, no doubt, to figures far in excess of the number listed under the head of murder.”

The deplorable part about it is that the low value that one human places upon the life of a fellow human seems to have the sanction of the constituted government authorities. Only a little more than one per cent of the murders in the United States were punished. If the law, which is for the protection of society, thinks no more of human life than to permit more than 98 per cent of the murderers escape, then how can it be expected that there be anything but a low estimate placed upon life? The effect and cause are evident to anyone who will look at those figures.

“A Nation of Law Breakers” is the indictment brought against America by the Fort Bragg Citizen, the publication issued by the officers at Fort Bragg, Fayetteville. It points out that in one year there were nearly twice as many burglaries in New York city as there were in England and Wales combined. Other counts in the bill of indictment point out that Washington, our national capital, with a population of 450,000, had four times as many burglaries in one year as did London with its population of over 7,000,000. Liverpool is about one and a third times larger than Cleveland, and yet, in 1919, Cleveland reported 31 robberies for every one reported in Liverpool. The violations of the prohibition laws are so numerous that it would be difficult to set a figure that would be correct. Besides these violations, there are hundreds of regulations in America—Federal, state and local—that are constantly evaded or openly flouted. Why all this disrespect for law and order? What can be done to check it? This is indeed a problem for good citizens.

The figures show that about one murderer in a hundred in America suffer legal punishment for the crime. In Germany 95 per cent pay the penalty. In England and other countries the percentage is also large. In Canada, a country whose population is very similar to ours, there is very little crime that goes unpunished. “It is not too much to say,” says Chief Justice Taft of supreme court of the United States, some years ago, “that the administration of criminal law in this country is a disgrace to our civilization, and that the prevalence of crime and fraud, which here is greatly in excess of that in European countries, is due largely to the failure of the law and its administration to bring criminals to justice. “In England criminal trials are speedy; appeals are not allowed on purely technical grounds. Less delay in bringing accused persons to trial, abolition of senseless appeals on merely technical ground, giving the state the right to appeal, more independence from politics for prosecuting attorneys, and more speed in proceeding with the trial will, in our opinion, do much to reduce crime, and make criminal law in the United States something more than it is now—a farce.

From the editorial page of the Durham Herald, Sunday, Aug. 26, 1923, W.N. Keener, editor

According to Wikipedia: Arthur Brisbane (December 12, 1864 – December 25, 1936) was one of the best known American newspaper editors of the 20th century as well as a real estate investor. He was also a speech writer, orator, and public relations professional who coached many famous businesspeople of his time in the field of public relations.