One of the finest editorials we have read in some time we found in Monday’s Raleigh News and Observer under the above caption. It brings forcefully the great need in America of not more laws but of people who are obedient to themselves, their interest and their laws.
People are disobedient to the law because they are first disobedient in the home. The young people are allowed to do as they please. There is no restriction from the parental hand and when the law comes forward with its “don’ts” the man or woman who has not learned self control finds it impossible to obey. Says the News and Observer:
“Germany has three homicides for every million of population. England has five homicies for every million of population. France has 14 homicides for every million of population. Italy has 95 homicides for every million of population. America has 120 homicides for every million of population.
“Read these figures again. What do they mean? America, the enlightened and the free, the land of law and of democracy, has 50 times mor homicides than Germany and 22 times more homicides than England. Why?
“Is it possible that with an infinitely smaller population in ratio to the size of the country than Germany, or England or France or Italy, we value life less highly? Is it the fault of our laws? Has our social structure given way at a critical point?
“Albert Sidney Wiggam, writing in Sunday’s paper declared:
“You can hang a man, but by doing so you haven’t reformed him. You an put a thousand men in jail, but you have not by this process made a single free moral agent, and nothing will ever make life and property and civilization safe except self-controlled men, training in the ways of self-mastery.
“Today, we are studying laws a neer before. We are devising statutes to compel performance of the common duties of man toward man. We ae imposing penalties for failure in the essentials of human obligations. New relations evolve new problems fo conduct, and we rush to the law for a solution.
“On a scaffolding of law we have set up government, and almost we would worship it as the Golden Calf. Before it we lay down the burden of our individual obligations, the harvest of our wrongs. Here, we say, is power and efficiency. Her is the investment of the common good. Let this wonderful thing we have created care for the sick and the helpless. Give to it the duty of training our children, of guarding out lives and our property, of providing us with the conveniences of travel, the utilities of living, the guarantees of well being. Let it prevent evil with the stature and punish wrongs with the chain gang, the jail, and the electric chair.
“We must have laws and penalties for their violations; but we must remember that behind the law of the mass is the law of the individual, the law of self-control. It must be given in the home first and emphasized in the school. Cultivated in youth it grows to bless; neglected, it creates the wild power of self destruction.
‘Isn’t this the secret of that dismal comparison? Have we not hastened to shift to law the control that ought to rest in the home, while we go out to pursue our own ideas of individual liberty, dodging where we can with impunity, the very barriers we’ve set up? Do not good men vote for prohibition and straightway encourage its violation? Do we not applaud standards of safety and then boast of our clever evasions? Do we not provide statutes against gambling and then in our homes and clubs exempt ourselves from their operations?
“Our ideals of personal liberty have run to riot in the mad rush to go our own way, to run our course, to do as we please, to live our own lives. We are forgetting that the freest man is the man who best controls himself. We have multiplied the powers of law in the State and neglected the power of restraint at the home.
“Nancy Astor, in her farewell talk to newspaper men before she sailed for England, packed an immense amount of common sense in the terse comment:
“’Not to teach obedience is to be cruel to your children. The trouble with the American young people I think is that they are too old for their age.’
“Good citizenship is a compelling force from within, the result of accumulating power of self mastery.
“The crime wave starts in the cradle.”
From the editorial page of the Concord Daily Tribune, Sept. 14, 1926
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn92073201/1926-09-14/ed-1/seq-10/
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