In the main there is an increase of self- feeling, and mortifica- tions, imagined and real, are never so stinging; so that for both sexes, between increased susceptibility on the one hand and increased control on the other, there is a new psychic tension which may now become a potent factor in the life. Indigna- tion is restrained, deferred, and when vented is far more dangerous, not only because of the increased physical strength, but of the increased deliberation with which ven- geance is executed. Anger should be a great and diffused power in life, making it strenuous, giving zest and power to the struggle for survival and mounting to righteous indig- nation. Its culture requires proper selection of objects and great transformation, but never extermination. The healthy and complete male especially will never be an entirely peaceful creature, and cowardice and the loss of courage will always mean some degree of psychic emasculation. It was for this reason in part that I advocated boxing in Chapter III as an essential part of the physical education of adolescents, because it affords a wholesome vent for anger, the psychology of which 35^ THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE shows that it must find or make some way of escape for its energy, and that physical effort is the most instinctive, while it also teaches the control of temper because any loss of it is almost sure with a skilful antagonist to be punished by a stinging blow, against which loss of control always weakens the guard.
The instinct of revenge, however, is very deep-seated, and not entirely eradicable. In abnormal cases it is instantaneous and perhaps unconscious. I have myself talked with perhaps a score of youthful murderers under sentence of death, who I believe were in every way as good by nature as I am, but who in an instant of fulminating anger struck the fatal blow, possi- bly harder than they knew or because a weapon was at hand, and killed, it may be, their best friend with a regret no less than if sudden death had come without their agency, and with a self-reproach equal to that which they would have visited upon any wretch who had slain their friend. When we reflect that the entire administration of criminal law up to recent date was based upon vengeance, we can not wonder that its impulse is so strong and passionate in the heart of man, and when we read the horror of some American lynching scenes, we realize that collective man can with impunity be as vindictive as those on whom we inflict the worst punishments.
Thus, like nearly everything else in the soul, the power of indignation is greatly deepened and strengthened in adoles- cence, and the problem of rightly directing and habituating it is an important theme in juvenile criminology. All boys de- velop a greatly increased propensity to fight at puberty, and although most of them while pretending to give way completely seem very terrible in their rage, perhaps threatening everything if they are made mad, as if anger were a demoniacal posses- sion, they nevertheless do not quite lose the power of discrimi- nating where they hit and how, lest too great injury should be done. Anger, and even hate, uncaused at this age, is some- times almost spontaneous and even against every motive. However, this stage passes as if it were slowly realized that " to kick against nothing is wrenching." Those whose tempers are strong and show no trace of this inhibition become danger- ous; while those who morosely sulk, brood, and nurse their anger till it corrodes the soul, who can never forget or forgive, who are taciturn and malevolent — in these the seeds of injury JUVENILE FAULTS, IMMORALITIES, AND CRIMES 357 may slowly grow to preposterous and even insane dimensions. The spasmodic type is far more complex, and simple prophylac- tics, like abundant food and exercise, are sometimes sufficient. Either type of this morbidity is augmented by humoring or indulgence, helped by drastic or judicious treatment, and al- though neglect may have its efficacy as a mode of treatment in children, the impulse must now be taken vigorously in hand. Plain talks, one writer suggests, with a careful and judicious use of profanity in rebuking this damnatory and diabolical in- stinct, may be effective in minor cases, but the infliction of the common legal penalties usually has very slight efficiency.
Envy and jealousy constitute another prominent factor in juvenile crimes. Of ninety-seven offenses by minors due to this impulsion, Ferriani finds that with both sexes insults were most frequent; next followed severer injuries, then light ones, false accusations and libels, attempted or successful murder. Marro ^ found these instincts more frequent in young women than in young men in the ratio of 17 to i|. It is hard for girls to admit that others are more beautiful, witty, cultured, than themselves, and rivalry often drives them to extreme and even desperate acts. Vents of this passion are often secret and underhanded. If it be true that, as in matters of the heart in general, women are more susceptible to this passion than men, it may well be doubted whether, if it be broadly interpreted, man in his own sphere is not as liable to it. A friend reports an authentic case of a normal and sweet girl seen secretly dan- cing on the fresh grave of her nearest friend, singing exultant- ly, *' I am so glad she is dead and I am alive." When food and dress were limited and communities small, this passion must have been more intense. It is probably the most direct ex- pression of the struggle for survival and competition for all that is best in the world. Its roots strike deep into the animal world, and it is the rich soil in which prejudices have their recognized growth. It gives momentum to cruelty and self-con- sciousness, and is often secretly undermining the best friend- ships. Indeed Lombroso and Ferrero insist that no permanent friendship between two adolescent girls can withstand its influ- 1 La Pazzia nelle Donne, 1893. See La Jalousie, ch. 8, in Proal's Le Crime et la Suicide, 1900.
358 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE ence, and that it is always made conjectural and uncertain by it. Many a noble and even great man has confessed that mingled with profound grief for the death and misfortune of their best friends, they were often appalled to find a vein of secret joy and satisfaction, as if their own sphere were larger or better. It would seem as if this feeling must have had its culminating de- velopment in a past where communities were smaller, and where the means of subsistence were so limited that every cause that lessened numbers meant increased supply.
However this may be, we find that with puberty begins an age of great intensification of rivalry for the favor of the other sex expressed in animal battles, showing off, and all the intri- cate processes of sexual selection. It is in this sphere that rivalry becomes most intense, and the dawn of first love is always marked, if not directly measured, by the growth of jealousy.
Some of the psychic rudimentary organs, which in degener- ates often develop into crime, are seen in the teasing and bully- ing so common among children. It is perhaps almost normal at a certain stage of human life to take pleasure in hectoring, plaguing, pecking at, worrying, etc., often perhaps to test the temper or cry point. Burk has collected many interesting data and proposed a provisional classification for these phenomena.^ Children stone, pinch, slap, pull the hair and clothes of those younger or weaker than themselves until they confess that they are beaten and beg for mercy. Jesse Pomeroy, the notorious pubescent murderer and torturer, could give no better reason for cutting the throat of one of his girl victims than to see what she would do. If children were to grow up with all their psy- chic propensities developed in due proportion from such a state, some of them would be insane, but most of them would be criminals. The fighting instinct, which is so strongly reen- forced by the dawn of sexuality; the egoistic assertion of tyran- nical power; the appropriation of property; the compulsion of service, and obedience of those weaker by bullying and some- times under awful threats of torture or of the black man, who is invoked for many a form of juvenile spoliation; the tormentor who makes himself especially aggravating by insisting upon do- * Teasing and Bullying, by Frederick Burk. Fed. Sem., April, 1897, vol. iv, JUVENILE FAULTS, IMMORALITIES, AND CRIMES 359 ing precisely that which is most objectionable to the victim, e.g., threatening those peculiarly timid of snakes, fire, etc., with these objects, barring the passage, jerking away chairs as others are about to sit in them; all these illustrate the strange teasing instinct often almost irresistible even in those incapable of rancor and who are overflowing with general good-will. This is also the motive in threatening and almost performing forbidden and perhaps heinous acts, in taking and hiding prop- erty, calling nicknames, twitting of personal peculiarities, arousing disappointment by practical jokes, exciting shame or envy. Burk enumerates from his empirical data a long list of modes by which the tormentor expresses his joy at the suffer- ing of his victim, and suggests that these aggressions into the rights of other personalities may be broken neurological frag- ments or parts of old chains of activity involved in the pursuit, combat, torture, and killing of men and enemies. They may be regarded more as crystallized instincts than as conscious voluntary activities, as the causelessness of some and the pur- poselessness of others indicates. If they may be fragments of old reflex arcs, it is vain to seek any well-defined conscious motive. " Do they in some covert or concealed way, acting beneath the subliminal range of consciousness, aid in the de- velopment of useful activities, or are they merely a dead and useless weight continually serving as a drag to civilization," as if they were first intentions of nature? Lombroso deliberately assumes that criminal instincts are general in children. This is an easy explanation of some of the deeper problems of crime, but must not be interpreted as an indictment of childhood. There is a sense, however, in which this can be heartily granted without the slightest shock to modern ethical conceptions of the nature of right and wrong, and their relations to each other.
The child torturer is only an extreme and abnormal de- velopment from the arrant teaser. The latter lacks acute and tender sympathy for the sufferings of his victim over which he even comes to gloat, but his pleasure passes into pain when the distress reaches a certain point. The tormentor, on the other hand, lacks this check. Where cruelty is abnormally developed in adolescent years so that there is rapture in inflicting extreme pain, where the most bizarre torments are inflicted with no ap- 360 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE parent motive, it is not enough to say that there is mere lack of sympathy, although this is true. We wish to be the cause of psychic states in others, to be an agent and exercise power, and Ireland holds that the insanity of power is a form of hypertro- phied egoism. But we must reflect that primitive man was at enmity with most of mankind, his own family and race being excepted. The savage is a good father, perhaps husband and tribesman, with a kindly nature, but all his virtues are expended on those nearest him, and for all others he has suspicion, enmity, and bitter hostility. In the torturer the boundary between these two sentiments is disturbed. Just as there is individual love, so there is instinctive individual hate. He places the neighbor in the same position as the alien and enemy, whom he would cap- ture and torture. Most can only love a few, and the diffusion and irradiation of fraternal sentiments outward toward ever larger portions and finally to the whole race is a matter of very slow and painful growth. Perhaps now even the best of us still need to keep alive the faculty of hate for what is bad rather than for strangers. At any rate I can conceive no other clue by which to explain the sad facts of certain types of juvenile torturers than the atavistic one.
Sheldon's interesting statistics show that among the insti- tutional activities of American children,^ predatory organiza- tions culminate from eleven to fifteen, and are chiefly among boys. These include bands of robbers, clubs for hunting and fishing, play armies, organized fighting bands between sepa- rate districts, associations for building forts, etc. This form of association is the typical one for boys of twelve. After this age their interests are gradually transferred to less loosely organized athletic clubs. Sheldon's statistics are as follows: Innocent though these predatory habits may be in small boys, if they are not naturally and normally reduced at the be- ginning of the teens and their energy worked off into athletic societies, they become dangerous. " The robber knight, the ^Am. Jour, of Psy., July, 1898, vol. ix, pp. 425-448.
JUVENILE FAULTS, IMMORALITIES, AND CRIMES 36 1 pirate chief, and the savage marauder become the real models." The stealing clubs gather edibles and even useless things, the loss of which causes mischief, into some den, cellar, or camp in the woods, where the plunder of their raids is collected. An organized gang of boy pilferers for the purpose of entering stores had a cache, where the stolen goods were brought to- gether. Some of these bands have specialized on electric bells and connections, or golf sticks and balls. Jacob Riis says that on the East Side of New York, every corner has its gang with a program of defiance of law and order, where the young tough who is a coward alone becomes dangerous when he hunts with the pack. He is ambitious to get ^* pinched " or arrested and to pose as a hero. His vanity may obliterate common fear and custom as his mind becomes inflamed with flash literature and " penny dreadfuls." Sometimes whole neighborhoods are ter- rorized so that no one dares to testify against the atrocities they commit. Riis even goes so far as to say that " a bare enumer- ation of the names of the best-known gangs would occupy the pages of this book." ^ The names are sufficiently suggestive — Hell's kitchen gang, stable gang, dead men, floaters, rock, pay, hock gang, the soup-house gang, plug uglies, back-alley men, dead beats, cop beaters and roasters, hell benders, chain gang, sheeny skinners, street cleaners, tough kids, sluggers, wild In- dians, cave and cellar men, moonlight howlers, junk club, crook gang, are some I have heard of. Some of the members of these gangs never knew a home, were found perhaps as babies wrapped in newspapers, survivors of the seventy-two dead infants Riis says were picked up on the street in New York in 1889, or of baby farming. They grow up street arabs, slum waifs, the driftwood of society, its flotsam and jetsam, or plancton, fight- ing for a warm corner in their resorts or living in crowded tene- ment-houses that rent for more than a house on Fifth Avenue. Arrant cowards singly, they dare and do anything together. A gang stole a team in East New York and drove down the avenue, stopping to throw in supplies, one member sitting in the back of the wagon and shooting at all who interfered. One gang specialized on stealing baby carriages, depositing their in- mates on the sidewalk. Another blew up a grocery store be- cause its owner refused a gift they demanded. Another tried * How the Other Half Lives. 1890, p. 229.
362 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE to saw off the head of a Jewish pedler. One member killed another for calling him " no gent." Six murderous assaults were made at one time by these gangs within a single week. One who is caught and does his " bit " or stretch is a hero, and when a leader is hanged, as has sometimes happened, he is almost envied for his notoriety. A frequent ideal is to pound a policeman with his own club. The gang federates all nationali- ties. Property is depreciated and may be ruined if it is fre- quented by these gangs or becomes their lair or " hang-out." A citizen residing on the Hudson procured a howitzer and pointed it at a boat gang, forbidding them to land on his river front- age. They have their calls, whistles, signs, rally suddenly from no one knows where, and vanish in the alleys, basements, roofs, and corridors they know so well. Their inordinate vanity is well called the slum counterpart of self-esteem, and Riis calls the gang a club run wild. They have their own ideality and a gaudy pinchbeck honor. A young tough, when arrested, wrenched away the policeman's club, dashed into the street, rescued a baby from a runaway, and came back and gave him- self up. They batten on the yellowest literature. Those of for- eign descent, who come to speak our language better than their parents, early learn to despise them. Gangs emulate each other in hardihood, and this is one cause of epidemics in crime. They passionately love boundless independence, are sometimes very susceptible to good influence if applied with great wisdom and discretion, but easily fall away. What is the true moral antitoxin for this class, or at least what is the safety-valve and how and when to pull it, we are now just beginning to learn, but it is a new specialty in the great work of salvage from the wreckage of city life. In London, where these groups are better organized and yet more numerous, war is often waged between them, weapons are used and murder is not so very in- frequent. Normally this instinct passes harmlessly over into associations for physical training, which furnishes a harmless outlet for these instincts, until the reductives of maturer years have perfected their work.
The Mafia is a secret association of malefactors that most abound throughout nearly the whole extent of Sicily. It has no laws, meetings, chiefs, or regular organization, but has JUVENILE FAULTS, IMMORALITIES, AND CRIMES 3^3 great power and is incarnate like an instinct in the Sicilians. It has a clan for the city and one for the country. The urban Mafioso steal, assassinate, etc., while those in the country are brigands who go in bands of ten or a dozen, often on horse- back, and are masters of the district which they infest. It is in- visible, and any one condemned by it is usually killed within twenty-four hours. So great is the terror it inspires, that judges rarely condemn a convict, so that an almost unheard-of social decomposition is caused. It extends through all classes of society, and many whom no one suspects are members and may secretly do all its bidding. The bands share all profits and separate. This association has novices, usually called Sgaraglioni, who must prove their audacity and vow to God secrecy. First, they pay a tribute and are protected. If their conduct i^ disapproved or contrary to brigand customs, they are declared infamous.
The Camorra, another criminal organization of Italy, has a hierarchy, a highly developed esprit du corps, and is not with- out humanitarian aspirations. Like the Mafia, it can be traced back to the confusion caused by the fall of the Roman empire and the subsequent mixture of races. The Camorra has novi- tiate degrees. First and lowest are the Giovanne di Agarro. These youth have little to do but collect assessments and to serve the higher officers. They then become Giovanni d' Onore and can take part in the criminal activities of the Camorra and profit by its operations. The third stage is that of Camor- rista who have received a baptism of blood. Those who at- tain the latter grade wear an elegant uniform. The society has its own vocabulary and something like a jury, and is much younger than the Mafia. Both sanction and execute the ven- detta.^ These societies form thus perhaps the most remarkable of all schools of crime, and account for the high rate of homi- cide, especially in Sicily.
The earliest form of theft is due to ignorance of what ownership is and means. Primitive man under the tribal organization had most things in common, and isolation was such that where every community was surrounded by unap- propriated land and all the fruits of nature and animals of the * Le Brigandage en Italic, by A. Dubarry. Paris, 1875, P- 3^9 et seq.
364 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE hunt, individual possession had a very limited sphere. Poach- ing was impossible, for there were no preserves. Possession was all the ten points of law. Children are reared in a commu- nal state in all good homes. Most things necessary to satisfy their needs are their own to take and use. Food, clothing, and shelter are theirs by the right of their dependent state, and it is a long, hard curriculum to understand the meuni, tuum, suum, of civilized life. Slaves newly emancipated have found this a hard lesson to learn, as the census of the causes of im- prisonment of the colored race in the South shows. The city child, who takes edibles freely at home, has to learn that it can not do so from the stand of the street vender. Hence petty larceny, as nearly all statistics show, constitutes more than half the earliest crimes of youth. There is a deep instinct that things belong to those who most need or can best use them, and the finer conceptions of the sacredness of personal property come as a later stage of evolution. Theft in childhood is gen- erally to satisfy immediate wants and desires, and it is inter- esting to see how edibles, or thefts of money to procure them, predominate.
Later comes theft by fraud and stealth, with a more or less developed sense of its nature. Thieving is literally furtive- ness, and in civilized society, particularly in the country, ex- ploitation of orchards and gardens is to some extent licensed and IS often perpetrated in a jocose way, where the pleasure lies in the superior cleverness, stealth, or fraud of the invader of these rights. Thieving becomes often a passion gratifying the love of adventure and is celebrated in song and story. This, too, is no doubt an atavistic note of the ancient rights of the common. Even the frauds of the accomplished and adult swindler are often condemned less severely by public sentiment because of the unconscious traces in the human soul of the old days when things belonged to those who were shrewdest to get them. Robbers and footpads are very few in numbers until later adolescence, partly by reason of lack of strength and con- fidence, but then some of the boldest and most hardy crimes against person appear in connection with the forcible appro- priation of property.
Marro says that house thieves predominate among children under fifteen years of age, and the innate disposition to steal to JUVENILE FAULTS, IMMORALITIES, AND CRIMES 3^5 gratify sense and vanity shows a very marked increase in the beginning of the teens. Carrara says that in all times and by every race thievery is most incurable, and that women are less often reformed than men. Curiously enough the latter are espe- cially prone to steal during menstruation. Ferriani ^ thinks that boys under fourteen are more likely to be recidivists because they lack circumspection, and their thefts are petty, but that from fourteen on, in place of many little disconnected thieveries larger plans are made; that repetitions are more common in the city than in the country, and in England than elsewhere. Youth rarely steals from avarice, and only gradually develops into the oily tactician or " flash " man. Theft slowly develops special- ization, and all thieves develop great ingenuity in lying. Theft to satisfy passion, vice, and self-indulgence is far more com- mon than to satisfy necessities, and the daily rhythm of life is upset and periods of idleness alternate with those of great en- ergy. Moreover, it is often a passion with young adepts to corrupt others. The secret dialect, jargon, or cant of the thief, which is so interesting, is akin to that of the vagrant and the mendicant, and has been repeatedly made the object