Willem Adriaan Bonger

“ By what strange folly should we have cultivated a studied elegance and refinement in our needs if inequality of fortune had not accustomed us to regard this ridiculous fastidiousness as a proof of superiority, and attained thereby a certain consideration? Why should I consider as below me a man who is perhaps my superior in merit; why should I pretend to have authority over him and so open the door to tyranny, to servitude, and all the vices most fatal to society, if the inequality of conditions had not exposed my soul to ambition, as the inequality of fortune has exposed it to avarice? ”

“ But the men who can do this are rare. The great majority of us need outside support. Who has not seen in his own experience how the judgment and prejudice, the beliefs and superstitions of his associates have a determining effect upon him; how he supports others and is supported by them? Break up the enclosed circle and you weaken or annihilate the inhibitory ideas; shatter society to atoms, so that each stands by himself in the war of all against all, and you set loose whatever evil instincts have their roots in us; ‘declass’ man and you have driven him into the arms of crime. ”

“ But it would be as absurd to say of the runner who comes in last in a race that he cannot run at all, as to say of the man who goes under in the struggle for existence that he is fit for nothing. Those who do not succeed in life are in great part those who through accident of birth have not obtained the place for which their talents fitted them. How many among the bourgeoisie are ruined from their incapacity for directing a business enterprise, while they would have become useful members of society if they had been able to follow their true vocation? ”

“ Not a single surgeon or butcher pursues his bloody trade through atavism, but only because forced to it by his interests. More than one born-bourgeois thinks that he would never eat meat rather than have to kill cattle himself, but this is only pure illusion or an unconscious hypocrisy. For he would do it without any doubt if he could not gain his livelihood in any other way. Do not the bourgeoisie shoot their inoffensive fellow citizens who revolt against a social condition that no one would dare to call ideal? ”

“ Ought we to be astonished that the attacks upon the social laws are so multiplied to-day, and that there are always so many thieves and assassins, when to the causes of crime which we have developed it is necessary to add that horrible malady of European states, mendicity? When the water destined by nature to quench the thirst of all men is artificially diverted into particular channels for the exclusive use of certain individuals, the unfortunate man, tormented by need, falls into despair, and in a rage breaks these fatal channels, making the fragments fall upon the heads of his enemies. ”

“ Let us compare two totally different environments in which an individual grows up. Let us place him first in the slums of a great city; his father is alcoholic, his mother a prostitute; he has never attended school, passing his time in vagabondage up to the day when, still young, he has been committed to prison, where his education in crime is completed. Now let us suppose this same individual to have grown up in a healthy environment, where neither poverty nor extreme riches exercised their pernicious influence. ”

“ Picture to yourself the state of mind of one who has led a more or less comfortable life, who has been independent, and enjoyed the esteem granted to a man who is well-to-do, and who sees that the time is approaching when all this will come to an end, and that there remains nothing for him to do but accept some minor poorly paid employment, and lead henceforth an existence that cannot satisfy him in any way. Imagine also that chance throws in his way an opportunity to commit a crime with good hope of success. It must be granted that we find here very powerful determinants to crime. ”

“ Thus modern socialism was born; on one side from an ardent desire of the working class to free itself from the poverty caused by capitalism; on the other side from the development in the manner of capitalistic production, in which small capital is always conquered by large capital. The conviction becomes more and more general that capitalism has fulfilled its historic task, the increase of the productive forces, and that the means of production must belong to all if we are effectively to deliver humanity from the material and intellectual miseries which result from capitalism. ”

“ Poverty alone causes many moral situations from which crime must logically result. The majority of criminals are in fact recruited among the less privileged classes.
But the bourgeoisie is not happy simply because the proletariat is unhappy. The cause of the unhappiness of both is in the present economic conditions, by which the great majority of the population vegetate in the blackest misery, while the others are immersed in idle luxury. There is only one remedy for this injustice; it is to divide the total product of labor among the workers, and not among the capitalists. ”

“ Each man scrupulously respects the rights of his fellow, and any infraction of these rights rarely or never takes place. In such a community, all are nearly equal. There are none of those wide distinctions, of education and ignorance, wealth and poverty, master and servant, which are the product of our civilization; there is none of the wide-spreading division of labor, which, while it increases wealth, produces also conflicting interests; there is not that severe competition and struggle for existence, or for wealth, which the dense population of civilized countries inevitably creates. ”

“ They are the hardened, the incorrigible, the recidivists. They form, by the side of regular society, the great rebel tribe, where gather and mingle poverty, ignorance, vice, idleness, and prostitution. The soldiers of this army obey, not a momentary desire, but a permanent tendency. They do not always commit crime for crime’s sake, but the most trivial incident drives them to it; they profit by every opportunity, and we can say that, as in certain circles virtue is a reflex act, so crime is a reflex act with them. ”

“ Hence it comes, doubtless, as well as from the excitement prevailing in these circles, that criminality there is as great as among domestic servants. In the same way, in the licentious environments, in the great cities, where there are masses of working people, sexual crimes are as much more numerous as the pleasures of the senses are there more easily come by. But we can lay it down as a principle that where wealth is an obstacle to activity it is also an obstacle to crime, very much as political power ceases to be dangerous at the moment when it ceases to be ambitious. ”

“ By what right can society punish the thieving servant who has been a witness of the unpunished robberies and extortions of his master, or has seen public thieves strutting along, enjoying the consideration of their [14] fellow citizens, and shamelessly displaying the fruits of their extortions under the very eyes of the heads of the state? How can we make the poor respect the property of others when they themselves have been the victims of the rapacity of the rich, or have seen the property of their fellow citizens snatched away by violence or fraud with impunity? ”

“ If there is any kind of crime that is the consequence of the economic environment exclusively, this is the one. Such crimes can arise only in a time like ours, with its insatiable thirst for gold, with the unlimited opportunity to deceive the public, greedy for great profits. A superficial knowledge of economic history is enough to make it plain that the bourgeois crimes, and especially those which we are now discussing, can be committed only under an economic system of the kind that ours is. ”

“ It is incontestable that economic conditions have a direct influence upon the origin of crime. The lack of the means of satisfying the numerous wants of a man is already a goad to incite him to procure these means in any way whatever, honest or dishonest. And it is the dishonest way that one will choose by preference when society makes it difficult or impossible to act otherwise. A London pickpocket gets $1500 a year on the average; on the other hand, the misery of those who wish to earn their living honestly is indescribable. ”

“ The severity of taxes, the vexations and hardships inflicted by the rich and great multiply the number of the unfortunate, whom poverty often reduces to despair and who avail themselves of crime as the promptest means of escape from their condition. If wealth is the mother of vices, poverty is the mother of crimes. When a state is badly governed and wealth is too unequally divided, so that millions of men lack the necessaries of life, while a small number of citizens are surfeited with luxuries, there we commonly see a great number of criminals, whose number punishments do not diminish. ”

“ If the dwellings of the working-class are bad, those of the lower proletariat are more pitiable still. There are, through sickness or lack of work, periods of dire poverty in the life of almost every worker—for the lower proletariat these periods are without intermission. Its poverty is chronic. And when the poverty makes itself felt for a long time together, the intellectual faculties become blunted to such a point that there remains of the man only the brute, struggling for existence. ”

“ With the master it develops cupidity and the imperious character which sees in a fellow man only a being fit to satisfy his desires. It is true that the capitalist has not the power over the proletarian that the master has over his slave; he has neither the right of service nor the power of life and death, yet it is none the less true that he has another weapon against the proletarian, a weapon whose effect is no less terrible, namely enforced idleness. The fact that the supply of manual labor always greatly exceeds the demand puts this weapon into the hands of every capitalist. ”

“ The overplus which one person can obtain by his own labor must always remain limited. Without the rise of slavery the great wealth of a single individual would not have been possible. To the difference between master and slave is now added that between rich and poor, and the envy and hatred of the poor for the rich, and the pride of the rich and their desire to dominate over the poor. ”

“ They are all, in the first instance, the fruit of a skill and a want of scruple which would never obtain the sanction of a really equitable society; at their blaze, which scorns poverty, the passion for gain is kindled, and dull rage begins to develop the germ of reprisals. How shall we make men who have nothing, and exhaust themselves to gain the bare necessaries of life, satisfied that the persons who do no work and only amuse themselves possess everything? ”

“ Our entire education, in school as in life, rests upon suggestion. What keeps us from crime is the inhibitory ideas, which are instilled into us until they permeate our flesh and blood and control our actions, without our being conscious of it. ‘Thou shalt’, ‘thou shalt not’, these general prescriptions of right and morality, of religion and philanthropy, or whatever you choose to call it, must determine our conduct, unless we stop to consider, hesitate, and delay.... ”

“ Man will never be able absolutely to prevent the development of noxious organisms in nature, but it is unquestionably within his power so to improve the social organism created by himself, that it may afford equally favorable conditions of existence and an equal freedom of growth to all; that no one may be forced to gratify his hunger or his desire of possession or his ambition at the expense of someone else. People only need to investigate the causes of crime and to remove them, and they will abolish crime itself. ”

“ The chief difference between a society based upon the community of the means of production and our own is that material poverty would be no longer known. Thus one great part of economic criminality (as also one part of infanticide) would be rendered impossible, and one of the greatest demoralizing forces of our present society would be eliminated. And then, in this way those social phenomena so productive of crime, prostitution and alcoholism, would lose one of their principal factors. ”

“ Take any district whatsoever, however poor, uncivilized, and wild, and you will always find in the great cities, London or Paris, New York or San Francisco, a worse environment and greater depravity. It is here, in the lowest slums, where never a glimmer of physical or moral well-being penetrates, that the disinherited live. They get a glimpse of the splendor of luxury only to hate it; they respect neither property nor life, because neither property nor life has any real value for them ”

“ It is the system that does it, the long-continued, soul-and-mind-destroying monotony, the long, silent nights in which for hours men lie awake thinking, thinking, thinking, driven in upon themselves and to be their own selves’ only companion. ”