Vigilantism

“ It would be an equal pity, were the casual reader to condemn all who eventually aligned themselves against the Vigilance movement as of the same stripe as the criminals who menaced society. There were many worthy people whose education thoroughly inclined them towards formal law, and who, therefore, when the actual break came, found themselves supporting law instead of justice. ”

“ Divested of all complications, our task is to defend ourselves against the criminal population,—the professional criminals; to guard society against their outrages and depredations in the most prompt, effectual, and enduring fashion we can devise. ”

“ Sure—we know the criminal, but to squelch him we have to learn his hangouts, study his modus operandi, and learn how to make his victims secure from his activities. Unless we do that, we can treat individuals from now to infinity and all we’ll have is more cases. ”

“ Any other robber and murderer, who was known to be on the watch to attack our houses, would be the subject of free discourse: his habits, his haunts, his usual plans, his successful and his baffled assaults in former cases, would be talked over, and thus a salutary fear would be kept alive, influencing us to bolt and bar, and watch and ward with unfailing vigilance, to avert a surprise. ”

“ By spontaneous criminals we mean those who act from well-defined motives, from avarice, revenge, the gratification of pride, vanity, or the grosser passions—also those who from congenital defects of organization have strong natural tendencies toward the commission of crime—sporadic criminals against whom it is scarcely possible for society to protect itself, unless, like the ancient Spartans, it is prepared to undertake the entire education of the future citizen, morally, intellectually, and physically, including the ante-natal period. ”

“ For what does it matter, or rather ought it to matter, for social purposes, in what part of a man's system his conscience lies, or whether pressure on a particular portion of the brain may convert him into a thief, when we know, as of experience, that the establishment of good courts and police turns a robbers' den into a hive of peaceful industry, and when we see the wonders which discipline works in an ignorant crowd? ”

“ One could not be expected to take so frivolous a view of life, therefore you will in self defense take every possible precaution to suppress vandalism and thievery? Never, my dear sir, never! You must take every possible precaution to reduce the spirit of vandalism and of thievery. The acts are in themselves unconsequential—they are but the product of a diseased mind or an indifferent training. The spirit, here as elsewhere, is all important. ”

“ Is the man of worth so modest that he finds greater security than the thief or assassin? and are not these always detected by criminal justice? Alas, it is a utopia, but it is consoling!
Suppose, for the moment, a society were so organised that it would hold an assizes of virtue, as we have [Pg 282] assizes of crime,—a public ministry pointing out noble actions, disclosing them to the view of all, as we now denounce crimes to the avenging power of the laws. ”

“ We are careful to suppress tendencies toward criminality and struggle. The criminal and the maniac, or those who are permanently incurable as determined by careful examination, are 'removed' as the Leaders put it. ”

“ I had learned the lesson of violence in prison, and I believed that I lived in a world of violence, had to use violence, and use it first. I had no more thought of right or wrong than a wolf that prowls the prairie. I hunted because I was hunted myself, and I showed no consideration for anybody or anything because I knew I would receive none.
[385] “I was a habitual criminal. I had formed the criminal habit. Habit is the strongest thing in life, and criminals such as I have described obey the impulse to commit a crime almost subconsciously. ”

“ The sudden sense of exposure after the re-established sense of safety came—not to the coarse organisation of a criminal but—to the susceptible nerve of a man whose intensest being lay in such mastery and predominance as the conditions of his life had shaped for him. ”

“ Police! Your man’s a thief, and you [104] have the devil’s own time clearing yourself of complicity. What now? You have to have a roof and a bed, and some one to talk to; you want a warm bite and a cool drink. You’ve got the mark of the trade on you, and no one trusts you. You’re shoved and you’re pulled, and you go down and down, day by day, step by step. ”

“ Ay, man in every country is, on the one hand, producing these brutal children, and on the other hand multiplying the police force to keep these brutes down. The question is not how to destroy evil that way, but how to prevent the very birth of evil. ”

“ In those particular localities where crime seeks to shelter and hide itself among numbers, the suggestions to wrong-doing are ever present, and the young, who as yet have the criminal instinct only latent, but who still must be regarded from the circumstances as incipient criminals, are the objects which offer the best promises of success in any effort for the reduction of crime. There is also this promising feature in reformatory efforts, that the moral emotions, once thoroughly awakened, do not satiate and deaden by exercise, like many pleasurable vices ”

“ Thus we are not concerned merely with the construction of a theory of anthropology or psychology, or a system of criminal statistics, nor merely with the setting of abstract legal theories against other theories which are still more abstract. Our task is to show that the basis of every theory concerning the self-defence of the community against evil-doers must be the observation of the individual and of society in their criminal activity. In one word, our task is to construct a criminal sociology. ”

“ It is all very fine to talk about tramps and morality. Six hours of police surveillance (such as I have had) or one brutal rejection from an inn-door change your views upon the subject like a course of lectures. As long as you keep in the upper regions, with all the world bowing to you as you go, social arrangements have a very handsome air; but once get under the wheels and you wish society were at the devil. ”

“ In our eagerness for self-protection at any cost we lose sight of the fact that the criminal problem is one of conditions quite as much as of "cases." In our large cities, the great reservoirs of crime, we are but reaping the harvest of centuries of evil in older civilizations, and in our own civilization as well. ”

“ I have often seen, subsequently, this species of tactics employed, the success of which is always founded on atrocious calumnies and measures, revolting, because unjust; clumsy, because they produce an effect entirely contrary to that which is expected; for those persons who would exert themselves personally in the apprehension of a thief, are prevented from fear of struggling with a man whom the feeling of crime and the prospect of a scaffold, drives probably to despair. ”

“ If, on the contrary, I take no kind of notice of the man I fancy guilty, if I do not have him arrested, if I in no way set him on his guard—but if the unfortunate creature is hourly, momentarily, possessed by the suspicion that I know all, that I do not lose sight of him either by night or by day, that he is the object of my indefatigable vigilance—what do you ask will take place under these circumstances? ”

“ Expose the crime, and hunt down the criminal; but remember that even in the case of crime, if it is attacked in sensational, lurid, and untruthful fashion, the attack may do more damage to the public mind than the crime itself. ”

“ Your up-to-date criminal presses the button of a social mechanism, and at the other end of the land or the year innocent lives are snuffed out. As society grows complex, it can be harmed in more ways. Each advance to higher organization runs us into a fresh zone of danger, so there is more than ever need to be quick to detect and foil the new public enemies that present themselves. The public needs a victim to harrow up its feelings. ”

“ Weener, you look like a criminal type to me; Lombroso couldve used you for a model to advantage. Have you a policerecord or have you so far evaded the law? Let me tell you, the Intelligencer is the evildoers' nemesis. Is your conscience clear, your past unsullied as a virgin's bed, your every deed open to search? ”

“ It is by a too familiar view of even the shadow of crime, that in certain minds the criminal idea may be developed. We need but abolish the mental barriers to crime to step from the criminal idea to the criminal act. ”

“ Will we have the courage to do what this man hesitated to ask of us—allow ourselves to be bound and when the Monitors question us say that we struggled to defend ourselves but were overpowered by this man's criminal strength? ”

“ The mental reflex result of physical strength, as expressed in the criminal act, is more clearly shown in crimes against property attended with violence. Distinguishing it from the other orders of crime—malicious offenses against property, and offenses without violence—we have the motive in the first-mentioned class narrowed to the desire of possession, but so associated with the consciousness of personal strength that it is employed as an agent of the crime. ”

“ To stand guard as a policeman over our thoughts to see that no unworthy one enters, requires too much time and energy. Our interests must be of such a nature as to lead us away from the field of unworthy thoughts if we are to be free from their tyranny.
The Will and Voluntary Attention.—In voluntary attention there is a conflict either between the will and interest or between the will and the mental inertia or laziness, which has to be overcome before we can think with any degree of concentration. ”

“ Divine civilization, however, so traineth every member of society that no one, with the exception of a negligible few, will undertake to commit a crime. There is thus a great difference between the prevention of crime through measures that are violent and retaliatory, and so training the people, and enlightening them, and spiritualizing them, that without any fear of punishment or vengeance to come, they will shun all criminal acts. ”

“ But had not a development of unparalleled villany put scepticism to flight, we could not have brought ourselves to believe that those who were paid to detect crime should be found the most active in seducing innocence and youth to its commission. ”

“ How simple it all would be, or at least more simple than at present, if the notion of criminal act was superseded by that of dangerous act. The idea of crime is a metaphysical idea; the idea of danger is a social idea. ”

“ Those of the indurated sectarian mind, who would order all life by mechanism, are given to saying that if they were in authority the police would do so and so, and would not do such and such a thing, that they would have the police see to this and that, etc., etc., etc. ”

“ If the criminal, whilst at large, could count on a minimum of interference with his career of depredation, he had at the same time to reckon with a maximum of ill-treatment if ever he was deprived of his liberty. ”

“ Indeed it is to be observed not only that the main and typical criminality has a sort of reflex criminality depending upon it, but also that an increase of more serious or more frequent crimes induces a crop of resistance to and assaults upon the guardians of public order, together with false witness, insults, avoidance of supervision, absconding, and the like. ”

“ In fact, in a country without not only bolts and bars, but any effective system of law and government, this Spartan severity of discipline seemed the only security against the most frightful disorder. ”

“ On looking back at the dreadful state of society which necessitated the organization of the Vigilantes, and on reading these pages, many will learn for the first time the deep debt of gratitude which they owe to that just and equitable body of self-denying and gallant men. ”

“ If the proper guard was held over mind, the lazar-house, the prison-cells, and the slaughter-house of infamy would be emptied. We must begin with mortal mind, and first empty that of crime, or crime will never cease. Criminal codes are inadequate to educate the thought morally. ”

“ As defined in this book, "the principle of vigilance takes its place above formulated law, which is its creature, and is directly antagonistic to the mobile spirit which springs from passion and contemptuously regards all law save the law of revenge." ”

“ Since men greatly preponderate in those phases of crime which demand strength, belligerency, and publicity in the perpetration, the conclusion is legitimate that Crime would rapidly decrease at the time of life in which these qualities are wanting, or are impaired. ”

“ At present we are less exposed to the vicissitudes of good or evil, to the incursions of wild beasts or ‘bandit fierce,’ or to the unmitigated fury of the elements. The time has been that ‘our fell of hair would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir as life were in it.’ But the police spoils all ”

“ A few old men armed with a staff, a rattle, and a lantern, called watchmen, are the only guard throughout the night against depredation; and a few magistrates and police officers the only persons whose employment it is to detect and punish depredators; yet we venture to assert that no city, in proportion to its trade, luxury, and population, is so free from danger, or from depredations, open or concealed, on property.”
[436]
WATCHMEN GOING ON DUTY—1808. ”