All sorts of intangible and
hardly traceable injuries can be wrought today by malicious or careless
men injuries to reputation, to credit, to success. In a city the criminal
can hide and escape far more easily, can associate with his own kind,
have a certain code of his own (cf. "honor among thieves"), and more
completely escape the pangs of conscience, than under the surveillance
of village life. In a hundred ways there are increased opportunities
for doing evil with impunity. [Footnote: Cf. E. A. Ross, Sin and
Society, pp. 32: "The popular symbol for the criminal is a ravening
wolf; but alas, few latter day crimes can be dramatized with a wolf
and a lamb as the cast! 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. The injury that
is problematic, or general, or that falls in undefined ways upon unknown
persons, is resented feebly, or not at all. The fiend who should rack
his victim with torments such as typhoid inflicts would be torn to
pieces. The villain who should taint his enemy's cup with fever germs
would stretch] [Footnote continued from previous page: hemp.
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