This fact furnished a moral restraint to the individual and likewise made it hard for him to violate the rules of the game.  The opportunities for collecting large numbers of people who might encourage each other with their conversation and association were very few in rural life.  The man who would violate the law must do it alone.  Not only this, but he must take his first steps almost without suggestion or aid.  This confined criminal conduct largely to the feeble-minded and the seriously defective, and even these could generally live in a country atmosphere where life is simple and easy, without serious danger to themselves or others.

The great city with its swarms of people, its wealth and poverty, its unhealthy atmosphere, its opportunities for everyone to have many associates and still be lost to the community at large, makes irregular lives not only easy, but almost necessary to large numbers of men.  Civilization has no doubt created crime as it has created luxury, wealth, refinement and ease.  Much luxury has always led to deterioration and decay and is doubtless leading that way now.

One of the latest products of civilization that has had a marked effect on crime is the automobile.  Stringent laws are on the statute books of all states against stealing automobiles, yet stealing and selling automobiles is a flourishing and growing business.  A large percentage of the boys in the juvenile courts of our cities are there for stealing automobiles.  Yet this is the work of a very short period.  I do not mean to say that many of the boys brought into court for stealing automobiles would not have committed some other crime, if automobiles had not been invented and come into general use, but I feel quite sure that many of them are victims of the automobile madness alone.

The automobile is one of the latest manias and fashions that civilization has provided.  Almost no one is free from the disease.  Conservative business men must have motor cars; clerks and salaried people who cannot afford them must get them; mechanics and professional men who have no need for them, except that others use them, must contrive to buy them.  Automobiles are much more important today than houses.  Men go into debt and struggle for money to buy gasoline so that they may drive somewhere for the sake of coming back.  It has created a psychology all its own, a psychology of movement, of impatience, of waste, of futility.  Men in Chicago start to drive to Milwaukee without the slightest reason for going there; they travel the road so fast that they could get no idea of the scenery even if there were something to see.  They hurry as if going for a doctor.  They reach their destination and then start back home.  The specific desire that is satisfied by this expense and waste is a new one, an emotion of no value in the life processes and probably of great injury in life development.  It is a craze for movement, for haste, for what seems like change.