The discovery of the body of Colonel Lindbergh's baby was the tragic climax of a protracted tragedy. After weeks of frustrated hopes, it now appears that the baby was murdered soon after it was stolen, and that the complicated rumours and counter-rumours that have filled the newspapers were one and all unfounded. Americans are rightly appalled at the crime; will they extend their present indignation into a serious effort to deal with the circumstances that made the crime possible and its perpetrators able to escape detection?
It is dangerously easy to fasten on to the tragedy a moral that is beyond its scope; but it has without question served dramatically to illustrate the defects of American civilisation. There have not been wanting other illustrations just as forcible, and on a larger scale. Everyone knows that a negro cannot be sure of a just trial in many parts of the United States. At the same time, seldom has the breakdown of law and order in the face of organised crime been made so obvious as in the course of events since Colonel Lindbergh's baby was kidnapped.
Well-known gangsters have negotiated for the return of the baby; the police have been active and the newspapers lavish with space; large sums of money have been paid to persons purporting to come from the kidnappers; fantastic rumours have been put about, denied, and put about again. Yet all the while it looks as though the body of Colonel Lindbergh's baby lay a short distance from his house.
Al Capone sent out offers of assistance, and even President Hoover interested himself in the affair; but not only have the police failed to discover the criminals, they have failed even to arrest those persons who extorted money from Colonel Lindbergh.
Various attempts have been made to explain how such things can be in a country that, in a material sense, is amongst the most civilised in the world. It is Prohibition; it is the mixture of races; it is corruption; it is the lawlessness of old pioneering days persisting still; it is the lack of tradition and the restlessness and instability of a people that is not a people. Any of these may be contributory causes; but the present breakdown of law and order in America is mainly a consequence of the worship of Prosperity. Wealth is a disastrous social value because so much that is bad can be justified by it; when wealth is the only social value, then social institutions collapse and gangsters become national heroes. It may be that now, in the autumn of her great prosperity, America will rediscover other values and rebuild these institutions the significance of whose decay has hitherto escaped notice.
