It is probably the breaking down of local attachments and the weakening of the restraints and inhibitions of the primary group, under the influence of the urban environment, which are largely responsible for the increase of vice and crime in great cities. It would be interesting in this connection to determine by investigation how far the increase in crime keeps pace with the increasing mobility of the population. It is from this point of view that we should seek to interpret all those statistics which register the disintegration of the moral order, for example the statistics of divorce, of truancy, and of crime.
- What is the effect of ownership of property, particularly of the home, on truancy, on divorce, and on crime?
- In what regions and classes are certain kinds of crime endemic?
- In what classes does divorce occur most frequently? What is the difference in this respect between farmers and, say, actors?
- To what extent in any given racial group, for example, the Italians in New York or the Poles in Chicago, do parents and children live in the same world, speak the same language, and share the same ideas, and how far do the conditions found account for juvenile delinquency in that particular group?
- How far are the home mores responsible for criminal manifestations of an immigrant group?
Crisis and the courts,—It is characteristic of city life that all sorts of people meet and mingle together who never fully comprehend one another. The anarchist and the club man, the priest and the Levite, the actor and the missionary who touch elbows on the street, still live in totally different worlds. So complete is the segregation of vocational classes that it is possible within the limits of the city to live in an isolation almost as complete as that of some remote rural community.
Walter Besant tells the following anecdote of his experience as editor of the People's Palace Journal:
