Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/293

 NOTES AND ABSTRACTS.

Problems of Criminality. — I. " Is there a law of the transformations of the notion of crime?" It is a question not of real transformations of morality and of criminality, but of changes in the notion of morality and crime. The difference between the notion of crime held by our earliest known ancestors and that of more modern times is not so great as at first appears. The Ossetes of the Caucasus preserve better than any other existing people of Aryan origin the primitive institutions. Accepting the generalizations to which a study of this people leads, it seems to result that "among all ancient nations living in the state of the clan and the tribe, and even in the first epoch of city organization, crime was conceived: (l) not as an individual act, reproachable to the author alone, but as a collective deed, imputable to a whole collection of individuals; (2) not as the voluntary violation of a law, but as a simple material injury, no matter whether voluntary or involuntary." But the offenses which give rise to vengeance, crimes with respect to which no distinction is made between the author and his relatives, between the voluntary and the accidental, are not true crimes; they are deeds of war, accidents of the chase, committed to the injury of a man or a group of men, to be sure, but outside of the social group of which the author of the injury is a member, and outside of which there was primitively no relation of duty or of right recognized. The obligations of clan to clan long remained fragile, and their violation aroused only alarm on the material side.

But besides these pseudo-crimes, which became true crimes only with the lapse of time by the superposition of the city upon the clan, by the enlargement of the social circle, there was from the beginning a category of true crimes, committed between relatives, within the family or clan. These were under the jurisdiction of the domestic tribunal. Crimes committed within this sacred circle were imputable only to their author, and they were punishable only when they were intentional. Vengeance was not demanded under these conditions; society would be inimical to itself if it punished the death of one of its members by the death of another. Banishment was sometimes the lot of the guilty person, and if he escaped this penalty his lot was hardly more enviable; the public contempt into which he fell often drove him to voluntary exile. Thus there have existed, side by side, two vastly different species of punishment, the one inter-familial, the other intra-familial; one has not evolved from the other, but both have evolved independently and parallel. They have acted and reacted upon each other, and in a given time and place one or the other may have the ascendency.

The punishment inflicted by the domestic tribunal, tinctured with sympathy and mildness, was gradually assumed by royal, imperial, or national tribunals ; and as the royal judge often treated the offenders as enemies rather than as rebellious sons to be brought back to the fold, we find the element of vindictiveness again appearing. The notion of crime has remained the same, in its essentials, from the origin of societies. Yet it has been purified. The enlarging of the social circle has had for its effect to give to the notion of crime a meaning less and less particular and more and more general. Homicide, for example, has a larger social interest than formerly, one indica- tion of it being the establishment of treaties of extradition.

II. "Is there a law of transformations undergone, not with respect to the notion itself of the crime, but with respect to the nature of the acts to which this notion has been successively attributed ? "

Certain acts have always been considered as crimes; such, for example, are homi- cide and robbery committed against a member of the same social group. But this is not saying that these crimes have always been considered as major crimes. The greatest crime has always been that which has at once aroused the greatest alarm and the most lively indignation, that is, which has appeared most seriously to injure the lives and the interests of the collectivity, and to shock most severely the sentiments

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