Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/297

Rh reasonable minimum, and the economy of the country is developed every year toward strength and independence. The Soudan has been reclaimed from barbarism, the fellah has become a peasant proprietor, and enjoys a commercial freedom and importance which would have been thought impossible less than twenty years ago. Egypt is in the position of a railroad in the hands of a receiver; its government must continue, but its finances are under a foreign control, and subject to the regulations of more than one power. Herein lies the whole problem. A people may spend freely on business principles in directions where the cost is returned many times over in public welfare. But politics or interested partisanship introduces an element that is ruinous to the public good and debauching to the public service. —, "Year of State Deficits," in Publications of the American Statistical Association, March, 1899.

Fanaticism as a Source of Crime. — When belief, on its emotional side, rises to such a height as to interfere with the normal evolution of the psychic life, it becomes fanaticism. As phases of the development of such one-sidedness appear intense intolerance of the beliefs of others, and that degree of desire to save one's own soul which halts at no crime considered as a necessary means of reaching the end in view. It is in this phase of its growth that fanaticism becomes a source of crime. The results of an analysis of a series of legal actions involving prosecution for crime supposably committed under the spell of fanatical religious beliefs serve to illustrate this point. Thus, the Convulsionists, a sect existing in Paris about 1760, were wont to crucify members of their order, in emulation of the crucifixion of Jesus, in the belief that the souls of the surviving members would be saved by the sacrifice of their fellows. In 1817 the "Paschelians," an Austrian sect, murdered a man, his wife, and their daughter, under the delusion that the trio, who refused to go with the fanatics, were possessed of the devil. On the following day they crucified one of their own number, a girl of eighteen years, who had offered herself for the death, in imitation of the death of Jesus, in order to save the souls of her fellow-believers. In 1S23 the leader of a Pietistic circle in Switzerland, after having dispatched her sister, who gave her life as a means of saving the souls of her relatives, was crucified by her followers at her own command, in order that she might die, rise again after three days, and restore to life the sister whom she had slain. In 1865 two mothers, adherents of the "Holy Men," slew their sick children, believing them to be victims of demoniacal possession. In 1875 a Hungarian miller, belonging to the "Nazarenes," killed his son as an offering for his own sins, after the fashion of Abraham. In 1870, in Irkutsch, Russia, one of the "Schismatics" convinced himself by prayer and fasting and much scripture-reading that to save his soul he must be crucified. Accordingly he attempted self-crucifixion, and succeeded so far as the circumstances of the case would permit. In 1830, in the government of Perm, Russia, a peasant killed his child as an offering for sin, and buried the body in an ant-hill. Likewise, in the government of Vladimir, another peasant killed both his children in due Abrahamic form, and while the babies bled under the father's knife the devout mother celebrated the service by reading aloud selected portions of the twenty-second chapter of Genesis. In 1854, in the government of Tamboff, Russia, a peasant, convinced that to save his soul a man must have a sin to repent of, killed a neighbor with an ax in order to satisfy this highly imperative condition. It is a part of the creed of the "Wanderers," a Russian sect, that Antichrist rules in high places there, and that, accordingly, good men must have naught to do with governmental affairs of any sort. In conformity with this belief, a man murdered, in various ingenious ways, twenty-five men, women, and children, including his own wife and babes, in order to free them from the danger of losing their souls by suffering the contaminating contact of the government census-taker. This occurred in 1897. The "Deniers," another quite interesting Russian sect, believe that evil taints all earthly good, and that the only escape is death. In 1825 sixty of these men, strong in the faith, after having murdered their wives and children, permitted themselves to be put to death, one by one, by their leader. The "Scourgers," who also form a widespread and influential sect in Russia, in obedience to the behests of their "saviors" are in the habit of indulging in human sacrifice, cannibalistic feasts, erotic dances, and other lewd procedures as an extremely efficacious method of keeping the hand of evil from off their immortal souls. So the "Muckers" of Konigsberg