Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/443

 NOTES AND ABSTRACTS 429

and often beautiful in its play of feeling. The imagination of the Mediterranean peoples is plastic, seeking expression in architecture, sculpture, and painting ; that of the Baltic peoples is dramatic, seeking expression in action and dramatic art. Among Mediterranean peoples belief is determined objectively. Among the Eur- Asian and Baltic peoples there is a tendency toward a subjectively formed judgment. The habit of arriving at conclusions by scientific weighing of evidence seems correlated with a mixture of bloods.

So far as fundamental qualities of mind are concerned no harm can come to us through infusion of a larger measure of Mediterranean and Eur-Asian blood. It will soften the emotional nature, it will quicken the poetic and artistic nature. We shall be a more versatile, a more plastic people, gentler in our thoughts and feelings, livelier and brighter, with a higher power to enjoy the beautiful things of life. And probably, through the commingling of bloods, we shall become more clearly and fearlessly rational ; in a word, more scientific. F. H. GIDDINGS, in International Quarterly, June-Septemper, 1903. A. B.

The Social Factors of Criminality. At the last session of the congress oi St. Petersburg, Professor von Liszt, of Berlin, delivered a discourse, in the first part of which he considered in turn the classical, anthropological, and sociological schools of criminology, pointing out wherein each has been and can be fruitful, and the exaggerations and tendencies to be eliminated or rectified. He examines the division of the factors of criminality proposed by Ferri anthropological, physical, and social. The fault of this division lies in the absence of a rational definition of the social factors, and in the confusion resulting from the use of the physical factors as one autonomous group.

Herr von Liszt modified this tripartite division, transforming it into a bi- partite one. " Crime is the product of the individuality of the criminal as he behaved himself at the moment of his crime and of all the circumstances, in particular the economic circumstances, in the midst of which the criminal was found at the time of his act." In a word, he proposed a distinction between the individual and social factors. He affirms that the individual analysis can be made only by examining social causes.

What are the social factors of criminality? The two distinctive character- istics of modern criminality are the proletarization of criminality and the criminal activity of neurasthenics. It is customary to speak of crime as a phenomenon of social pathology. According to Herr von Liszt, however, the roots of crime are to be sought in normal social life. By stroke of analogy, the principle established by Virchow is invoked : that disease is only a manner of being of vital phenomena, a variation from the normal state.

The German savant borrows another conception from Virchow. " If we wish to study the normal or pathological life of individuals, we ought to go back to the cell. In the same way we can penetrate the life of the social body only by going back to the social cell." The social cell is constituted by groupings of individuals bound by community of interests.

Of these groups Herr von Liszt considered, in the first place, race. It has on criminality an influence which is not to be neglected. National, religious, political, and particularly economic groups formed for the production and distribution of wealth are considered. It is by an economic and social transformation that one can explain the phenomena of plundering knighthood and of the crowd of vagabonds which inundated all populated Europe at the close of the Middle Ages.

It is not necessary to search elsewhere than in the vigorous life of our society, " in the passage from a national to a world economy," for the two dis- tinctive traits of modern criminality criminality of the proletariat and crimin- ality of neurasthenics. Development of industry on a large scale, exhaustion of the nervous forces by the roughness of competition and by the struggle for life these are the sources whence this criminality derives its characteristics.

Much might be said on the subject of these affirmations. Some will ask if there is not in one of the principles which Herr von Liszt makes the tests of his system a point of departure a little too absolute: in the idea that it is necessary