Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/85

Rh Its effects, if long-continued, are to pauperize and permanently brutalize, just in proportion as it induces physical deterioration; and none so well as the pathologist knows the extent of the organic degeneration which accompanies and underlies the moral degradation—which is, in fact, the corpus delicti, the very substance and body of the offense. Hence the descent to Avernus by this route is not only easy, but, once fully inaugurated, the return becomes difficult if not impossible. Hoc opus est, hoc labor est. Such a traveler burns his bridges in crossing them, and, the physical basis of moral living being destroyed, the full restoration of the superstructure becomes a physiological and hence a moral impossibility. For the benefit of those whose thoughts are trained to run in curves—to whom a temperature-chart represents the condensed eloquence of a whole chapter of description the statement may be made that in one of the few series of exact observations in this direction the curve of alcoholic expenditure was found to be followed by the curve of arrests for crime of all kinds, even more closely than by the curve of arrests for drunkenness; showing, to a demonstration, that the crime-stage does not always wait for the drunken-stage—that the slow and silent deterioration due to alcoholic drinks is not necessarily dependent on their excessive use. But from that most instructive history of the Jukes, already cited, it appears that certain physical and mental disorders often precede the appetite for stimulants, and that the real cause of their use, in a large proportion of cases, is antecedent physical exhaustion, either hereditary or acquired. Both the prevention of constitutional disease and its cure (if such a thing be possible) will then do much toward the prevention of inebriety and the crimes and lesser immoralities which grow out of it. Disease is the equivalent of weakness, and induces not only physical indifference but moral apathy. Dr. Bruce Thompson, Surgeon to the General Prison of Scotland, says: "In all my experience, I have never seen such an accumulation of morbid appearances as in the autopsies of the prisoners who die here. Almost every organ of the body is more or less diseased; and their moral nature seems equally diseased with their physical frame."

The intimate relationship between nervous diseases and crime is conspicuous. In England, the ratio of insane to sane criminals is thirty-four times as great as of the insane to the whole population, and criminal lunatics are in excess in the high proportonproportion [sic] of seventeen to one.

The statistics of insane hospitals in our own country show that insanity, in a large proportion of cases, is associated with unhygienic living—both overwork and want of work, as well as monotony of work, being fruitful of this kind of degeneracy. A considerable percentage of the insane women in our hospitals is drawn from country farms. The monotonous drudgery of their daily lives, and the little