Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/620

602 also condemns very strongly and very properly the foolish habit that obtains on the European continent of extending full pardons to prisoners because a private event has taken place in a royal family, such as the birth of an heir, or the marriage of a prince. Punishment must be steady, equal, and not liable to such accidents on which the criminal, generally a fatalist, is apt to count. Further, it is always well, if it can be hindered, that a released prisoner should not return to his native place or habitual abode. A most special watch ought to be kept over the houses of receivers of stolen goods. These persons, who might be called the capitalists of crime, almost always go unpunished, and it is just they who should be smitten. The professor has great praise to bestow on the American vigilance committee, an institution he regards as wise in the extreme. He also lauds the English detection system and the Austrian Vertraute, who render splendid services by giving such persevering chase to criminals. He also proposes the alliance of all nations for the arrest of delinquents, as well as the sequestration of a person who boasts that he has committed a crime.

Alcoholism is a fruitful source of evil-doing. It is therefore desirable to prevent by all available means the diffusion of the liquor trade, either by exorbitant taxes or by a limitation in production. The statistics of Switzerland, Sweden, Holland, and certain parts of the United States and England show a very sensible diminution of crime since severe laws were enacted against the manufacture and sale of intoxicating drinks. Feasts, fairs, and markets should be diminished, when they are not called for by special and real commercial reasons. The mass should be educated not only by means of the alphabet, but should be taught elevated ideas with regard to work and personal dignity. Prizes should be instituted for the virtuous, and every aid should be given to extend the helpful labor of postal banks and co-operative stores. Yet another powerful incitement to crime is the public spectacle afforded by courts of justice. Entrance to these should be limited to well-known persons, and the mass be rigorously excluded. The modern tendency, fostered by the press, to make of a malefactor a hero, is greatly to be deprecated, and leads to crimes due to pure imitation, from a desire for notoriety, no matter at what cost. There should positively be forbidden those extended judicial reports in the newspapers, fruitful sources of eventual crime, which the people read with so much avidity. The State ought to promote and protect work in every way it can, for only by work can idleness be conquered, that too potent counselor of crime.

Lombroso holds that there are certain establishments where the notion of evil is first inculcated, and these, according to him.