Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/625

Rh and in Massachusetts. In Italy most of these unhappy creatures are held to be lazy, riotous, perverse, or deceitful, and when their lunacy is admitted it is difficult to obtain their admission into asylums, and this because this special class of lunatics are dangerous inmates for ordinary madhouses. They steadfastly resist all discipline, they permit themselves obscene and violent acts; they are discontented with everybody and they evince themselves indifferent to punishment; in a word, they carry into the madhouse the habits and vices of the immoral class from which they spring, and thus become apostles of sodomy, rebellion, robbery, and desertion, to the detriment of the establishment and of the other lunatics. Often, too often Prof. Lombroso says, such men are allowed to wander free in the midst of society, and are the more dangerous because under an apparent calmness and lucid intelligence they retain their diseased impulses, giving proof of this when least expected. The professor cites several examples, and holds that to men thus mentally afflicted are due the epidemical madnesses that show themselves in the form of Nihilism, Mormonism, Anabaptists, the incendiaries in Normandy of 1830, and the Parisian Commune.

He insists rigidly on the point that this institution of criminal lunatic asylums is not due to sentimental pity, but is a pure measure rather of social precaution than of humanity. And against the objection that might be raised that real madmen may be confounded with dissimulators, Lombroso sets the development of modern anthropologic studies, which rarely, when the diagnosia is carefully made, falls into error on this point. By the institution of criminal lunatic asylums we obviate the transmission of the disease to offspring, we hinder recidivism and its consequences, which at best lead to the heavy cost of a new trial for the criminal. And that the theory is proved by practice to be correct is evinced by the fact that gradually the objections of adversaries are being overcome, so that criminal madhouses, under different forms, are being established in Denmark, Sweden, and France, where, since 1876, there exists one at Gaillon annexed to the central prison. The other civilized peoples of Europe, if they have not real criminal madhouses, have certain laws and institutions that in part answer the same purpose, as in Belgium, at Berlin, Hamburg, Halle, and Bruchsal. In Italy not only are there no such special establishments, but there is not even a line in the codex admitting the possible necessity for any such institution. Prof. Lombroso invokes these salutary provisions in ardent terms. He writes: "The orbit of crime is too deeply engraved in the book of our destiny for us to delude ourselves that we can suppress its course. But if other undisputed laws do not fail us, like those concerning the selection of species, we may hope by such