Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/572

530 result we have the criminal. It is quite unnecessary to spend time in exposing this fallacy in physiology; we need only refer to the Italians, whose food is very largely vegetable, and whose percentage of crime is among the greatest. The native inhabitants in India are another case in point; for their diet is likewise almost entirely a vegetable one, and yet, if it were not for the interference of the carnivorous English, they would even now be addicted to the almost universal practice of infanticide. So also is it that social rank, while setting metes and bounds in every other direction, fades away in the domain of evil. The criminal may be high or low, he still is the criminal; and, reasoned about broadly, there are as many offenses among the socially exalted as the socially debased.

Thus from every side we are driven away from the fortuitous, the occasional, the accidental as the controlling cause. We are forced, as a necessary resort, to something more reasonable, more stable, something which we can work on and understand. And as soon as we look on the matter with such eyes, it becomes plainer, more tangible, holding out hopes for amelioration if not entire cure.

In a problem like this, which has so many ramifications, we should seek for constant factors of divergence from the normal; or, better still, let us decide what is the healthiest development, so that we may be better able to understand the abnormal, the deficient in human character. "The perfection of man," says M. de Laveleye, "consists in the full development of all his forces, physical as well as intellectual, and of all his sentiments; in the feeling of affection for the family and humanity; in a feeling for the beautiful in Nature and art." Now we have something really definite. We have a clear idea of what is essential to the highest growth of human worth, and immediately we recognize that in the criminal we have a being more or less utterly removed from this standard, and thus representing what is abnormal, twisted, or diseased. What is more, this divergence is a constant one, which reproduces itself over and over again in successive generations of wrongdoers. It is rarely necessary for a man to commit crime at the present time, even though he be laboring under adverse circumstances; and it is never necessary for him to continue such a career. Therefore, when he does, it is a matter of choice or of temperament. Very often the amount of ingenuity and talent exhibited would be sufficient, if rightly applied, to bring him comfort if not greater rewards in the regular lines of effort.

The majority of us exhibit a strange lack of logic in thinking about hereditary transmissions. We recognize the necessity of breeding and the duty of selection in regard to animals; we are