Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/573

Rh perfectly willing to follow well-known ideas on the need of weeding out undesirable traits in cattle; moreover, the world has for a time shown its belief in the existence of hereditary genius, otherwise Galton's painstaking work on the subject could never have reached its present popularity, nor should we now possess our admiration for "good blood." But when we speak of the more unfavorable traits and the deadly certainty of their reproduction in descendants, our lips falter, we quickly hide the unpleasant sight with a capacious covering of charitable forbearance. We constantly meet with startling examples of transmitted crime, such as the famous or infamous Cook gang and Jukes family; every day in the more unfortunate phases of metropolitan life we see children following in the wake of parents and grandparents in the wide sea of vice; even do we see the same manner of crime reproduced in straight family lines, and yet we dare not look the plain truth full in the face; under the mask of a specious system of correction we hide our fear of facts and our incapacity to act for the criminal individual as well as the noncriminal public.

It is time for us to see that punishment will not abolish crime, any more than a whipping will change a lunatic into a sane man. Until the citizens of a community are really healthy in mind, body, and soul, crime will and must continue in its concomitant ratio. For crime is merely the expression of the action of ordinary social conditions upon distorted and diseased organisms. The symptoms of this pathological state when occurring singly may, as in the common sicknesses, mean but little. But when they come together in recognized groups they point to definite degrees of degeneration. For this reason anthropologists have been trying to classify criminals, to put in their proper places symptoms of weakened will and industry, overweening egoism, a failing respect for consequences, deficient domesticity, insensibility to the higher impulses, as well as the merely physical traits of facial and cranial asymmetry, misshapen heads, epilepsy, idiocy, and the tendency to disfigurement, as in tattooing. It is on the permanency of such traits that Bertillon's system of measurement is founded, as well as Galton's theory of finger markings. The main idea which these facts should impress upon us is the absolute stability of these peculiarities and the inevitable surety of the results which flow from them. The criminal is not necessarily without good impulses; on the contrary, he may have them more or less constantly, but he is unable to act them out. Where the will is thinned out almost to the vanishing point, or where the faculty of concentration has been progressively weakened, it is practically impossible to make up for them, and the unhappy offender is quite at the mercy of circumstances which bring him time and again before the criminal courts. In this connection it is