Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/574

532 to read from Sir John Strachey's quotation of an official report from India: "When a man tells you that he is a Bodhak, or a Kanjar, or a Sonoria, he tells you what few Europeans ever thoroughly realize—that he, an offender against the law, has been so from the beginning and will be so to the end; that reform is impossible, for it is his trade, his caste—I may almost say his religion—to commit crime"

The belief in the inevitable steadfastness of these personal and family traits will finally clear our moral atmosphere, for we shall and must see that the safety of society lies in right methods of development based upon normal marriages and normal breeding. As population increases and the complexities of life increase, the burdens put upon us become heavier in proportion. We need more mental and moral backbone than we have; we are becoming progressively unable to stand the strain, it has become absolutely necessary to raise men to a higher level. For our present standard in character even more than in brains is a pitiably low one. Just as it is practicable to improve a breed of animals, so is it possible to increase our own worth. It is in this belief that Francis Galton said: "I argue that, as a new race can be obtained in animals and plants, and can be raised to so great a degree of purity that it will maintain itself, with moderate care in preventing the more faulty members from breeding, so a race of gifted men might be obtained, under exactly similar circumstances."

Here we have the gist of the matter. There is a consensus of opinion in the competent that crime is not fortuitous; likewise that there is one sure method for betterment: "in preventing the more faulty members from breeding."

Scientists have known this for a long time; but the mere fact that the opinion was a scientific one kept it from the active appreciation of the many people who go to make up the intelligent class. Now it is time for us to understand the full bearing of the matter, as we certainly must do if we follow to their logical conclusion the teachings of great minds like Darwin and Wallace, like Wilson, Prof. Oscar Schmidt, Dr. Maudsley, and Jonathan Hutchinson; if we would rightly follow the meaning of the brilliant Weismann when he says that heredity is "that property of an organism by which its peculiar nature is transmitted to its descendants. And not only are the characteristics of the species transmitted to the following generation, but even the individual peculiarities." Besides all this, we have the evidence of men of authority, specialists in criminal anthropology, whose conclusions point in exactly the same direction, men like Cesare Lombroso, Ottolenghi, Rossi, Zucarelli, Virgilio Morselli, Marro; to these let us add the names of the eminent Lacassagne, of Kocher, Raux, Bournet. And even then we shall have only a part. The