Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/353

Rh between the sexes characteristic of earlier ages hold on unchanged through this last period of life.

It will be interesting to return for a moment and examine what are the real proportions of the sexes, during the criminally most active period of life, between twenty-one and thirty years. While we would not expect in this period to find the groundwork laid for criminal conduct, yet it is the term of life, in both sexes, in which the effects of heredity, of early training, assume activity, and give shape and color to the destiny of the individual. What goes before may be called the germ period, and this the period of fruition. The years which precede the meridional term of life are under the influence of structural and intellectual genesis. It is the result of an aggregation of forces tending to a common end. Life has not reached the level of the conflicting emotions, passions, and activities, which at the completion of structure exist so potently. Activity at this period is the expression of simple laws, which lead to a uniform result. Mr. Neison, reasoning purely from statistics, arrives at the same conclusion, that "in the juvenile period of life the tendency to crime is under the influence of more constant laws or elements, and therefore shows less fluctuation than in mature life." The same conclusions hold good at the closing years of life. Youth and old age unite in the degree and quality of crime. The aggregate of crime in general is committed at the earlier part of this intermediate period of both sexes. The crime of this decade of life is more than quadruple that of any other. During this period occur those differences in the tendency to crime between the sexes which affect the total results. During this period, sex powerfully asserts its influence. Sex is no longer existing potentially in incomplete structure; but it is partly the sum of completed structural effort. Psychically, it is emotion, passion, and unconscious cerebral activity. Physically, it is the difference in development and mechanical power. Each of these is a factor in the differences real and apparent in the tendency to crime existing between men and women. There are many other causes, some of the more important of which have already been referred to, and are of social rather than sexual origin. But social factors operate more strongly at this period than at any other. Society in all its phases is made up of the activities of this period of life. Those forces which in their totality express all there is of society, seem to concentrate and coincide with those forces which express all there is of sex, and tend to one period of life common to both men and women.

2. In this connection it is proper to examine the bearings of women to the hereditary tendency to crime. Recent study of the relations of sex to crime has shown that the hereditary element in the criminal tendency may assume sexual phases. This is exemplified by the law of movement in the direction of the least resistance. The