Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/357

Rh as M. de Marsangy useless for scientific purposes. Fortunately, this style of scientific writing belongs to the French school of both sentiment and morals.

The mental reflex result of physical strength, as expressed in the criminal act, is more clearly shown in crimes against property attended with violence. Distinguishing it from the other orders of crime—malicious offenses against property, and offenses without violence—we have the motive in the first-mentioned class narrowed to the desire of possession, but so associated with the consciousness of personal strength that it is employed as an agent of the crime. Belligerency, revenge, and other emotions which tend to crime, are absorbed in the order of malicious offenses, and thus the field is left clear, in the class under analysis, for the full play of the physical factor. Omitting ages under sixteen years, as being too nearly equal physically in the sexes, and basing our proportion on the number of criminals of both sexes from that age to twenty-one years, the proportion is 1 woman to 18 men, while for the ten years following it is 1 to 20. This is twice the proportion between the sexes for crimes against persons, and seven times that for crimes against property without violence, for corresponding ages. When we contrast this with the fact that the mean proportion between the sexes for all crimes against property is 1 to 4, and for crimes against the person it is 1 to 6, we may form an idea of the enormous influence of physical strength as a restraint to woman's criminal tendencies. We have, however, to modify this somewhat, by giving more or less value to woman's tendency to avoid those crimes which require publicity in both the planning and perpetration, and which is implied in violent crimes against property; but even giving this trait due weight, the physical factor as exhibited in this order of crime is the one which, more than any other, defines its character. While woman's deficient physical strength, compared to man's, acts so powerfully as an obstacle in the division of crime just considered, it is highly probable that in other offenses it also acts in the same manner, varying in amount, as this quality is necessary to the successful perpetration of the crime. In those crimes in which this factor does not enter, we at once notice that the ratios of the sexes approximate. In adultery, for instance, the proportion of the sexes is about the same. In infanticide, I have already remarked on the ease with which women enter upon a criminal course, when this conforms to the direction of purely sexual qualities; and, undoubtedly, intensity is added by the absence of physical strength as a requisite to the perpetration of the crime. In crimes against the currency, the same near equality in the number of the sexes involved may be noticed, and the fact that the proportions for the most active period of adult life and for childhood and old age are about the same renders it highly probable that this