Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/749

Rh of civilization—a scion, as it were, grafted upon the parent trunk—humanity is wedded to its original savagism. Certain sociologists of the religious school teach that crime is the outcome of civilization, that it increases or decreases in proportion to the extent and quality of religious teaching; but an examination of the criminal returns of various peoples shows that crime exists at nearly a fixed ratio without regard to religion, be it what it may. Some forms of crime are, beyond doubt, increased by the artificial needs of society in its civilized form, infanticide and abortion, for example; yet even these crimes prevail universally among the most primitive races. Civilization has not modified the crime, it has simply changed the motive. With the tendency to crime existing at the ultimate fibres of man's psychical life, the expression of sexual cerebration in the criminal conduct of women assumes a naturalism called forth by no other social relation. As I have separately examined the matter of sexual mental types in a former article, all that is necessary here is, to apply the conclusions there reached to woman's tendency to crime.

The crime of poisoning, with its remarkable ratio, has been used a few pages back to illustrate the influence of the physical factor. It was called the weapon of weakness. This weakness is twofold, physical and mental. Women possess moral courage, but not physical. Timidity, a shrinking from bodily danger, a fear of combat, each an analogue of the other, appear as mental traits in the average woman. Here is an offense gauged to woman's mental and physical aptitudes. By means of poison, a fatal blow may be given by the weakest arm without the fear of combat, or of physical hurt. To a mind with criminal tendencies, hampered by the reflex consciousness of weakness, the security, the secrecy, are charming. The result is that, as a poisoner, woman nearly equals man. This equality among the lists of crime nowhere else appears except in offenses against the currency, a crime also remarkable for its secrecy, and freedom from personal encounter during its perpetration. If a further extension of the statistics of crime against the currency confirms the ratio of the sexes deducible from Mr. Nelson's tables, it will amount to nearly a demonstration of the fact here shadowed forth, that woman tends to equal man as a criminal in those crimes which require neither physical courage nor strength as conditions of their perpetration. The crime of vagrancy is the only exception that offers itself, and which loses its force as an exception under the law of criminal analogies. From the crime of poisoning, the climax of the criminal tendency, downward through the lighter shades of offense, this phase of sexual cerebration may be detected. If it were possible to give to woman the physical strength of man with this mental trait existing in its present force as a sexual characteristic, I doubt if it would alter essentially the known ratio of the sexes for murder and the wounding of strangers—9 to 100. I venture this prediction merely for the purpose of illustrating the potency of this