Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/750

730 mental factor touching woman's criminal relations. In robbery from the person, although the enormous disproportion in the ratio is in a measure explained by differences in physical strength, yet there remains much of this excess of men to be explained by other means. That which remains to be explained by means other than that of sexual differences of physical strength may be stated in this way: The ratio of the strength of the two sexes being fixed at 16 to 26, and the ratio for crimes in general against property being 26 to 100, we nevertheless find that for the crime mentioned the ratio is reduced to 8 in 100. Here is a difference in ratio between two classes of the same division of crime of 18 to 100. Evidently, it is too largely in excess of the ratio of strength of the sexes, to be entirely accounted for by that alone. This phase of sexual cerebration, together with woman's social conditions, is competent to explain the differences remaining unaccounted for. The crime of self-murder also brings out quite distinctly the action of this mental trait in women. An examination of the methods of self-destruction reveals sexual peculiarities. Men prefer cutting instruments and fire-arms, while women select poison, and hanging and drowning (Quetelet). A collection of nearly five thousand cases of suicide, by M. Brierre de Boismont, reveals the fact that hanging occurs more frequently among women than men, by a large percentage. It will be noticed that women select those modes of suicidal death which take the matter out of their own hands. They offer a surety for their fainting spirits by closing the avenue of escape behind them. However painful may be the death they seek, after the fatal draught, the fall, or the plunge, all voluntary power of escape is beyond their reach. Is it not from the consciousness that lack of physical courage, or timidity, would involuntarily cause them to escape from the pangs of death, that they select a method of destruction which after the painless first step renders such a return impossible? Cortes, who knew the temper of his men, burned his ships upon the shore; and in the same way women assure themselves of the impossibility of return ere they attempt suicide.

The influence of the excess of the emotional life in women over men, upon their criminal career, is not so marked as that of the psychical traits just considered. I stated in a former chapter that there was evidence which rendered it probable that those emotions or passions which serve as the incentives to crime approached in intensity the same mental conditions in man. In that portion of these contributions devoted to "Sexual Cerebration," emphasis was given to the fact that the emotional life of woman exceeded that of man. At this point in the study we can give this practical significance. The emotions offer vulnerable places in woman's moral armor. These mental sexual attributes which give such grace and beauty to woman's character cannot exist except at the expense of rigidity and sternness of