Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/752

732 less confined within the area of domestic life, is more able than woman to resist the action of the emotions. Another cause, which comparatively releases man from the criminal tendencies which grow out of a violated emotional life, is the weaker hold these emotions have upon his conscious life. These are my reasons for concluding that this excess over men, as a criminal against persons, within these limits, is the result of the more active development of the emotions in women.

Considering that, in the purely sexual relations of men and women, the male is the active and the female the passive one, the ratio between the sexes for the crime of adultery offers additional confirmation of the foregoing. For this purpose I shall select the statistics of M. de Marsangy, than whom none can be selected more favorably disposed to women. This author places the ratio for men at 528, and women at 472 to 1,000. As these were cases which came under the notice of the public prosecutor, it is reasonable to suppose that the circumstances attending them were in both sexes of a flagrant character, so that possibly the usual attitude of the sexes toward each other in this offense was reversed. These ratios render the assumption safe that it is in crimes which grow out of the acute and excessive emotional life of women that they tend to equal men as criminals. If it were any tendency to crime, growing out of sexual mental traits possessed more equally in common than the emotions, which causes the tendency to equality above referred to, it would be reasonable to expect to find the sexes occasionally approaching a common ratio in crimes against property, and which could be traced to the same mental traits. But a careful survey of the field shows this not to be so. Woman's delicacy and keenness of emotional life, when their undue exercise or unbalanced proportions seek expression in the criminal act, lead to crimes against persons, not against property. Even incendiarism, so commonly practised by men from motives of revenge, is but seldom attempted by women. The enmities of women are never general. They are roused by particular persons and special acts; hence their revenge takes-an individual direction, not against the property, but against the person of the enemy. The wounding of parents, and parricide, exceeding by so large a ratio all other acts of violence against the person, I believe can be explained in no other way. Admitting, as I have already done, that the great opportunity afforded of making attempts upon the persons of parents has some value as a factor, yet we must bear in mind that, from the nature of their domestic life, women have opportunities equally as great of inflicting injury upon others. It follows that opportunity as it affects parents must be given exceptional value, in order to account for their being the objects of criminal attempts on the part of daughters, over that of other persons holding a domestic relation. The ratio of crimes against parents also makes it very probable that the purely sexual emotions are