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Strong corroborative evidence for the view that criminality is a condition essentially dependent upon the physical and mental constitution of the individual rather than upon the environment may be drawn from our knowledge of the lower animals, among which the analogue of almost every crime has frequently come under observation. Thus, there are thievish bees which organize into bands and then live solely by plunder, murdering the sentinels and inmates of the hives which they ravage. There is

a variety of bees-the Sphecodes-which live entirely by pillage. These are " born criminals," for their tendency toward depredation upon their kind is evidently innate, a matter of organic constitution.' It is a very interesting fact that the ordinary honest working-bee may be transformed into a thief by feeding it upon a mixture of brandy and honey; upon such a diet, bees become irritable and lazy, and, when pressed by hunger, will attack and rob the hives. This fact might be misinterpreted, for it might be thought that if criminality may be induced in normal bees merely through such a change in environment as consists in a peculiar feeding, we should regard this as evidence for the belief that the fundamental cause of crime lies in environment. But the fact in question merely goes to show that the environment may induce degeneration in the congenitally normal, but does not conflict with the view, so well established, that degeneracy may be inborn. It has been pointed out that, in almost every dove-cote, there are certain pigeons which, 1 Wm. Ferrero, Forum, xx., 492. 1896.

instead of gathering for themselves the straw which they require in nest-building, endeavor to steal from their neighbors; and, in correspondence with their thievish propensities, these pigeons are generally found to be lazy and, because of their slow flight and proneness to lose their way, to be unworthy of confidence as carriers.' The analogue of human infanticide is very common among the lower animals. Some females regularly abandon, and others kill, their young. A pigeon in a dove-cote has been observed to kill every brood by crushing the skulls with her beak. Evidently, in such cases, there is an organic brain-defect. Crimes dependent upon a kind of insanity are recognized as occurring among certain animals. Thus, it may happen that an elephant-an animal usually of a most peaceable disposition becomes demented, and roves through a region beset by a frenzied desire to kill any man or other living creature which it may encounter. A very curious instance of a callous moral sense among the lower animals is supplied by those species of ants which steal from other species their young, while still in the chrysalis stage, and bring them up as slaves. The fact that such slavery is maintained among certain species of ants is now fully attested.'

An impressive feature of the relation between heredity and crime, and, indeed, between heredity and every other manifestation of evil, is found in the 1 Wm. Ferrero, loc. cit., p. 493.

2 Ibid., p. 495.

8 Cf. Prof. R. Hertwig, Lehrb. d. Zoologie, p. 134, Jena, 1893; also Prof. Wm. Marshall, Leben u. Treiben der Ameisen, p. 75 et seq., Leipzig, 1889.

possible influence of each individual toward a wide and incalculable injury of the whole human race. The rapid diffusion of influence through descent is, in a general way, very readily demonstrated. Assuming the offspring of each pair of parents to be only two individuals, a man's descendants would double with each generation, until, at the twentysixth generation, they would number 67,006,624; and in a few generations later the number would equal that of the whole population of the earth. On the other hand, our ancestry, if we go back only a few centuries, is as wide as the peopling of a continent; if we trace it very remotely, it appears coextensive with the human race.'

We must recognize, then, that the weak and the vicious who, a few centuries ago, were suffered to have a share in the world's parentage, have transmitted to us all some of their weakness and depravity; on the other hand, the "defectives" and criminals permitted, in this generation, to multiply their kind, are creating a stream of foulness which will surely, some day, mingle with and defile the blood of our own direct descendants. Generation after generation, the ever-widening circles of hereditary influence approach one another, those of the noblest and those of the vilest human progenitors, until they overlap and completely coincide, with the sad result that all of mankind are kept at one low level. A strong tendency toward reversion to the normal type is frequently manifested in heredity, and this influence has nullified, no doubt, much of

1 Appendix 13.

the evil which, otherwise, would have been transmitted from remote ancestors; but we must remember that this tendency toward the normal is assisted by some, and combated by other, conjugal unions, and that, as said elsewhere, the affinities of the degenerate incline them toward unfavorable unions.

It is a general biological law that the lower the position of an animal in the scale of being, the greater its capacity for the reproduction of its kind. This law holds generally in the case of man, and goes far to explain the exceeding slowness of human progress. Not only are men of the superior type much more rare than those of the inferior, but the latter are very much more prolific. Cherishing, as we do, the offspring of the very worst of men, we thereby add to the already overwhelming odds against which the race struggles toward perfection. It has now been sufficiently shown, I trust, that heredity is the fundamental cause of human wretchedness. Environment essentially the influence of heredity in previous generations-is a mighty factor, too, but, as Kurella has remarked, it is no more the cause of the human tendencies which it influences than is digitalis, when it modifies the action of heart and arteries, the cause of the circulation of the blood. In our veins flows the blood of ancestral imbeciles, lunatics, and criminals: small wonder, then, that we should continually suffer, ourselves, and constantly harass our neighbors, through our weakness, our eccentricity, and our crime!

1

I would remind the reader that the word is used in its broadest sense, as explained in the note on page 76.

WE

CHAPTER IV

THE DEFECTIVE CLASSES

E now come to a more special consideration of those individuals who, through their weakness or vice, are known as "defectives." Their number is appalling, and the burden which they impose upon the better portion of society is ever increasing. Their support and restraint require a vast series of institutions, asylums for idiots and imbeciles, for the insane, for insane criminals, for drunkards, for paupers, for those afflicted with incurable disease, for the deaf and dumb, for the blind, colonies for epileptics, and innumerable hospitals, reformatories, and prisons. From the teeming mass of defective humanity, let us select for our more detailed attention the idiot, the imbecile, the epileptic, the drunkard, and the criminal.

The Idiot. There are certain human beings whose mental powers are exceedingly undeveloped: the lowest grades of such persons are grouped together as "idiots," the higher as " imbeciles " or " weakminded." According to the census of 1890, there were in the United States 95,571 persons classed as feeble-minded and idiots. Doubtless the number

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