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II.

What, then, is the criminal?

The science of criminology is almost entirely of today, and some of its conclusions are as yet only partially established. But many Italian, French and German, and a few English and American students have deeply studied it. Many investigations and experiments have been made, and there are a sufficient number of results obtained, upon which there is a general consensus of opinion, to make it possible to attempt, at least, a partial reply to the question.

The subject has been attacked from two principal points of view—the psychological and evolutionary and the sociological. From the former point of view, heredity becomes the predominating factor; from the latter, environment. The more sober writers combine the two, and in this combination, no doubt, the truth is to be found.

Of the first point of view, perhaps, Lombroso, Ferri, and Benedikt may be said to be the leading exponents. The argument is that as men, like all the rest of nature, are constantly developing minute differences of structure, so are they also constantly developing constant differences in their mental and moral endowments. It would be difficult to say what exactly is the normal type of man. A man perfectly proportioned—physically, mentally, morally—is altogether unknown. Moreover, if we should try to imagine this typical man, our estimate of him would differ from age to age, rising gradually as time advances. Only the Christian can look up to a perfect type, a perfect Exemplar—and He was God as well as man.

All men, as we know them, possess slight differences in all the parts of their being; no two are alike.

Now these differences involve the increased development of some organ, function, or capacity, or some combination of these, at the expense of the rest. The functions or capacities developed may be of an intellectual or imaginative character, then we get the inventor or the poet; they may be those that lead to strength of page 17 will or rapidity of thought, then we get the great general or the keen man of business; they may be the opposite of these, those which produce irritability, vacillation, passion, acquisitiveness, then we get the murderer, the thief, the criminal. The point is—and it is a strange though obvious one—that all these are departures from the normal type, as we conceive it—they are all, in fact, abnormal conditions. Some of them we believe to be advances on the normal type, anticipations of the perfect man to come, and we speak of them as virtue or genius; some are retrogressions, reversions, and these we talk of as degeneration and crime, but all are equally abnormalities, departures from the normal type as at present conceived by us.

Thus Lombroso describes genius as a "neurosis of an epileptic character"; crime he would describe as a similar disease but exhibiting contrary symptoms. This must be received with the reservations already mentioned. But so much seems clear: that the circumstances on the one hand which predispose a man to virtue or genius, and those on the other which predispose him to degeneration and crime, are equally beyond his own control. A few facts will strongly emphasise these considerations, and are of much interest in themselves. I turn to the statistics of murders in the United Kingdom for the ten years ending 1888; they seem to prove clearly enough that such crime, at least, proceeds from individual abnormality akin to insanity. The number of them reported was 1766. In 1094 cases no trace of a culprit was found; for the rest, 672 persons were tried, of whom 231 were acquitted; of the remaining 441 declared to be guilty, 142 or 32 per cent, were found to be insane: 299 were condemned to death, but of these the sentence of 145 was commuted, generally on the ground of mental infirmity: only 154 were finally executed. Thus of the few tried nearly one half were found to be mentally infirm—and some of the others may have been so—it was only the question of an opinion. The short lives of criminals point the same way: 54 per cent, of English prisoners are between 21 and 40 years page 18 of age. But the most striking fact is the early age at which crime developes: "Scarcely an habitual criminal in this country who has not been imprisoned as a child" says "The Reformatory and Refuge Journal" of July 1890. Lord Shaftesbury stated in 1853 that 58 per cent, of the known thieves began their career under 15 years of age, 14 per cent, between 15 and 16, 8 per cent, from 17 to 19, and only about 20 per cent, at 20 and upwards. In Italy it is said that 36.1 per cent, of the criminals are between 16 and 20. Most of these facts are quoted from Havelock Ellis' "The Criminal" or Morrison's" Crime and its Causes." As to the direct influence of heredity, in Germany 27 per cent, of the offenders are said (by Dr Lichart) to have sprung from degenerate parents, drunkards and criminals, and in Italy (by Dr Virgilio) 32 per cent. And the following particulars are taken from R. L. Dugdale s book on "The Jukes Family." The original Jukes, it seems, was a Dutch settler in America between 1720 and 1740. He was a careless, indolent fellow, the father of many illegitimate children Of his descendants the career of 709 has been traced: 76 were criminals who committed 115 offences, 131 were blind, insane or mentally weak, 142 were vagabonds, 180 are known to have received outdoor relief for an aggregate period of 800 years: of the women 128 were prostitutes, that is 52.4 per cent against a normal proportion of 1.66. On the whole Mr Dugdale considers that the State supported one or other member of this family for 2,300 years at a cost of some million and a quarter dollars.

I do not lay much stress upon the supposed physical peculiarities of the criminal—the receding forehead, the "sugar-loaf" form of skull, the prominent frontal crest, the ear projecting and deficiency of the lobule. There is much difference of opinion about these, and no real proof as yet exists that they are peculiar to criminals. The "criminal type" so often observed, not always inside a prison, may be due to circumstances of environment. Yet some of the facts adduced by Lombroso are striking and suggestive. He tells us, for instance, of a child who would not speak to a young man who was charming society by his manners and wit—"he is a page 19 murderer," said the child, and was punished accordingly, but a murderer Francesconi was eventually found to be. He tells, too, of a school of 32 children before whom he laid mixed up the portraits of 20 thieves and 20 honest men: four-fifths rightly separated the one class from the other. Once more he tells how he submitted 200 portraits of honest young men to three physicians and a girl of twelve: they all selected one as a criminal who on investigation was found, though never accused of crime, yet to have shown himself of a degenerate character. One fact which Lombroso urges is known to all who have seen much of prison life—that criminals have special diseases and special vices of their own—but this may be due rather to environment than to heredity. The special feature of all criminals is weak will power, showing itself in lack of self-control, want of concentration and application—deficiencies which often co-exist with much openness of mind, generosity, and religious feeling. On the whole it may perhaps be said that the criminal is simply a man whose special peculiarities have brought him into opposition to the prevailing tendencies of his age; he belongs to a type which the majority of his fellow men have left behind; his peculiarities, indeed, are shared all of them by other men, but the particular combination found in him in the particular environment in which he has been placed has made him what he is; had he been placed in some other environment his good qualities, not his evil ones (as we regard them) might have the rather developed; had he lived in an earlier age he might have changed places with some who are now honoured and esteemed. "Of a very great number of modern habitual criminals" says L. Owen Pike in his "History of Crime in England" (1876 p. 509), "it may be said that they have the misfortune to live in an age in which their merits are not appreciated. Had they been in the world a sufficient number of generations ago, the strongest of them might have been chiefs of a tribe. . . . With the disposition and the habits of uncivilized men which he inherited from a remote past, the criminal has to live in a country where the majority of the inhabitants have page 20 learned new lessons of life, and where he is regarded more and more as an outcast as he strives more and more to fulfil the yearnings of his nature." It is only necessary to add to this the remark that only a small proportion of the inmates of our prisons are habitual criminals; the majority are "occasional criminals" who have not yet and never may reach the stage of habitual criminals, but whose innate tendencies are such as are here described, and whose fault is that, being such as they are, some unfortunate combination of circumstances has been too much for their weak powers of self-control.