NATURAL SELECTION AND CRIME. 439 



It should be understood that in speaking of criminals the 

 modern classification of criminals is recognized, and only the 

 instinctive or congenital criminals are here considered. In this 

 presentation, however, we must include the vast army of tramps 

 who move with the snow-line back and forth across the country ; 

 a horde continually increasing because, as with the criminal, the 

 vagabond strain is continually being bred. This startling truth 

 of inheritance must be emphasized again and again, till the pub- 

 lic mind slow to understand shall finally realize the fact and 

 take the same stern measures for suppression that it would in 

 the case of polluted water-supply and contagious disease. When 

 these matters were fully understood health boards came into ex- 

 istence, and with such arbitrary powers are they now endowed 

 that a family can be imprisoned in its own house ; the house may 

 be destroyed; the dead, if necessary, denied the ordinary funeral 

 observances. The public fully acquiesce in these heroic measures, 

 for the death-rate figures, year after year, become too significant 

 to be neglected. 



Vagabonds, like criminals, spring largely from a degenerating 

 stock. The persistence of the vagabond strain, the hopelessness 

 of reform among those blasted with the taint, is strikingly por- 

 trayed by the lamented Rev. Oscar C. McCulloch, in an address 

 read before the National Conference of Charities and Corrections 

 (1888), entitled The Tribe of Ishmael, a Study in Social Degrada- 

 tion. Traces of this tribe have been found as far back as 1790, 

 but from 1840 the record is quite made out for some twigs of this 

 baleful stock. Mr. McCulloch says: "The individuals already 

 traced are over five thousand, interwoven by descent and mar- 

 riage. They underrun society like devil-grass. Pick up one, and 

 the whole five thousand would be drawn up. Over seven thousand 

 pages of history are now on file in the Charity Organization 

 Society " (Indianapolis), and he asks : " Do any of these get out of 

 the festering mass ? Of this whole number, I know of but one 

 who has escaped, and is to-day an honorable man. I have tried 

 again and again to lift them, but they sink back. They are a 

 decaying stock; they can not longer live self-dependent. The 

 children reappear with the old basket. The girl begins the life 

 of prostitution, and is soon seen with her own illegitimate child." 



The tramp horde is a nidus from which apparently a vast 

 number of criminals spring. The appalling character of the 

 fruits of this nidus may be faintly realized by reference to Dr. 

 Seaman's paper on the Social Waste of a Great City (Science, 

 vol. viii, p. 283). Referring to New York, he says: "It seizes 

 upon and subsidizes the fairest string of islands that grace a 

 metropolis the world over. Where there might have been, under 

 a shrewder, better providence, parks, groves, museums, art-gal- 



