CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY IN ITALY 



749 



leagues, who have carried their antagonism to Italy and things 

 Italian even to the serene fields of science. The French objections 

 were beaten down by a very hailstorm of facts, so carefully collated, 

 so industriously collected, that opposition was perforce silenced. In 

 the front ranks of the combatants, indeed, leading the attack, was 

 that eminent criminal sociologist, Enrico Ferri, whose legal vocations 

 have not hindered him from continuing his favorite studies, though 

 he is no less valiant as a lawyer than as a scientist. Indeed, he 

 holds that the two studies ought to go hand in hand. All lawyers, 

 he affirms, should dedicate themselves to the study of criminal an- 

 thropology if they would go to the fountain-head of human responsi- 

 bility; all judges should be inspired by this doctrine, ere blindly 

 punishing a culprit on the faith of a code not always founded on 

 direct observation of the environment or of the individual. " It is 

 not true that with Lom- 

 broso's theories all prison 

 doors would be broken down 

 and respectable humanity 

 given over to the mercy of 

 delinquents, as our oppo- 

 nents say. And were the 

 first part of this strange para- 

 dox to be verified — i. e., that 

 which demands that in order 

 to be logical all prison doors 

 be opened — there would 

 open also those of the lunatic 

 asylums in order to permit 

 the entry of the men ejected 

 from the prisons, individuals 

 whose mental and physical 

 constitutions pushed them 

 into crime." It was just 

 this theory of the born crimi- 

 nal, which Lombroso was the 

 first irrefutably to prove, and 

 whose effects must shortly be felt in criminal legislation, that car- 

 ried off the most clamorous victory at Geneva. 



Cesare Lombroso, who is a Hebrew by birth, was born at Turin, 

 in 1836. As a mere lad he loved to write, and composed, with the 

 same facility and rapidity that distinguishes him to this day, novels, 

 poems, tragedies, treatises on archaeological, physiological, and 

 already on sociological subjects, those dating from his student days 

 being actually published, so much talent did they show. Medicine 



Cesare Lombroso. 



