656 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the fact that they who, for the sake of the world, are throwing their 

 lives behind them as fast as they can, are doing more work and better 

 work than they who, keeping their lives in their hands, are content to 

 labor without resort to any perilous adventitious assistance. Is it so ? 

 Is the man who never touches a lethal weapon alcohol, opium, tobac- 

 co, chloral, hasheesh, absinthe, or arsenic a worse man, a weaker man, 

 a less industrious man, a less-to-be-trusted man, than he who indulges 

 in those choice weapons ever so moderately, or ever so freely ? If he 

 is, then my position is confessedly undermined, and toxico-mania is a 

 blessing, with all its curses. Contemporary Heview. 



SPONTANEOUS AND IMITATIVE CKIME. 



By E. VALE BLAKE. 



IT is not to be expected that law-makers or the administrators of 

 legal justice should discriminate between spontaneous and imitative 

 crime ; but to the patient thinker, the medical scientist, and the prac- 

 tical philanthropist it is evident that the grades and distinctions of 

 actual criminality are almost as various as the individual criminals. 

 Even the word crime is very indefinite, and by no means always indi- 

 cates the true character of an act usually so designated. Acts inno- 

 cent in themselves such, for instance, as buying goods in a foreign 

 market and bringing them for use to this may be made a legal crime 

 by statute law, while other acts which are monstrous violations of 

 natural human rights may be and are ignored by the code, and are 

 perpetrated with impunity in the highest grades of civilized society. 

 So, also, really criminal acts may be committed, and yet crime be 

 absent, for the essence of crime in the individual (excluding for the 

 present the rights of society) lies in the intention, and this element, 

 through physiological and moral reasons, may be void. Indeed, could 

 we apply a mental and moral vivisection to the cases of individual 

 criminals, we should probably find unexpected variations as to the 

 causes and influences tending to its development ; but practically we 

 may summarize the whole mass of law-breakers under either one or 

 the other division which the title of our article indicates : and, if by 

 some subtile alchemy we could perceive the main dividing line sepa- 

 rating the criminal classes into those who act from the spontaneous 

 impulses of their nature and those who are led into crime mainly by 

 the influence of their peculiar vofiog, or social environment, we should 

 be in a fair way to learn how crime might be diminished, and the so- 

 called " dangerous classes " prevented from spreading its infection. 



By spontaneous criminals we mean those who act from well-defined 

 motives, from avarice, revenge, the gratification of pride, vanity, or the 



