8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



erally the case, it is insufficient to supply those matters of personal 

 adornment and comforts of surrounding, small as many of them are, 

 which are so necessary to contentment. This tendency to adornmen-t 

 either in person or surroundings must be looked at seriously as a sex- 

 ual mental trait in women. They need but to reach the rudimentary 

 stage of education to have developed in them {esthetic tendencies, and 

 which in many seem to exist innately. This feeling is also closely allied 

 to that personal pride which is such a safeguard against the encroach- 

 ments of vice. This pride of person is to many a struggling woman 

 what a moral atmosphere is to others. To the one it is an instinct 

 which keeps her from the degradation, and that conduct which leads to 

 it; to the other it is the moral foi'ce which surrounds her and lifts her 

 above the opportunities for evil. Viewed in this light, personal pride, 

 as expressed in the adornment of person and home, may replace the 

 purely moral sense to a certain extent. But pushed beyond the point 

 at which it contributes to correct conduct, and allowed to exist solely 

 as a sexual trait, it may become a strong incentive to crime. There 

 is no reason to doubt but it is mainly the cause which makes crimes 

 against property so nearly equal in the sexes among French domestics 

 just alluded to. A mere desire for luxury would not be liable to de- 

 velop in one never at any time of life exposed to its enervating influ- 

 ence, as the mass of working-women spring from parents who are 

 also toilers, so that we may safely conclude that want, or a personal 

 pride to appear better than others in the same station, is the most 

 active cause of crime among underpaid women who have inherited 

 no criminal taint. 



The massing of large numbers of women at manufacturing centres 

 is a circumstance from which spring many conditions which render 

 the minor degrees of crime easy of commission. It is a singular fact 

 that a great preponderance of numbers in one sex over the other, un- 

 restrained by ties of family, and without the natural dependence of 

 the different occupations and stations of life upon each other, almost 

 invariably defines a locality in which the various forms of crime exist 

 to excess. This has long been remarked of places in which the num- 

 ber of men greatly exceeds the number of women, but little attention 

 has been called to the same condition as resulting from the preponder- 

 ance in numbers of the other sex. Any one who has inquired into 

 the causes of the social evil must have been struck by the numbers 

 who admitted they had taken the first steps of their career in the pop- 

 ulous manufacturing towns where an excessive number of their own 

 sex was employed. There is this marked diflTerence : an excess in the 

 number of men leads to an increase of crimes against persons, while 

 an excess of women increases crimes against property, in both cases 

 relatively as to sex. I see no way, in our present knowledge of the 

 subject, of explaining this, other than that a healthy tone of society 

 demands an even balance of the different occupations and stations, 



