lo THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ments of its strength and permanency, as well as its weakness. It 

 is created and made lasting as life, or as brief as a summer's day, 

 by one and the same organic emotion. Otherwise marriage, which 

 we may assume as tbe type of domesticity, would not seem of itself 

 to exist as a factor in crime. As we study marriage in relation to 

 crime in another part of this paper, we shall perceive some very sin- 

 gular facts in which its bearings upon society are not so healthy as 

 might be expected. It cannot be charged, however, to marriage, 

 which is the most perfect of all human relations, but to its underlying 

 weakness, the changing sexual conditions upon which it is based. It 

 is safe in a broad grouping of crime to say that the emotions and pas- 

 sions define ofienses against persons, while those against property are 

 characterized by processes of mental calculation and deliberation. 

 The last needs opportunity and temptation; the first exists every- 

 where. The domestic relation afibrds a refuge to the one, and con- 

 tains within itself the element of the other. For these reasons I be- 

 lieve that the restraint afibrded by domesticity must be mainly limited 

 to crime against property. 



In connection with this division of our subject we are brought 

 face to face with the fact that women are as capable of crime as men. 

 "It is not the degree of crime which keeps a woman back," says Que- 

 telet .... " Since parricides and wounding of parents are more 

 numerous than assassinations, which again are more frequent than 

 murder, and wounds and blows generally, it is not simply weakness, 

 for then the ratio for parricide and wounding of parents should be 

 the same as for murder and w^ounding of strangers." ' 



With opportunities equal to man's, with the w^ay to crime made 

 easy, instead of being hedged in by the limits of her occupations, 

 woman may equal him in the tendency to crime. Infanticide, in 

 view of tlie strength of woman's maternal emotions, of the acute- 

 ness of her sympathies, and the general attributes of her char- 

 acter, stands alone as a crime in its relations to the sex. Consider- 

 ing the violence done to emotions which are a part of her organic 

 psychical life, it has no equivalent in degree in the range of crime. If 

 we apply to it the theory that the degi*ee of oifense, to a certain ex- 

 tent, affords a measure of the tendency to crime in the individual, 

 this crime would reveal in women such a tendency greatly in excess 

 of the other sex. But we must bear in mind that this crime, more 

 than any other, wliich tends to make woman appear unduly promi- 

 nent as a criminal, is a natural outgrowth of social surroundings. It 

 is a marked instance of the fact that society contains within itself, 

 even in its normal conditions, the moral agencies that create crime. 

 Society has raised for itself a gauge of conduct, by which the alter- 

 native may be presented to any woman, of either crime or disgrace. 

 At the same time society has so organized itself that the chief aim 



^ Loc. cit., p. 01. 



