168 Heredity. [April, 
England, which were nests where the vilest criminals 
swarmed and multiplied, are to this day characterised by the 
low moral type of their inhabitants. Whitefriars, Fulwood’s 
Rents, and certain distriéts of Westminster, are sufficiently 
well known in London. Scarcely an episcopal city but has 
a similar rookery beneath the very shadow of its cathedral. 
A young woman of remarkably depraved character, who in- 
fested the distri¢ts on the Upper Hudson at the beginning 
of the present century, has left eighty direct descendants, of 
whom one-fourth are convicted criminals, whilst the rest are 
drunkards, lunatics, paupers, prostitutes, or otherwise useless 
members of the community. If the lineage of criminals is 
inquired into, as it doubtless henceforth will, we shall find 
that crime literally reproduces crime. So long as we imagined 
that the criminal, if placed under more favourable circum- 
stances, might have grown up a virtuous man, we were 
justified in a policy of leniency, and might entertain the 
hope of reclaiming the offender. This hope—except as re- 
gards the casual, incidental criminal—is now taken from us. 
The hereditary ruffian must be ‘‘ stamped out,” by death or 
by penal servitude for life, as the circumstances of the case 
may indicate. 
We do not set ourselves to work to train tigers and 
wolves into peaceful domestic animals; we seek to extirpate 
them. Why should we act otherwise with beings who, if 
human in form, are worse than wild beasts, since they slay 
and maim out of pure wantonness? Education, moral and 
religious influences, may doubtless arrest the formation of 
criminal races, and bring them back to a normal condition ; 
but can we allow a criminal family to go on for four or five 
generations, murdering intelligent, moral, industrious citi- 
zens, whilst we are trying experiments in reclamation? To 
educate the son of a garotter or of a “‘ corner-man ” into an 
average Englishman is about as promising a task as to train 
one of the latter into a Newton or a Milton. 
