THE STAMPING OUT OF CRIME. 531 



perfectly willing to follow well-known ideas on the need of weed- 

 ing out undesirable traits in cattle ; moreover, the world has for a 

 time shown its belief in the existence of hereditary genius, other- 

 wise Galton's painstaking work on the subject could never have 

 reached its present popularity, nor should we now possess our 

 admiration for " good blood." But when we speak of the more 

 unfavorable traits and the deadly certainty of their reproduction 

 in descendants, our lips falter, we quickly hide the unpleasant sight 

 with a capacious covering of charitable forbearance. We con- 

 stantly meet with startling examples of transmitted crime, such 

 as the famous or infamous Cook gang and Jukes family ; every 

 day in the more unfortunate phases of metropolitan life we see 

 children following in the wake of parents and grandparents in 

 the wide sea of vice ; even do we see the same manner of crime 

 reproduced in straight family lines, and yet we dare not look the 

 plain truth full in the face ; under the mask of a specious system 

 of. correction we hide our fear of facts and our incapacity to act 

 for the criminal individual as well as the noncriminal public. 



It is time for us to see that punishment will not abolish crime, 

 any more than a whipping will change a lunatic into a sane man. 

 Until the citizens of a community are really healthy in mind, 

 body, and soul, crime will and must continue in its concomitant 

 ratio. For crime is merely the expression of the action of ordi- 

 nary social conditions upon distorted and diseased organisms. 

 The symptoms of this pathological state when occurring singly 

 may, as in the common sicknesses, mean but little. But when they 

 come together in recognized groups they point to definite degrees 

 of degeneration. For this reason anthropologists have been try- 

 ing to classify criminals, to put in their proper places symptoms 

 of weakened will and industry, overweening egoism, a failing 

 respect for consequences, deficient domesticity, insensibility to the 

 higher impulses, as well as the merely physical traits of facial and 

 cranial asymmetry, misshapen heads, epilepsy, idiocy, and the ten- 

 dency to disfigurement, as in tattooing. It is on the permanency 

 of such traits that Bertillon's system of measurement is founded, 

 as well as Galton's theory of finger markings. The main idea 

 which these facts should impress upon us is the absolute stability 

 of these peculiarities and the inevitable surety of the results 

 which flow from them. The criminal is not necessarily without 

 good impulses ; on the contrary, he may have them more or less 

 constantly, but he is unable to act them out. Where the will is 

 thinned out almost to the vanishing point, or where the faculty of 

 concentration has been progressively weakened, it is practically 

 impossible to make up for them, and the unhappy offender is 

 quite at the mercy of circumstances which bring him time and 

 again before the criminal courts. In this connection it is inter- 



