HEREDITARY TRAITS. 235 



are worse than wild beasts ? ' * To educate the son of a 

 garotter or a " corner-man " into an average Englishman,' 

 may be ' about as promising a task as to train one of the 

 latter into a Newton or a Milton.' But we must not too 

 quickly despair of a task which may be regarded as a duty 

 inherited from those who in past generations neglected it. 

 There is no hope of the reversion of tiger or wolf to less 

 savage types, for, far back as we can trace their ancestry, we 

 find them savage of nature. With our criminal families the 

 case is not so utterly hopeless. Extirpation being impossible 

 (though easily talked of) without injustice which would be 

 the parent of far greater troubles even than our criminal 

 classes bring upon us, we should consider the elements of 

 hope which the problem unquestionably affords. By making 

 it the manifest interest of our criminal population to scatter, 

 or, failing that, by leaving them no choice in the matter, the 

 poison in their blood may before many generations be era- 

 dicated, not by wide-spreading merely, but because of the 

 circumstance that only the better sort among them would 

 have (when scattered) much chance of rearing families as 

 well as of escaping imprisonment. 



