592 The Criminal Law of the Future. [September, 
perhaps surprise those who are so anxious for the path of 
crime to be strewn with roses, if they are told that the 
legitimate conclusions to be drawn from one of the most 
interesting laws of organic science point in an exactly oppo- 
site direction. How this can be the case will at once appear 
if we refer to one of the stock-arguments of the opponents 
of capital punishment. They sometimes remind us that if 
a locomotive explodes, occasioning damage and perhaps loss 
of life, we do not break it up for old metal, but send it to be 
repaired. It might, however, strike them that between the 
defective locomotive and the criminal, especially the mur- 
derer, there are points of distinction which make their 
parable worthless. Let us suppose these differences done 
away with. Suppose good locomotives were so plentiful 
that employment for many of them could not be found. 
Suppose bad locomotives could not be reduced to inactivity 
and consequent harmlessness at our will, but were all to go 
on of their own accord, working and doing damage. Sup- 
pose, further, that if sent for repairs to a competent en- 
gineer we had still no positive means of knowing whether 
they were rendered trustworthy, or whether their defects 
were merely hidden for a time, to re-appear on some future 
occasion. Lastly, let us suppose that these unsafe locomo- 
tives had the power of reproduction, giving rise to others 
no less dangerous than themselves. Were such the case 
common prudence — the instinCt of self-preservation — would 
at once bid us to destroy such formidable machinery before 
it had opportunity to work further mischief. 
This brings us at once to the point — the question of 
heredity. Are children not absolutely certain, but at least 
very likely, to resemble their parents, grand-parents, and 
more remote ancestors, not merely in complexion, figure, or 
stature, but in habits, in intelligence, in disposition, in force 
of will, and in all that is generally summed up under the 
word charaCler ? The doCtrine is unpopular, since it has 
the misfortune to come into collision not with faCts, not 
with established truths, but — what is perhaps worse — with 
dogmas. Two most antagonistic schools of thought fear 
that should the principle of heredity be formally recognised 
their systems will stand in need of revision. On the one 
hand, we encounter the radical or revolutionary seCt of 
world-betterers, political and social, who not unnaturally 
see that if heredity is a faCt, human equality — a main point 
of their creed — must be greatly limited, and that aristocra- 
cies have an existence founded in the nature of man. On 
the other hand, many theological and ethical authorities of 
