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The Criminal Law of the Future . [September, 
to bear upon them, at home, at school, and at church, were 
perseveringly applied. The younger, however, grew up to 
be the image of his father, in character as in person. If 
the doubters of heredity would watch with sufficient care, 
they could not fail to detect the transmission from father to 
son of traits of character, whims, and caprices incapable of 
being taught, and little likely to be adopted from imitation. 
And if dispositions are thus inherited in their minutest 
peculiarities, are the bolder and more decided features likely 
to escape reproduction ? But why should theologians and 
moralists fear that if we admit the inheritance of character 
it will no longer be possible to maintain responsibility ? As 
regards human laws this is altogether a delusion. Suppose 
a murderer pleads, as an apology for or extenuation of his 
deed, that he is sprung from a criminal stock, and cannot 
help taking life. Even admitting this helplessness — which 
after all by no means follows — Society may reply that this 
proves only the more convincingly the necessity for his 
elimination. 
Nor can heredity be pronounced incompatible with man’s 
responsibility before God. Does it not, after all, include 
the theological dogma of Original Sin, which divines have 
always been able to reconcile with responsibility ? Nay, is 
not the inheritance of evil tendencies formally recognised 
in the words “ visiting the sins of the fathers upon the 
children unto the third and fourth generation ” ? 
Turn we now to the revolutionary opponents of Heredity, 
the followers of Helvetius, who consider that if a man is 
only caught young, duly Board-schooled, and afterwards 
examined by the Art and Science Department, he can be 
converted into a genius, an “ advanced ” thinker, or a cos- 
mopolitan philanthropist, quite as easily as china clay and 
sizing can be transformed into good cotton cloth. Con- 
cerning responsibility to God or to man the writers of this 
school are not anxious. Nor, if we mistake them not, do 
they confine their denial of heredity to the moral aspedt of 
man’s nature. Of their manner of argument the following 
may serve as a typical specimen : — “ Of all vulgar modes of 
escaping from the consideration of the effecTt of social and 
moral influences on the human mind, the most vulgar is 
that of attributing the diversities of character and conduct 
to inherent natural differences.”* 
Such outbursts are of course vastly easier than the calm 
and exhaustive cohesion and appreciation of facts bearing 
* John Stuart Mill. Political Economy, vol. i,, p. 3go. 
