CONDITIONS OF CRIME. 443 against property; the ouvrier (wage-workers) and servile class tend most to crimes against property. So far as women are in a condition of dependence, lead sedentary lives, or are physically weak, their proportion of crime is diminished. The impulse toward crime was strongest in the period of the culmination of physical strength and animal passion, declining after the age of twentyfive in the ratio shown in the diagram. 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70 75 80 RELATIVE TENDENCY TO CRIME AT DIFferent AgES. In America the period of epidemic absence of crime was simultaneous with the like absence of bankruptcy, viz., during the war of 1861 to 1865. In many counties in every State the jails were continuously empty for long periods, so that it attracted the comments of the courts. The war seemed to exhaust the crime propensity by its intense demands for slaughter, and all minor strifes lacked the passion to fan them into crime. M. Quetelet concludes his researches by expressing his "astonishment at the constancy which we observe in the results which each year appear in the records of the administration of justice. Nothing, at first blush, ought to be less regular than the march of crime. Nothing, above all, ought more completely to defy human foresight, than the number of murders which would arise without provocation, and in encounters altogether accidental. Nevertheless experience proves that not only murders are annually nearly the same in number, but that the instruments which serve in their commission are employed in the same proportions. Thus is presented to us the same sad perspective of the reappearance of the same crimes in the same order, and assuming in minute detail the same form. Sad condition of the human race-the portion due to the prison, chains, and the scaffold, seems as fixed as the revenues of the state." * In the very earliest condition of society, crime, as distinguished from the disobedience, by the slave, of his master's commands, could hardly be said to exist. Crime is the offspring of liberty, as is also virtue. The tendency of earlier society was to punish crime by expulsion or extermination-vindictively. Exile to an island is mentioned in Job, and appears in the earliest Roman law. Labor in mines, and slavery, took the place, until a recent date, which is now held by penitentiaries and jails. Forfeiture of goods, and, in a few cases, of land, branding and slitting the ear, maiming and torture, crop out in history as expressive of the sense of social justice toward crime. Throwing from the Tarpeian Rock, casting among lions, the drinking of poison, beheading, crucifixion, and burning are prominently brought to view in ancient and medieval history, while hanging is recent. In administering the death penalty, no account is usually made of the value a man may still be capable of conferring on society, notwithstanding the commission by him of a very great crime. Common rumor reports Shakspeare as having incurred the death penalty, for poaching, before he had written any one of his plays or poems. Had the law been executed, in his case, the human race would have suffered an immeasurable loss. Jeremy Bentham assails vigorously what he calls the "lavish and unnecessary use that is made of the invariable, unequable, incommensurable, ⚫ uncharacteristic, unfrugal, unpopular, uncompensatory, irremissible punishment of death." Since his, day the number of crimes so punished has been reduced from 134 to 4, of which the latter all involve the taking, or endangering, of human life. The most successful treatment of crime in modern history, and FROM KILLING TO CURING. 445. the only treatment that could be called economic or reformatory, is the colonization of the criminal, as practiced by England, indirectly in America, and directly in Australia, the Cape, New Zealand, and Tasmania. Notwithstanding all the efforts which philanthropists have made to bring reform out of the penitentiary system, the admission of practical prison workers is that the system almost never produces penitence. It fails to recognize that most men become criminals, not because increased restraint and a close fitting "jacket of the law is what they need, but because the degree of restraint and jural limitations they are under in civilized life, and in a state of liberty, is greater than their natures are adapted to. A society more relaxed, with fewer restraints and greater self-dependence, is furnished them by colonization, and, in many thousands of instances, the transported convict in a few years becomes the firm friend of law in his new home. The substitution of the penitentiary so largely for the gallows has been due to the increased value of man which arises with the growth of capital, the facility of subsisting and employing the prisoner, which attends the introduction of machinery and the subdivision of labor,* the sensitiveness of the public conscience in view of occasional instances of convicting the innocent, and the general growth of humanity and regard for human life. 175. Social Crimes and Insanities.-Quetelet found that both the weather, and the seasons, had the same influence on crimes, and on insanities. The ancients recognized, or imagined, so close an influence, or sympathy, as existing between the moon and mental aberration, as to call the latter after the former, lunacy, or moonstroke. Absurd as this has been held, modern medical science drifts around to the same point, by attributing much mental derangement to malaria or diseased air, and then making the symptoms on the 7th, 14th, 21st, and 28th days the test as to whether the disease is malarious, since these are merely moon periods. Both views may be mistaken, and the latter merely a survival, in a scientific form, of the earlier superstition. On the other hand, it is possible that a force which can lift the ocean ninety feet, in the Bay of Fundy, may excite tides in the atmosphere which have their effects on the mind and will. Whether any of these hypotheses be true or not, there is a strong analogy between the epidemics of unreason, cyclones of cruelty, * In the penitentiaries of Illinois, 17 mechanical trades were taught in 1870, and outbreaks of social war, which occur in the world of collective humanity, and the storms and tempests of the physical world. These epidemics of unreason enlist great masses of men, even millions at a time, in their phantasies. As these millions could only cohere through the leadership of their noblest and purest minds, their most zealous, self-sacrificing, and just men, it is found that in these great social upheavals it is the very best men that lead in the work of mischief, if mischief it is to be called. The persecutions of the Christians by the Roman Emperors, the tendency of dying persons to bequeath their lands and goods to the church, and to overestimate the virtue of charity as compared with industry, led into the middle or dark ages. The exaggerated value which men, during several centuries, attached to the work of bringing the whole world under one religious government—a fanaticism which had its outcome in a sacrifice of industry to monasticism and in a waste of European life and energy upon the crusades-in religious persecutions, and in the prosecution and burning of witches, and the religious wars, all threatened to quench civilization in Europe wholly. There is little doubt that these veritable cyclones of human hate, black with all the destructive possibilities of reviving barbarism, were led on by the very best, purest, and noblest minds, the most spiritual and selfsacrificing, as they were judged at the time, in the world's best circles. There is equally little doubt that it was the substitution of the spirit of gain, of industry, and of business, caused by the revival of trade in Europe under the stimulus of the discovery of the Indies and of America, which rescued the world from the darkness into which it was ever more deeply plunging, by bringing back the thoughts of mankind to their secular and material interests. Looking at these social tendencies, it becomes evident that they go far toward equalizing the ultimate influence of the more successful and the less successful, or of what are usually called the good and bad classes of society. The latter drift into the petty stage of individual crime, and are eliminated by society through some mode of punishment. The former take the lead in great holocausts of suffering and slaughter, which equal, in the evil and misery they inflict on the world in a single year, or generation, all that its combined criminal and vicious classes would inflict in a century. At the rate of 240 murders per annum, in France, the individual wickedness of that country would in seventy years take as many lives as its social and collective fanaticism, acting AMBITION AND CRIME. 447 in the name of justice and public spirit, took in one year of the French Revolution,* and it would require four French Revolutions to make one St. Bartholomew's night. † Roughly estimating, as many lives were destroyed in the crusades as have been ended in Europe by private murder in 3,240 years, or since King Sesostris led the armies of Egypt against Asia. Yet it would be doing injustice to the leaders in the crusades to suppose that their motives seemed to them less sacred than the absolute righteousness itself. It becomes those who have charge of the state, therefore, in its executive, legislative, and judicial functions, to observe with a wary and watchful eye the movements of those who have influence, popularity, and power, rather than those of the burglars, hall-thieves, and midnight assassins. The latter will be reached by the police and the courts, and opinion is united as to their quality. But the great upheavals and oppressions, holocausts and sacrifices, civil wars aud revolutions, will originate with the public-spirited, patriotic, pure, and virtuous. The people who give the statesmen most trouble, and the generals and armies most business, are those RATE OF GROWTH OF THE WORLD'S NATIONAL DEBTS SINCE 1714, ON A SCALE OF $1,000,000 TO THE SECTION LINE PERPENDICULARLY, AND 5 YEARS TO THE SECTION LINE HORIZONTALLY. * 17,000. + 80,000. $7,000,000. |