class="x-ebookmaker-pageno" title="[Pg 10]"/> faculties. He acquires habits of body and of mind, and they leave their mark on him.

Vice and crime are not the same thing, nor have they any necessary relationship. Though generally the result of a vicious impulse or intention, there is hardly a crime in the calendar that might not be committed by a person acting from a higher moral standard than that set by the law. On the other hand, a vicious person may indulge in almost any vice and yet keep clear of the law; it all depends on how he does it. A dishonest person, if he puts his hand in the pocket of another and abstracts the contents, may be sent to prison; but if by appealing to the cupidity of his neighbours he can get them to put their hands in their own pockets and hand him over the proceeds in order that they may share in the El Dorado he has invented, he robs them just as effectively and is not sent to prison. He may become a pillar of society and a legislator.

When people are sent to prison for the first time all that has been determined is the fact that they have been guilty of breaking the law. There is no justification for assuming that their characters are, on the whole, worse than those of others. Some of them may have committed very wicked crimes; but, except in a few cases, a thorough investigation of all the attendant circumstances might modify any impressions derived from the trial. Even the commission of a fiendish act is not incompatible with a disposition that is usually and mainly good. We do not in practice assume that a man is a bad man because he has done a bad thing, any more than we credit him with being a good man because he has done a good thing. When the evil he has done has taken a criminal form we are as little entitled to judge the man by the act we condemn.

The fact that a person is in prison hinders any attempt to study him. The investigator begins with a prejudice against him because of the crime he has committed. Yet it is the most common thing to hear people who have known a prisoner intimately for years say that they could not have believed he would do the thing he has done. These people are quite as fit to judge character as those who are called scientific investigators, and they have better opportunities for doing so. They have not seen the weakness of their friends in the form it has taken. The investigator usually sees nothing else.

If those who come to prison for the first time were made the subject of examination, it would be found that they are principally remarkable for the absence of what the books call criminal characteristics.

Prisoners differ as much from one another as people who are law-abiding. No two are alike even among those who have committed similar offences; and those who enter prison for the first time are not distinguishable in appearance from members of the same social class who have not transgressed the law. That they may develop certain common characteristics as a result of their way of living is true; and there is a criminal class in the same sense as there is a professional class or an artisan class. The criminal is born and made just as the policeman is born and made. See him early in his career and it is impossible to tell what he is, but when he has undergone his training it may be expected to leave its mark on him which those who know may read with more or less success.

These common characters in the criminal have been laboriously sought for and recorded; measurements have been made and tables compiled; ratios have been calculated to decimals, and an appearance of scientific precision has been given to the study of the criminal which has led many to the assumption that the writers must know more about the offender than they themselves do. Yet there are few men or women of mature years who have not known with some degree of intimacy at least one person who has sunk into the mire of vice and it may be of crime; and one such case thoroughly known is a better basis for study of the subject than any amount of tables.

It may be of importance to compare the peculiarities of habitual offenders, but it is of greater use to learn how they acquired them. As for the habitual himself, he is not really the problem. His life is seldom a long one, and even if nothing other than is at present were done to, or for, him, he would die out in a generation. I do not say that the question of what we should do with our habituals is not important, but of much more importance is the devising of means for preventing the wrongdoer from acquiring the habit and joining their ranks. A study of confirmed criminals may be interesting pathology, but it is the study of the beginner in crime that will prevent the formation of the criminal class, in so far as it affords means for enabling us to deal sanely with them.

When an atrocious crime is perpetrated there is intense public interest shown in the criminal. He is examined in a distorted mirror and his parts are magnified. The more extraordinary he is, the more monstrous he appears, the greater the sensation. Yet the ordinary men and the ordinary offences are at once the more common and the more important. Here and there a person may be born with such a crooked disposition that it is difficult to see how he could go straight; just as occasionally one of great wisdom enters the world, or a child with more than the usual number of heads or limbs; but the occurrence is quite exceptional, and it is never profitable to generalise from it.

We have been reproached in this country with failure to make a scientific study of the criminal; and the works of foreign writers have been translated for our example and emulation. They contain a certain amount of information, but its value is not apparent. The importance of a book is not to be measured by the difficulty of understanding it. Big and strange words may as easily mask an absence of useful knowledge as convey a fruitful idea, and the man who has anything of importance to say regarding his neighbour—even though that neighbour is a criminal—does not require a pseudo-scientific jargon in which to say it. The criminal is a man or a woman like the rest of us, and information about his head or his heels, while it may have a special value in relation to his case, should not be confounded with knowledge of himself. He is something more than a brain or a stomach.

Either the so-called criminal characters are the cause of the man’s wrongdoing, the result of it, or have nothing to do with the matter. If they are the cause of the criminal act, how is it that they are admittedly present in others who are not criminals? It would certainly simplify the work of the police if they knew that they could with any degree of safety look for the perpetrator of certain kinds of crime among men with heads of a given shape; but anyone who glances at the illustrated papers will see for himself as many villainous-looking faces among notable people, even among able people, as he will find in a prison. Our forefathers had a rule that when two persons were charged with the same crime and there was a doubt which of them was guilty, the uglier should be condemned. It is not stated whether the officials and governing classes were at that time chosen for their good looks. Fortunately the practice has long since lapsed.

Unless a peculiarity is shown to have a causal relationship to crime its mere existence proves nothing except the fact that it is there. That in some cases physical defects do cause those who suffer from them to make war on society, is undoubtedly the case; but it is very far indeed from being the rule.

There are many people who are prepared to regard a book as learned if it is sufficiently scrappy and contains figures arranged in a tabular form. Yet figures when they deal with other than very simple