the statistical data exhibiting the primary characteristics of the majority of criminals, the data connected with relapsed criminals are especially conspicuous. Though relapses, like first offences, are partly due to social conditions, they also have a manifest biological cause, since, under the operation of the same penal system, there are some liberated prisoners who relapse and some who do not.

The statistics of relapse are unfortunately very difficult to collect, on account of differences in the legislation of different countries, and in the preparation of records, which, even under the more general adoption of anthropometrical identification, rarely succeed in preventing the use of fresh names by professional criminals. So that we may still say, in the words of one who is a very good judge in this matter, M. Yvern<e!>s, not only that ``the Prisons Congress of London (1872) was compelled to leave various problems undecided for lack of documentary evidence, and especially the question of relapsed criminals,'' but also that to this day (1879), ``we find varying results in different countries, the exact significance of which is not apparent.''

I have, however, published an essay on international statistics of relapsed criminals, from which I drew the following general conclusion: that even in prison statistics, which often give higher totals of relapsed cases than are given by judicial statistics, because they are more personal, and therefore less uncertain, we never obtain the full number of relapses, though the totals given vary from country to country, from district to district, and from prison to prison. It <p 14>would be impossible to state accurately what proportion the numbers given bear to the actual number; but I am justified in saying, from all the materials which I have collected and compared in the aforesaid essay, that the number of relapses in Europe is generally between 50 and 60 per cent., and certainly rather above than below this limit. Whilst the Italian statistics, for instance, give 14 per cent. of relapses amongst prisoners sentenced to penal servitude, I found by experience 37 per cent; out of 346 who admitted to me that they had relapsed; and, amongst those who had been sentenced to simple imprisonment, I found 60 per cent. out of 363, in place of the 33 per cent. recorded in the prison statistics. The difference may be due to the particular conditions of the prisons which I visited; but in any case it establishes the inadequacy of the official figures dealing with relapse.

After this statement of a general fact, which proves, as Lombroso and Espinas said, that ``the relapsed criminal is the rule rather than the exception,'' we can proceed to set down the special proportions of relapse for each particular crime, so as to obtain an indication of the forms of crime which are most frequently resorted to by habitual criminals.

For Italy I have found that the highest percentages of relapse are afforded by persons convicted of theft and petty larceny, forgery, rape, manslaughter, conspiracy, and, at the correctional courts, vagrancy and mendicity. The lowest percentages are amongst those convicted of assault and bodily harm, murders, and infanticide. <p 15>

For France, where legal statistics are remarkably adapted for the most minute inquiry, I have drawn up the following table of statistics from the lists of persons convicted at the assize courts and correctional tribunals, taking an average of the years 1877-81, which is not sensibly affected by the results of succeeding years.

It will be seen that the average of relapses for crimes against the person is higher than the average for the most serious cases of murderous and indecent assault, which are clearly an outcome of the most anti-social tendencies (such as parricide, murder, rape, inflicting bodily harm on parents, &c.). Thus homicide and fatal wounding, though relapse is very frequent in these cases, still display a less abnormal and more occasional character by their lower position in the table, as shown in the cases of infanticide, concealment of birth, and abandonment of infants. As for the very frequent occurrence of relapse in special crimes, such as assaults on officials and resistance to authority, which rarely come before the assize courts—though even there they tend to support the higher numbers in the tribunals—these are offences which may also be committed by criminals of every kind, and which, moreover, depend in some measure on the social factor of police organisation, and frequently on the psycho-pathological state of particular individuals.

The somewhat rare occurrence of relapse in such a grave type of murder as poisoning is noteworthy. But this is only an effect of the special psychology of these criminals, as I have explained elsewhere.

{Table printed in ``landscape'' mode was not OCR'd.}
FRANCE—CASES OF RELAPSE, 1877-81.

<p 17>

Amongst crimes against property, the most frequent relapses are found in the case of thieves (not including thefts and breaches of trust by domestic servants, which thus, proving their more occasional character, confirm the agreement of statistics with criminal psychology). The same thing is observed in regard to forgers of commercial documents and to fraudulent bankrupts, who are partly drawn into crime under the stress of personal or general crises. And the infrequency of relapse amongst postal employees condemned for embezzlement, and amongst customs officers who have been guilty of smuggling, is only a further confirmation of the inducement to crime by the opportunities met with in each case, rather than by personal tendencies.

Amongst minor offences, apart from that evasion of supervision which is no more than a legal condition, there are, both in France and in Italy, very frequent cases of relapse by vagabonds and mendicants, which is a consequence of social environment, as well as of the feeble organisation of the individuals. Other relapses above the average, included amongst these offences, constitute a sort of accessory criminality, existing side by side with the habitual criminality of thieves, murderers, and the like, such as drunkenness, attacks on public functionaries, infractions of the regulations of domicile, &c.

In thefts and resistance to authorities, relapse is less frequent here than in the assize courts, for in the majority of these minor offences, in their general forms, there is a greater number of occasional offences, as is also the case with bankruptcies, defamation, <p 18>abuse, rural offences, &c., which demonstrate their more occasional character by their very low figures.

Hence the statistics of general and specific relapse indirectly confirm the fact that criminals, as a whole, have no uniform anthropological type; and that the bio-psychical types and anomalies belong more especially to the category of habitual criminals and those born into the criminal class, who, after all, are the only ones hitherto studied by criminal anthropologists.

What, then, is the numerical proportion of habitual criminals to the aggregate number of criminals?

In the absence of direct inquiry, it is possible to get at this proportion indirectly, from facts of two kinds. In the first place, a study of the works on criminal anthropology supplies us with an approximate figure, since the biological characteristics united in individuals, in sufficient number to create a criminal type, are met with in between forty and fifty per cent. of the total.

And this conclusion may be confirmed by other data of criminal statistics.

Whilst the statistics of relapse give us a very limited number of crimes and offences committed by born and habitual criminals,