Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/770

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POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

the habitual criminal, and here no punishment will suffice. The man must be treated as though afflicted with a serious illness and removed from society, for which, however, he may and should be made to work. He insists that these questions are of vital importance to every nation, and asserts repeatedly Enrico Ferri. that teachers in ragged schools and founders of polytechnics are patriots and philanthropists in the highest sense of the words, because helping to stamp out crime more than all the long-term sentences in the world. Crime is at once a biological and a social phenomenon. The criminal is a microbe which only flourishes on suitable soil. Without doubt it is the environment which makes the criminal, but, like the cultivation medium, without the microbe it is powerless to germinate the crime. To use Professor Ferri's expression, up to recent times the criminal has been regarded as a sort of algebraic formula; the punishment has been proportioned not to the criminal but to the crime. Anthropologists are teaching us to strive after scientific justice. Time and events have brought into clear relief the inadequacy of legal maxims, founded on antiquated and unscientific conceptions, and thus modern Italians show us that not the nature of the crime but the dangerousness of the offender constitutes the only reasonable legal criterion to guide the inevitable social reaction against the criminal. This position is the legitimate outcome of the scientific study of the criminal. And where the man of science has led the way the man of law must follow.

Such, in brief and somewhat in the rough, are the conclusions of Italian criminal anthropology, which we have given at some length, as the subject is too vast as well as too new to be clearly comprehensible in a few words. In the autumn of 1896 an International Congress of Criminal Anthropologists was held at Geneva, and on this occasion the Italian school triumphed as never before over all adversaries and schismatics, and especially over their French col-