Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/771

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY IN ITALY.
749

leagues, who have carried their antagonism to Italy and things Italian even to the serene fields of science. The French objections were beaten down by a very hailstorm of facts, so carefully collated, so industriously collected, that opposition was perforce silenced. In the front ranks of the combatants, indeed, leading the attack, was that eminent criminal sociologist, Enrico Ferri, whose legal vocations have not hindered him from continuing his favorite studies, though he is no less valiant as a lawyer than as a scientist. Indeed, he holds that the two studies ought to go hand in hand. All lawyers, he affirms, should dedicate themselves to the study of criminal anthropology if they would go to the fountain-head of human responsibility; all judges should be inspired by this doctrine, ere blindly punishing a culprit on the faith of a code not always founded on direct observation of the environment or of the individual. "It is not true that with Lombroso's Cesare Lombroso. theories all prison doors would be broken down and respectable humanity given over to the mercy of delinquents, as our opponents say. And were the first part of this strange paradox to be verified—i. e., that which demands that in order to be logical all prison doors be opened—there would open also those of the lunatic asylums in order to permit the entry of the men ejected from the prisons, individuals whose mental and physical constitutions pushed them into crime." It was just this theory of the born criminal, which Lombroso was the first irrefutably to prove, and whose effects must shortly be felt in criminal legislation, that carried off the most clamorous victory at Geneva.

Cesare Lombroso, who is a Hebrew by birth, was born at Turin, in 1836. As a mere lad he loved to write, and composed, with the same facility and rapidity that distinguishes him to this day, novels, poems, tragedies, treatises on archæological, physiological, and already on sociological subjects, those dating from his student days being actually published, so much talent did they show. Medicine