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A question compendium should be edited by psychiaters and jurists for the use of the bench. The examination should apply not only to the delinquent, but to his parents, grandparents, and collateral relations, with the view of finding a clue to the degeneracy of the accused. This history should be collected in every detail. The medical report of every delinquent recidivist should make part of his history.

In the prophylaxis against criminality we should try to check alcoholism. In all countries the growth of viciousness and of aberration of the moral sense goes hand in hand with the growth of alcoholism and of other poisons. Why are so many crimes committed under alcoholic influence? Why are so many criminal recidivists of inferior intellect and morality? Experimental physiology and psychology give us the answer. Alcohol produces a progressive degenerative effect on the cortical nerve cells, as well as on the other nerve elements which take part in the intellectual and moral functions. Continuous indulgence in alcoholic drinks reduces the general as well as the special vitality of the tissues; the faculties are impaired, and abnormal character and acts result. This takes place in normal beings. Should the subjects be hereditarily predisposed, the result is still worse.

Statistical investigation shows an intimate relation between recidivism and almost complete absence of education. This lack of education is so much the more important because the subjects had attended school for a number of years, thus showing the hereditary taint that exists.

Out of 168 recidivists receiving minor sentences, 72 had received no education; 46 had received rudimentary education; 50, primary education; 89 were given to alcoholic excesses; 57 had an alcoholic father or mother; 47 had near relatives among other prisoners; 61 belonged to insane, hysterical, epileptic, or suicidal families; some of the same number had been inmates of insane asylums, or were abandoned by their parents, or were orphans. Out of 158 recidivists sentenced for ten or more years, 30 had received no education; 52 had received rudimentary education; 76, primary education; 92 indulged in alcoholic excesses; 55 had alcoholic parents; 37 had near relatives in prison; 40 showed signs of degeneracy. In the second class, recidivists receiving long sentences, there are fewer illiterates, because the members of this class received a complementary education while serving sentences. The number of alcoholic and criminal ancestors is about the same in each class. This fact is most striking, and I believe with Dr. Naecke that there is among criminals a hereditary taint of from 50 to 60 per cent. Pauperism is found almost universally; almost all come from the lower strata of society, having been subjected to worse physical and moral hygiene, and having suffered more from disease than others; from their very birth they differ from others anatomically and physiologically, having alcoholic parents who lead either vicious or lazy lives, abandoning their offspring, who, in turn, emulate their parents' lives. The recidivists are sufferers from psychological conditions of a pathological nature, besides the defects above mentioned.

For the benefit of the public health, the government should care for the young degenerates and take them away from the evil influence of their parents. When these degenerates attract attention by their acts or conduct, they should be investigated and reported on officially, as well as professionally. As far as possible, they should be placed in medico-pedagogic institutes, directed by competent authorities. Parents should have the privilege of placing in medico-pedagogic institutes children whose low intellects require special care; the children should be cared for up to the age of eighteen years. The question of vengeance should give way to that of ameliorating the conditions of the offenders. The degenerate cannot be held responsible, but should be cared for by society.- Condensed from a paper read by DR. JUL. MOREL, chief physician State Insane Asylum, Mons, Belgium, before the Fifth International Congress of Criminal Anthropology, Amsterdam, 1901, entitled "La prophylaxie et traitement du criminel récidiviste," and published in Journal of Mental Pathology, November, 1901.

R. M.

The Pretended Inferiority of Woman.- -Woman has been deprived of a large amount of happiness which should have fallen to her lot because, since time immemorial, she has been considered inferior to man from both a physical and psychical point of view. If it were demonstrated that this supposed inferiority were

not real, woman would take a place in society equal to that of man, and it would greatly increase her happiness.

Among prehistoric peoples there was no difference intellectually between men and women, and the same is true of modern savages. The difference between men and women is not one belonging to the physical or psychical order, but it is a social fact. The subordination of woman is the result of the difference in occupations; it has its origin in social ideas. For a long period the chase and war were considered the most important functions of society. As such they assumed a special character of dignity and honor. From the fact that woman was excluded from these occupations she was underrated in the eyes of men. Confined to the despised occupations she shared in the lack of consideration for this work, and from this fact the idea of her physical and intellectual inferiority was enthroned in the social mind.

The proposition which asserts the inferiority of woman will not bear criticism from any point of view. Superiority or inferiority in the human species is not the result of sexual differences. If the difference in regard to muscular strength or courage is considered, it is found that there are a large number of women who are as strong physically as many men, and, indeed, as courageous, while in both respects men are often inferior to women.

In regard to intellectual ability it can only be said that the science of psychology has not advanced far enough to warrant any scientific conclusions here. In countries like America, where woman has been granted conditions approaching equality, as in some of the schools, it has been demonstrated that her work compares favorably with that of men. It is impossible to form a correct judgment as to the physical qualities, for even in the most advanced countries woman is still subjected to many disadvantages when compared to man. It is not necessary to emphasize the fact that she has done little in the intellectual realm, for, perhaps, if all the difficulties which she has had to surmount were taken into consideration, the results might be vastly different.

Our conclusion is that, in consequence of the predominance of brutal force in the period of primitive savagery, woman became the possession of man, his slave, his property. When savagery gave place to a regime allowing a certain amount of justice and security, woman should have been enfranchised, but the habits and traditions of man were opposed to it. A day came, however, when the injustice of certain institutions became evident to all. It was then that the attempt was made to justify the subjection of woman by declaring that she was intellectually inferior to man. This discovery was made for the purpose of making legitimate an iniquity which the conscience of man had begun to condemn.

Woman has been kept in this subordinate position because she was placed there centuries ago by our coarse and ignorant ancestors. I may give an example of the form of reasoning often used to prove the inferiority of woman. When woman suffrage happened to show some bad results in countries where it has been established, the claim is usually made that it is due to the ignorance of the voters, their indifference or immorality. These same critics forget to note that manhood suffrage also often gives bad and very unsatisfactory results, but no one attributes this to sex qualities. Admitting, for the sake of argument, that woman is inferior to man, it is an injustice to speak of it constantly in that way, for it is not her fault. There are men manifestly below the normal in ability, but they are not deprived of their civil and political rights. Why should this be done in the case of woman? If she is really inferior, it would be better to assure her those favors and privileges that would tend to lessen her disadvantages. —J. Novicow, "La prétendue infériorité de la femme," in La Revue, November, 1902. E. M.

Social Teleology and its Mechanism.—Is there a fixed end for society? This question can be answered only by tracing the laws of social evolution, and the only side of this process that is scientifically observable is its mechanical side, its mechanism. On this side are observable three stages, characterized by three distinct laws:

I. The law of mental inertia and least effort. All our social institutions have been created little by little through many generations, each adding some small innovation that required a very small mental effort. Social evolution is accomplished

through small successes and small progress; it is made up of small partial adaptations, by no means co-ordinated at their origin, of small expedients always imperfect and provisional. This law is entirely instinctive, and though the solutions it proposes are designed for the immediate difficulty, these ends soon become means in solving the next problem.

2. The law of activity directed toward the maximum social utility. The effects of this law are first the increasing mediatization, and, second, the increasing depersonalization of social values. Things formerly sought as means have come to be sought as ends, e. g., riches, comfort, power. Along with this mediatization comes the depersonalization of social values, the loss of the imprint of the individual who created them; e. g., property, labor, art, literature.

3. The law of activity, directed toward the maximum of individual life and beauty. Industry and art are in some measure now turning toward this perfecting of the individual. This tendency, though not easily defined, is none the less actual, and probably all the more likely to prevail because it is subtle.

Evolution thus works out the social ends. They do not come to consciousness until they are realized, or at least are in process of being realized. And the social teleology is nothing more than the sum-total of a multitude of small actions. Social teleology, in so far as it is scientifically observable, seems to admit of neither a single end nor an unchanging standard. There is no absolute social good any more than there is any absolute social value. The hypothesis of an absolute moral value in societies that confers upon them a sort of sacred right to exist is an invention of those scholastic teleologists who try to justify everything by some social principle. There is no one social teleology, there are social teleologies. In fact, in the history of mankind that which has been called good and bad are changeable contents ever being broken down and ever forming anew. The good and the bad imply each other. The rôle of the instincts called bad, of those of cruelty, of barbarism, and even of torture, is incontestable in the moral education of mankind. In vain do some posit universal harmony as the end of society, while others give this place to perpetual opposition. The contest between the partisans of division and opposition, on the one hand, and of adaptation and harmony, on the other, is a question without meaning. The truth is that the one set of terms implies the other. It is better to recognize that there is a circle, and, since we are in the squirrel's cage, continue to turn the wheel.-— G. Palante, “Etudes sociologiques; La téléologie sociale et son mécanis me," in Revue philosophique, August, 1902.

T. J. R.

The Professional Criminal in England.—If we wish to diminish the professional criminal class, two definite steps must be taken. First of all we must narrow the recruiting ground of this class by preventing juveniles between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one from swelling the ranks of the professional criminal. This can to a large extent be accomplished by giving greater elasticity to existing laws relating to the treatment of juvenile offenders. The industrialization of corrective discipline should not cease, as it now does, at the age of sixteen; it should be extended, if necessary, to the period of civil maturity. This method of treatment, if conducted on popular lines by competent and sympathetic officials, would cut off the supply of professional criminals by converting a large percentage of delinquent juveniles, who would otherwise become professional criminals, into industrious and law-abiding citizens. In the next place we must prevent the prison from being, what it has been in the past, a nursery of habitual crime. This can be done only by the complete industrialization of prison treatment, and by bringing the reforming and rehabilitating forces of industry to bear on the individual prisoner. But the prisoner will not become industrious without the strongest possible incentive. That incentive is the desire for liberty. This desire should be gratified and this incentive developed by offering a reward for consistent and habitual industry in the shape of conditional liberation on a much more extended scale than now exists. The industrialization of prison treatment and the extension of conditional liberation would counteract and perhaps nullify the deadening and degrading atmosphere of prison life. It is this atmosphere which turns the occasional criminal into the professional and confirms the professional criminal in his sinister career. I do not say that when these two steps have been

taken we shall make professional criminals as rare as wolves. It will be many a long day, no matter what measures are devised, before this happy stage of progress is reached. No delusion can be greater than to suppose that it can be reached by resorting once more to the rusty, barbarous, and obsolete weapons of our ancestors. But I do believe, if we put our penal law, as Lord Roseberry would say, on an efficient and business-like footing in the matter of juvenile offenders and in the matter of prison treatment, that we can largely reduce the proportions of professional crime.-WILLIAM DOUGLAS MORRISON, in International Journal of Ethics, October, 1902.

T. J. R.

Language and its Words: Their Sociological Factors.-Man is the product of an automatic evolution. But articulate language does not owe its marvelous development to any such unconscious principle. Its development has been very complex: the word and the gesture naturally going together enforce each other, but they also at the same time oppose each other. Their association is in reality a struggle for their individual existences. In this contest the word has the advantage, due no doubt partly to its intrinsic superiority-for language is above all things vocal; the gesture exists, it is true, but merely as an accompaniment of the word—but due also, and especially, to the pressure of "social" necessities. That is to say, articulate language is, no doubt, partly the work of nature, but the work of man much more. This laborious birth and development has been neither mechanical nor deliberate, neither conscious nor unconscious, because it has been neither biological nor psychological; but it has been at once both the one and the other, because it has been sociological. In the social process man makes the instruments of progress, yet he himself is an instrument; he passes from the pursuit of ends immediate and perceived to the pursuit of ends remote and unperceived. Thus it is with all social development; thus it is with language; it becomes both means and end, makes and is made, and passes from the stage of immediate, unreflective use to the removed, mediated, deliberative character.

If we study all the different kinds of language we shall find unmistakable evidences of this "social" character or origin of language. The words of a language fall into three groups that name social facts or relations, viz.: (1) those of intercourse, from primitive group organization, group-contests, to modern commerce and thought transmission; (2) those of labor, from immediate food-getting by the primitive man to the highly-organized industry of our present century, from the labor of war to the occupations of peace; and (3) those of ceremony from the early worship of all "moving" things to the worship of the one Hebrew God; from the earliest instinct of dependence to the Jewish sacrifice and the present memorials. Intimate connections bind these three into groups together, and bind them into a language.-L. GERARD-Varet, "Le langage et la parole: leurs facteurs sociologiques," in Revue philosophique, October, 1902.

T. J. R.

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CHAPTER II. THE ANTECEDENTS OF SOCIOLOGY.

BETWEEN 1815 and 1830 A. Loria, in his excellent book Les bases économiques de la constitution sociale, wrote that, with the mechanical progress of industry and under the protection of a somewhat peaceful régime, a revolution, both economic and political, was taking place, characterized by the concentration of movable wealth; that in almost the whole of Europe a division of capitalistic power between agriculture, on the one hand, and trade and manufacture, on the other, coincided with a corresponding division of political power between the conservative party and the liberal party. We may accept the description of this phenomenon in its main outlines. Marx has also stated it, placing it in a more remote period, and, in reality, it appears in the most ancient civilizations, although under partly different conditions. In fact, the error of Marx and Loria is in not having observed that from remotest antiquity even the minor civilizations have passed through an analogous evolution, which, however, was different in secondary points, and less extended.

This economic and political concentration and differentiation had at that time (as always') as its consequence, as a true reflex. action, the concentration of the industrial laboring forces, on the I Translated by Robert Morris.

*See my studies on the ancient civilizations: Peru, Mexico, Egypt, India, China, Iran, Persia, and Greece.

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