CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY (PSYCHICAL)

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IV. CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY (PSYCHICAL)

§ 1. Moral Insensibility.

The moral insensibility of the instinctive and habitual criminal, his lack of forethought, his absence of remorse, his cheerfulness, had been noted long before they were exhaustively studied by Despine. In the argot of French criminals, conscience is la muette, and to induce any one to lead a dishonest life is l’affranchir. This moral insensibility is, indeed, a commonplace of observation with all who have come in close contact with criminals. Gall remarked: “If criminals have remorse, it is that they have not committed more crimes, or that they have let themselves be caught.” Dostoieffsky, speaking from his intimate and sympathetic acquaintance with convicts in Siberia, said: “During so many years I ought to have been able to seize some indication, however fugitive, of regret, of moral suffering. I have perceived positively nothing. Seclusion and excessive work only develop among those people a profound hatred, the thirst of forbidden pleasures, and a terrible indifference.” He goes on to tell of a parricide who remarked carelessly, in the course of conversation: “Take my father, for example; he was never ill up to the day of his death.” “Scenes of heartrending despair are hardly ever witnessed among prisoners,” observes Dr. Wey of Elmira; “their sleep is disturbed by no uneasy dreams, but is easy and sound; their appetites, also, are excellent.” “It is a most singular thing,” remarks Mr. Davitt, “that I have met very few individuals in prison who gave evidence in appearance or talk of being truly miserable, no matter what the length of their sentence, amount of extra punishment, or contrast between their previous and their convict life may have been.”Mr. Davitt seems inclined to attribute this sinister contentment to a sort of heroic fortitude providentially implanted in the criminal breast. He refers, however, to one man who never smiled during the time he was in Dartmoor. “His existence seemed to be one perpetual sorrow, and he formed altogether the most striking exception to the rule of non-despairing prisoners which came under my notice during my long intercourse with Dartmoor’s criminal population.” Now this man was a Swansea stone-mason who had come home one Saturday evening “a little fresh,” but not drunk, to find his wife in tears, and on learning that she had been insulted by a man who lived on the other side of the street, he rushed out, chisel in hand, to the man’s house and left him desperately wounded. It is clear that this man, who was sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude, was not an instinctive criminal, or an habitual criminal at all; it was the strength of his social, and not of his anti-social, instincts which had caused his crime. He was merely a criminal by passion, and his case forms, therefore, no exception to the general rule.

On the whole we may conclude that the practice of the instinctive and habitual criminal corresponds very closely with the faith of that religious sect who in Commonwealth days held “that heaven and all happiness consists in the acting of those things which are sin and wickedness,” and “that such men and women are most perfect and like to God or eternity which do commit the greatest sins with least remorse.”

Despine, in his Psychologie Naturelle (1868), studied this question on the largest scale in order to obtain exact results. “I addressed myself for this purpose,” he tells us, “to the collection of the Gazette des Tribunaux, going back to 1825, and I soon acquired certainty that this psychical peculiarity is an invariable rule among these criminals.... I acquired the certainty that those who premeditate and commit crime in cold blood never experience moral remorse. I found also that those who manifest acute sorrow and real remorse after a criminal act, have committed that act either under the influence of a violent passion which has momentarily stifled the moral sense, or by accident, without intention.” He concludes that the two great psychical conditions for crime are moral insensibility and perversity, with two accessory moral anomalies, imprudence and lack of foresight.

“You premeditated your crime?” said the judge. “Yes, for eighteen months.” “But that is monstrous.” “I know; I ought to have done it in April, but having no money, I arranged it for January.” A murderer, after receiving sentence, was led out in the midst of a crowd who hurled imprecations at him. He saw a comrade and shouted to him, almost laughing—“Hallo! I’ve just been condemned to death.” An Albanian, after having killed a traveller to rob him, lamented that the expense of the shot amounted to five paras; he had only found four paras on the victim; that was his one regret. An assassin after his crime passed two days eating and drinking with a comrade; “he was as gay as a lark,” said the latter. “But,” said the judge to the accused, “one fact indicates remorse on your part: you were about to cut your throat when arrested.” “That was that I might not be taken to prison.”

Wainewright unblushingly avowed his atrocities. How could he kill such an innocent and trustful creature as Helen Abercrombie, he was asked once. After a moment’s reflection he replied, “Upon my soul I don’t know, unless it was because she had such thick legs.”

It would be easy to give many similar stories exhibiting the moral insensibility of the instinctive criminal, frequently manifested in brutal bravado. They are, however, easily accessible and of sufficient notoriety. It is enough to give one more. A corporal at Paris killed an old woman, the landlady of an inn, in order to rob her. He was condemned to death without any hope that his penalty would be commuted. He knew this, but was not disturbed, and was proud of his calmness and sangfroid; he talked to his warders on the most various subjects, without reference, however, to his crime; read books from the prison library, and finally devoted himself to what he called the literary labours of his last hours. He had a taste for verse, and wrote a drama concerning his crime. “Death!” he often said to those around him; “I cannot fear it either as a soldier or as a philosopher. Yet it is overtaking me in my youth and strength. It is a terrible thing, but I am prepared, and I shall go to my execution courageously and with head erect.” The acts of this Socratic criminal agreed with his words. He slept peacefully, rose and dressed himself with a smile on his lips, glad, as he said, to find himself still in this world, where it is, after all, so pleasant to live. His appetite was always good, and he joked with the warder who attended him about the small amount of food supplied to him. “Patience!” he exclaimed, “à la guerre comme à la guerre.”

An executioner told Lombroso that all the highwaymen and murderers went to their deaths joking. It would, however, be a mistake to trace moral insensibility in the tranquil avocations and bon-mots of men who, whatever their crimes, are about to pay the extreme forfeit for them. One criminal occupied his last hours with arranging his unpublished literary works; another gave lessons in hygiene to the warders; a third remarked to those who sought to hurry him to the place of execution, “Do not be disturbed; they will not begin without me.” Such stories have, however, been recorded of the most eminent political offenders in all countries.

PLATE IX.

Dr. Corre, in his interesting work, Les Criminels, has investigated the historic and judicial documents relative to the last moments of 88 criminals condemned to death, of whom 64 were men and 24 women. Of the men 25 died in a cowardly manner, already half-dead with fear, or else after a despairing struggle with the executioner. These were more than two-fifths of the whole number, and included many of the chief criminal celebrities, some of them educated men, doctors and priests. Four accepted their fate in a state of extreme nervous excitement, accompanied by loquacity. Twelve maintained to the end a cynical and theatrical attitude; these were vain individuals, often with some pretensions to literary ability; Lacenaire is the type of them. Five died with indifference, an impassivity which recalls the insensibility of the brute or the unconsciousness of the madman. Eighteen went out of the world with a calm and resigned courage, often repentant, and prepared by the exhortations of the priest. They belonged to various social classes. Those of the lower classes were generally more sincere, and publicly avowed their guilt, holding themselves up as warnings to others; those belonging to the middle classes, anxious to leave behind a doubt as to their guilt, declared themselves innocent; others were silent. Of the 24 women, only 5 (about one-fifth) showed cowardice. Only one, a poisoner, showed “revolting cynicism.” The rest, 18 in number, were self-possessed and resigned, frequently repentant, and generally consoled by religious administrations. In this category is included the Marquise de Brinvilliers, who for a long quarter of an hour was exposed to an immense crowd nearly naked—“mirodée, rasée, dressée et redressée par le bourreau,” wrote Mme. de Sevigné—with unshaken firmness. Three-fourths of the women, little more than one-fourth of the men, are among those who died with resigned self-possession. The cynicism, cowardice, and brutal passivity of the others alike testify to moral insensibility.

Out of more than 400 murderers Bruce Thomson had known, only three expressed remorse. Of the 4000 criminals who have passed through Elmira, 36.2 per cent. showed on admission positively no susceptibility to moral impressions; only 23.4 per cent. were “ordinarily susceptible.” Dr. Salsotto, in his recent study of 130 women condemned for premeditated assassination or complicity in such assassination, was only able to recognise genuine penitence in six. He is careful to point out that precise statistics on this point are of no great value, unless they are associated with a very intimate knowledge of individual criminals; the assumed penitence is seldom real, and the real penitence is not obtrusive. Dostoieffsky, the most profound student of the human heart who has ever studied criminals intimately, has noted this fact—“In one prison there were men whom I had known for several years, whom I believed to be savage beasts, and for whom, as such, I felt contempt; yet at the most unexpected moment their souls would involuntarily expand at the surface with such a wealth of sentiment and cordiality, with such a vivid sense of their own and others’ suffering, that scales seemed to fall from one’s eyes; for an instant the stupefaction was so great that one hesitated to believe what one had seen and heard.”

The moral insensibility of the instinctive criminal is the cause of his cruelty, a cruelty which he frequently displays from his childhood. Rossi found in ten of his 100 criminals an exaggerated and precocious cruelty; one of them, as a child, used to take young birds, pull out their feathers, and roast them alive; another revenged himself on birds for the punishments imposed on him by his parents. A certain amount of cruelty is, however, almost normal in healthy children. The instinctive criminal is more distinctively marked by his continuance of the same practices throughout life. At Buenos Ayres a man killed his father in order to rob him, and not finding the money, he placed his mother’s feet on the fire to make her confess that of which she was ignorant. Another, after killing an entire family, played with the corpses of the children by throwing them in the air and catching them alternately. Another, mentioned by Lombroso, when shown a photograph of his wife whom he had murdered, testified to the identity without the tremor of an eyelid, tranquilly adding that after inflicting the fatal wound he had asked for forgiveness, which had not been granted. A little nursemaid poisoned the twin children under her care with the phosphorus from a box of matches, in order to procure the excitement of going out to the doctor’s and the chemist’s.

In India no motive for murder seems too unnatural or too far-fetched to be occasionally true. “A village schoolmaster in Aligarh (1881) killed one of his pupils; and a stepfather in the same district threw his two stepsons into the Ganges because he was tired of them. A man in Jhansi (1885) killed his daughter because his neighbour had slandered her, in order that the girl’s blood might be upon the neighbour’s head. A master murdered his servant (1881) and threw the body before his enemy’s door, solely in order to bring a false charge against the latter. A similar case occurred in Azamgarh five years later: a boy was murdered by his grandfather and uncle; they threw the body into a sugar-cane field, and then charged the owner with the crime. A still stranger story comes from the Mutha District: Randbir, a Jat, who had once been a thriving man in Randbirpur, fell into the hands of the moneylenders, lost his property and his house, and became for some crooked reason embittered against his old fellow-villagers. He made up his mind to bring them into trouble. Taking his chopper with him, he met a little Chamar girl, whom he took into a temple in Bahadurpur. There he cut her throat and slightly wounded himself, and then brought a charge of dacoity and murder against the people of his old village.”

Such moral insensibility is, no doubt, intimately related to the physical insensibility already noted, and is of an equally morbid or atypical character. It passes far beyond that of the savage with which the moral insensibility involved in deliberately killing or injuring a fellow-creature may fairly be compared. “How you snore!” said one person to another. “Do it again, and I kill you.” An hour afterwards he killed him. Lord Gifford mentions an Australian woman of the Muliana tribe who admitted having killed and eaten two of her own children, who annoyed her by crying. (The Australian aborigines are, however, usually very tender to their children.) A Maori chief said to Mr. Tregear—“If I go out for a morning walk with my spear, and I see a man, and I push my spear through him, that isn’t murder—that is ‘killing.’ But if I invite him to my home, give him food, tell him to sleep, and then kill him, that is ‘murder.’” Such a clear-cut distinction as this testifies to a considerable degree of moral insensibility. It must be noted, however, that while in this respect the criminal approximates to the savage, he is at the same time related to those more or less civilised persons who tolerate killing with equanimity when it is called war.

§ 2. Intelligence.

The two most characteristic features in the intelligence of the average criminal are at first sight inconsistent. On the one hand he is stupid, inexact, lacking in forethought, astoundingly imprudent. On the other hand he is cunning, hypocritical, delighting in falsehood, even for its own sake, abounding in ruses. These characteristics are fully illustrated in the numerous anecdotal books which have been written concerning crime and criminals.

Several attempts have been made to attain accurate figures as to the relative intelligence of criminals, but there must be a considerable element of guess-work in such calculations. Dr. Marro, a reliable observer, detected a notable defect of intelligence in 21 cases out of 500. He found that incendiaries and then murderers yielded the largest proportion of individuals with defective intelligence; then came vagabonds, sexual offenders, those convicted of assault, highwaymen, and those convicted of simple theft. The fraudulent class, as well as pickpockets and burglars, showed no instances of defective intelligence. That is to say that criminals against the person show a much lower level of intelligence than criminals against property.

The stupidity and the cunning of the criminal are in reality closely related, and they approximate him to savages and to the lower animals. Like the savage, the criminal is lacking in curiosity, the foundation of science, and one of the very highest acquisitions of the highly-developed man. He is constantly compared in this respect to animals. Macé, a former chief of the Parisian police de sûreté, remarks: “In spite of the cunning and tricks, which are too gratuitously credited to thieves, their stupidity generally is scarcely credible; they nearly all resemble the ostrich who, when his head is hidden behind a leaf, thinks that he is not seen because he cannot see.” Dr. Corre remarks: “There is something feline in the criminal: like the cat, indolent and capricious, yet ardent in the pursuit of an aim, the anti-social being knows only how to satisfy his impulsive instincts.” Dr. Wey of Elmira says: “It is a mistake to suppose that the criminal is naturally bright. If bright, it is usually in a narrow line and self-repeating. Like the cunning of the fox, his smartness displays itself in furthering his schemes, and personal gratification and comfort.” “Many criminal illiterates,” he remarks elsewhere, “are so densely stupid as to be unable to tell the right hand from the left.” M. Joly, discussing the criminal’s delight in ruse, adds: “Animals are of all living things fondest of ruse when their special instincts are in action. Idle and untrained children, resolved to deceive their teachers and to amuse themselves at all risks, are more rusé than their comrades at the head of the class. Women make use of ruse much more than men.” I will quote, finally, on this point some words of Dr. A. Krauss:—“The specialists say that criminals are more astute than intelligent. But what is this astuteness? It is an instinctive, innate faculty, which does not depend on real intelligence, and which is already found precociously perfected in children, in the lowest savages, in women, and also in imbeciles; although experience comes to its aid, it is never capable of artificial culture. It is essentially a faculty limited to the consideration of concrete cases, and which is chiefly concerned with the deception of others. The mental inertia so often combined with this faculty is recognised in this, that a criminal, in planning a crime, does not calculate all the possible eventualities, and immediately after the success of his action he loses all caution, as if the energy of his mind directed to the project and its execution was exhausted at one stroke. Beside this instinctive faculty, intelligence is a faculty of infinite variety, which matures slowly, and gradually affects language and questions of abstract culture. It needs to be cultivated with diligence, and with the help of a happy organisation of the nervous centres. It often develops late even in highly-gifted men.”

At the same time men of undoubted intellectual power are sometimes found among criminals. Villon, one of the truest, if not one of the greatest of poets, was a criminal, a man perpetually in danger of the gallows; it does not seem to me, however, by any means clear that he was what we should call an instinctive criminal. Vidocq, a clever criminal who became an equally successful police official, and wrote his interesting and instructive Memoirs, may not have been, as Lombroso claims, a man of genius, but he was certainly a man of great ability. Eugene Aram is now generally recognised as a comparative philologist who foresaw and to some extent inaugurated some of the later advances of that science.

PLATE X.

Jonathan Wild is an interesting example of a criminal of great practical ability, a man whose genius for organisation would have made him equal to any position in which he might have been placed. “In the republic of the thieves’ guild”—I quote Mr. Pike’s excellent summary of his career—“Jonathan Wild became as it were a dictator; but like many of the great men of the middle ages, he owed his greatness to double dealing. From small beginnings he became, in London at least, the receiver-in-chief of all stolen goods. He acquired and maintained this position by the persistent application of two simple principles: he did his best to aid the law in convicting all those misdoers who would not recognise his authority, and he did his best to repair the losses of all those who had been plundered and who took him into their confidence. By degrees he set up an office for the recovery of missing property, at which the government must, for a time, have connived. Here the robbed sought an audience of the only man who could promise them restitution; here the robbers congregated like workmen at a workshop, to receive the pay for the work they had done. Wild was, in some respects, more autocratic than many kings, for he had the power of life and death. If he could reward the thief who submitted to him, he could hang the robber who omitted to seek his protection. If he could, for a sufficient fee, discover what had been lost, he could, when his claims were forgotten, make the losers repent their want of worldly wisdom. He was not above his position, and never allowed such a sentiment as generosity to interfere with the plain rules of business. He carried a wand of office, made of silver, which he asserted to be an indication of authority given to him by the government. Valuable goods he carefully stowed away in some of his numerous warehouses; and when there was no market for them in England, through the apathy of the persons robbed, or the dangers to dishonest purchasers, he despatched them on board a ship of his own to Holland, where he employed a trustworthy agent. Like barbarian monarchs, he gave presents when he wished to express a desire for friendship and assistance; and in order that the recipients of these favours might not be compromised, he retained a staff of skilled artizans, who could so change the appearance of a snuff-box, a ring, or a watch, that not even the real owner could recognise it. When satisfied with the good service of any of his subordinates who might be in danger, he gave them posts in his own household, with money and clothing, and found employment for them in clipping and counterfeiting coin. He did not even restrict his operations to London, but, in imitation of other great conquerors and pillagers, or perhaps through the independent working of his own intellect, he divided England into districts, and assigned a gang to each; each had to account to him, as the counties of old to the king, for the revenue collected. And as a well-appointed army has its artillery, its cavalry, and its infantry, so among Jonathan Wild’s retainers there was a special corps for robbing in church, another for various festivities in London, and a third with a peculiar aptitude for making the most of a country fair. The body-guards of a sovereign are usually chosen for their appearance, or for tried valour in the field. Wild’s principle of selection was somewhat different. He considered that fidelity to himself was the first virtue in a follower, and that fidelity was certain only when there was absolute inability to be unfaithful. For this reason the greatest recommendation which any recruit could possess was that he had been a convict, had been transported, and had returned before the time of his sentence had expired. Such a man as this not only had experience in his profession, but was legally incapable of giving evidence against his employer. Through his actions he was always in the power of Wild, who, as the law stood, could never be in his power. Thus Wild’s authority was in two ways supreme. Nor was he the first man who ever abused such authority. He did what political parties had done in earlier times. He used without stint or scruple all the means at his disposal, either to ensure his own safety, or to crush any one whom he suspected. It was necessary, according to the public opinion of his time, that a considerable number of thieves and robbers should be hanged; he satisfied at once the popular notions of justice and his own principles by bringing to the gallows all who concealed their booty, or refused to share it with himself. When required, he provided also a few additional victims in the form of persons who had committed no offence whatever. Sometimes he destroyed them because they were unfortunately in possession of evidence against himself, sometimes only because a heavy reward had been offered for the conviction of any one who might have perpetrated a great crime, and because, with the gang at his back, it was quite as easy to prove the case against the innocent as against the guilty, and not less convenient.” Wild’s greatness had a sudden fall. He was arrested for coming to the rescue of a highwayman near Bow, and his enemies at once took courage. He was speedily overwhelmed with evidence, and was hanged in 1725.

§ 3. Vanity.

The vanity of criminals is at once an intellectual and an emotional fact. It witnesses at once to their false estimate of life and of themselves, and to their egotistic delight in admiration. They share this character with a large proportion of artist and literary men, though, as Lombroso remarks, they decidedly excel them in this respect. The vanity of the artist and literary man marks the abnormal element, the tendency in them to degeneration. It reveals in them the weak points of a mental organisation, which at other points is highly developed. Vanity may exist in the well-developed ordinary man, but it is unobtrusive; in its extreme forms it marks the abnormal man, the man of unbalanced mental organisation, artist or criminal.

George Borrow, who was so keen a student of men, has some remarks on the vanity of criminals in regard to dress:—“There is not a set of people in the world more vain than robbers in general, more fond of cutting a figure whenever they have an opportunity, and of attracting the eyes of their fellow-creatures by the gallantry of their appearance. The famous Sheppard of olden times delighted in sporting a suit of Genoese velvet, and when he appeared in public generally wore a silver-hilted sword at his side; whilst Vaux and Hayward, heroes of a later day, were the best-dressed men on the pavē of London. Many of the Italian bandits go splendidly decorated, and the very gipsy robber has a feeling for the charms of dress; the cap alone of the Haram Pasha, a leader of the cannibal gipsy band which infested Hungary towards the conclusion of the last century, was adorned with gold and jewels to the value of four thousand guilders. Observe, ye vain and frivolous, how vanity and crime harmonise. The Spanish robbers are as fond of this species of display as their brethren of other lands, and, whether in prison or out of it, are never so happy as when, decked out in a profusion of white linen, they can loll in the sun, or walk jauntily up and down.” He then describes the principal features of Spanish robber foppery.

More significant and even more widely spread is the moral vanity of criminals. “In ordinary society,” said Vidocq, “infamy is dreaded; among a body of prisoners the only shame is not to be infamous; to be an escarpe (assassin) is the highest praise.” This is universally true among every group of murderers or of thieves; the author of a large criminal transaction is regarded by all his fellows as a hero, and he looks down upon the others with contempt; the man who has had the misfortune to be imprisoned for a small or, in the opinion of criminal society, disreputable offence, represents himself as the author of some crime of magnitude.

A Russian youth of nineteen killed an entire family. When he heard that all St. Petersburg was talking of him, he said: “Now, my schoolfellows will see how unfair it was of them to say that I should never be heard of.” It is this same weak-minded desire to excite interest and sympathy which leads young men and women of ill-balanced mental organisation to commit suicide in some public and startling fashion. The same feeling, and also, doubtless, the need for expression, leads to the frequency with which criminals keep diaries. The Marquise de Brinvilliers wrote a minute account of her vices and crimes which was brought up in evidence against her; Wainewright appears to have kept a diary of this kind which also fell into other hands; John Wilkes Booth, the shallow-brained young actor who killed President Lincoln, had, with his stagy patriotism, some of the characteristics of the instinctive criminals, showing themselves especially in his morbid vanity. The chief suffering he felt after the deed was to his vanity. He wrote in his diary: “I struck boldly, and not as the papers say; I walked with a firm step through thousands of his friends; was stopped, but pushed on. A colonel was at his side. I shouted Sic Semper before I fired. In jumping broke my leg. I passed all the pickets. Rode sixty miles that night, with the bone of my leg tearing the flesh at every jump.” And again he writes: “After being hunted like a dog through swamps, woods, and last night chased by gun-boats till I was forced to return, wet, cold, and starving, with every man’s hand against me, I am here in despair. And why? For doing what Brutus was honoured for—what made Tell a hero.” And again: “I am abandoned, with the curse of Cain upon me, when, if the world knew my heart, that one blow would have made me great.”

The excessive vanity of the criminal sometimes leads him to commit the imprudence of talking about his plans beforehand, and so courting detection. Before killing three rich men, a murderer was heard to say, “I want to do something great: oh, I shall be talked about!” We hear of Wainewright’s “insatiable and morbid self-esteem.” He enjoyed the respect paid to him in prison, and insisted upon being treated as a gentleman. A prisoner concluded a letter to her accomplice, “Your Lucrezia Borgia.” Sometimes the vanity of the criminal shows itself in the artistic or dramatic representations which he makes of his crime. Perhaps the most curious and audacious attempt is that recorded by Lombroso, who gives a representation of it: three assassins had themselves photographed as they appeared with knives in their hands and looks of resolute villainy, when about to commit the deed.

The Abbé Moreau has described the reception of a great criminal by his fellows at the prison of La Grande Roquette. He is immediately surrounded, though the curiosity remains respectful; “he is a king in the midst of his subjects; envious looks are cast at those privileged individuals who have succeeded in placing themselves near him; they listen eagerly for his slightest word; they do not speak their admiration for fear of interrupting him, and he knows that he dominates and fascinates them.”

§ 4. Emotional Instability.

The criminal everywhere is incapable of prolonged and sustained exertion; an amount of regular work which would utterly exhaust the most vigorous and rebellious would be easily accomplished by an ordinary workman. He is essentially idle; the whole art of crime lies in the endeavour to avoid the necessity of labour. This constitutional laziness is therefore one of the chief organic bases of crime. Make idleness impossible and you have done much to make the criminal impossible. It is not without reason that French criminals call themselves pègres (from pigritia), the idle. Lemaire, a notorious French criminal of the beginning of the century, was speaking for all his class when he said to his judges: “I have always been lazy; it is a shame, I admit, but I am not adapted for work; to work one needs an effort, and I am incapable of it; I only have energy for evil; if one must work I do not care about life; I would rather be condemned to death.”

While he is essentially lazy, and exhibits this even in his general neglect of personal cleanliness (though sometimes dressed outwardly as an ordinary man of the world), the criminal is capable of moments of violent activity. He cannot, indeed, live without them; they are the chief events of his spiritual life.

Louis Desprez, an unfortunate littérateur, imprisoned at Saint-Pélagie for a literary offence, “summed up the psychology of criminals,” remarks M. Émile Gautier, “in one picturesque formula: They see the world under the aspect of an immense gaol alternating with an immense brothel. And this is true. For them imprisonment is the normal condition. Liberty is their holiday, an occasional transitory holiday, during which they wallow in the far niente and debauch, like sailors who consume in three days the earnings of eighteen months, but a holiday which will have an end, a foreseen and expected end.”

The criminal craves for some powerful stimulus, excitement, uproar, to lift him out of his habitual inertia. That is why the love of alcohol is in all countries so strong among criminals. The man who is organised as we have seen the criminal to be must have some powerful stimulant to take him out of himself, to give him a joy which is otherwise beyond his grasp, and alcohol is the stimulant which comes easiest to hand. When, as frequently happens, he is the child of alcoholic parents, the craving for drink soon obtains morbid intensity. Crime and drink are intimately bound together, although we must beware of too unreservedly setting down drink as the cause of crime. Both crime and drink are the morbid manifestations of organic defects which for the most part precede birth. The abuse of alcohol is not, however, universal among criminals, at all events when any intellectual ability is required. “It would not do to drink in our business,” said a sharper to Lombroso.

The criminal finds another strong form of excitement in gambling. The love of cards is even more widely spread among criminals than the love of drink. It frequently becomes a passion. Lauvergne tells of a band of criminals who played for two days without intermission. We hear of a French prisoner who gambled away his meagre rations of bread and wine and at last died of starvation; of another who in the excitement of the game forgot his approaching execution.

To all forms of sexual excitement, natural and unnatural, criminals of both sexes resort, often from a very early age. The prison, in which the criminal is confined alone, or with persons of the same sex, serves to develop perverted sexual habits to a high degree. Prince Krapotkine, speaking of the moral influence of prisons on prisoners in France, writes:—“The facts which we came across during our prison life surpass all that the most frenzied imagination could invent. One must have been for long years in a prison, secluded from all higher influences and abandoned to one’s own and that of a thousand convicts’ imaginations, to come to the incredible state of mind which is witnessed among some prisoners. And I suppose that I shall say only what will be supported by all intelligent and frank governors of prisons, if I say that the prisons are the nurseries for the most revolting category of breaches of moral law.” There is unquestionable evidence that the same practices exist, notwithstanding all discipline, in English prisons.

Such practices grow up chiefly as a means of excitement and diversion in vacuous lives. Love, in its highest and strongest forms, seems to be extremely rare. This is true even when love is the cause of the crime. The love, even when strong, remains rather brutal. When a man was asked if he really loved the woman for whose sake he had murdered her husband, he replied: “Oh, if you had seen her naked!”

The craving for excitement, for intoxication, for uproar, finds its chief satisfaction in the love of orgy, which is now almost confined, at all events in its extreme forms, to the criminal and his intimate ally, the prostitute. The orgy is the criminal’s most sacred festival; here he attains his highest experiences of forgetful exhilaration. Vidocq, still a criminal at heart, even after he had become a police official, has described the orgy in his Memoirs:—“Imagine a rather large square hall, with walls, once white, now blackened by exhalations of every kind: such is, in all its simplicity, the aspect of a temple of Bacchus and Terpsichore. At first by a very natural optical illusion, one is only struck by the smallness of the place, but when the eye succeeds in piercing the atmosphere, thick with a thousand vapours which are not inodorous, the size becomes manifest by the details which escape from the chaos. This is the moment of creation; everything clears up; the mist dissipates, becomes peopled and animated; there is movement, agitation, not of empty shadows but of substantial forms which cross and interlace in every direction. What beatitude! What a joyous life! Never for epicureans were so many felicities gathered together as here for those who love to wallow in mire. Around, rows of tables, on which, without their ever being cleaned, disgusting libations are renewed a hundred times a day, serve to frame in a space which is reserved for what are called the dancers. At the end of this infectious den rises, supported by four worm-eaten pillars, a kind of platform, its construction hidden by two or three fragments of old tapestry. On this hencoop the musicians are perched, two clarinettes, a fiddle, a loud trombone, and a deafening drum.... In this receptacle one finds none but prostitutes and their bullies, sharpers of all kinds, swindlers of the lowest sort, and a good many of those disturbers of the night whose lives are divided into two parts, one consecrated to rowdyism, the other to robbery.”

More interesting than this resort to external sources of stimulus, and more significant of emotional instability, are the spontaneous outbursts of excitement common among criminals, curious self-evolved intoxications springing from mysterious and incalculable depths of the organism. Dostoieffsky has studied these outbursts and admirably described them. “A prisoner has lived tranquilly,” he tells us, “for several consecutive years, and his conduct has been exemplary. All at once, to the great astonishment of his guardians, he mutinies and recoils before no crime, even murder or rape. Every one is astonished. This unexpected explosion is the anguished, convulsive manifestation of personality, an instinctive melancholy, a desire to affirm the degraded ego, an emotion which obscures the judgment. It is like a spasm, an access of epilepsy; the man who is buried alive and who suddenly awakes strikes in despair against his coffin-lid; he strives to push it back, to raise it; his reason convinces him of the uselessness of all his efforts, but reason has nothing to do with his convulsions. It must not be forgotten that nearly every manifestation of the personality of the prisoner is considered a crime; also that the question whether the manifestation is important or insignificant is perfectly indifferent to the prisoner. Risk for risk, it is better to go to the extreme, even to murder. It is only the first step that costs; little by little the man is carried away and can no longer be held in.” The prison has much to answer for in the development of these emotional outbreaks, and it is only in prison that there is opportunity of studying them. It would, however, be rash to conclude that they are entirely due to prison conditions. They are in harmony with all that we know of criminal psychology, and it is not alone under prison conditions that they are the causes of crime.

In Germany these periodic explosions (known as Zuchthaus-Knall) have been described by Delbrück and Krafft-Ebing. In Italy they have been noted by Lombroso, especially in very hot weather and at such times as epileptic attacks are most frequent, and he regards them as fresh proof of a close relationship between the instinctive criminal and the epileptic. In England they appear to be rare in men, but, on the other hand, common in women who have, in prison language, “broken out.” This wild fit of maniacal violence which from time to time seizes on the women confined in prisons, and might almost be regarded as an exaggerated or vicarious form of orgy, has been studied with some care in England. Here as well as abroad it is frequently supposed to be a voluntary insubordination deserving punishment.

A lady superintendent thus described the “breaking out” to Mayhew:—“Sometimes they know when the fit is coming on, and will themselves ask to be locked up in the refractory wards. When they’re in these fits they’re terribly violent indeed; they tear up and break everything they can lay their hands on. The younger they are the worse they behave. The most violent age, I think, is from seventeen to two or three and twenty;—indeed they are like fiends at that age very often.” The medical officer told him that “4 per cent. of the whole of the prisoners, or 20 in 600, were subject to such fits of violent passion, and these were almost invariably from fifteen to twenty-five years of age.” “Women,” he added, “seldom injure themselves or those around them, though they will break their windows, and even occasionally tear their own clothing to ribbons.”

Miss Mary Carpenter, in her Female Life in Prison, reproduces what she tells us is a characteristic dialogue:—

“‘Miss G., I’m going to break out to-night.’

“‘Oh, nonsense; you won’t think of any such folly, I’m sure.’

“‘I’m sure I shall.’

“‘What for?’

“‘Well, I’ve made up my mind, that’s what for. I shall break out to-night—see if I don’t.’

“‘Has any one offended you or said anything?’

“‘N-no. But I must break out. It’s so dull here. I’m sure to break out.’

“‘And then you’ll go to the “dark” [cell].’

“‘I want to go to the “dark.”’

“And the breaking out often occurs as promised; the glass shatters out of the window frames; strips of sheets and blankets are passed through or left in a heap in the cell; the guards are sent for, and there is a scuffling and fighting and scratching and screaming that Pandemonium might equal, nothing else.”

Dr. Nicolson has made an interesting observation as to the periods when these “breakings-out” are most liable to occur. “At dates corresponding with the menstrual period there is a greater likelihood of their occurrence. Besides having verified this in several cases myself, I have the testimony of experienced prison matrons to the same effect.” These maniacal outbursts of hysteria may be compared to the somewhat similar effects observed especially at the menstrual periods among the epileptic, the insane, and the imbecile. Thus Dr. H. Sutherland (West Riding Asylum Reports, vol. ii.), from observations on 500 inmates of the West Riding Asylum, remarks that in epileptic insanity the fits are generally increased in number, and the patients generally become excited at the catamenial period; while the mania exacerbations usually occur at this time. He notes the frequency of excitement, violence, indecent language, tearing up clothes, etc., among insane women generally at this period. In a girl with congenital imbecility, who became violent, cruel, and capricious at puberty, Dr. Langdon Down noted that the monthly period was always marked by insubordination, violent language, rude gestures, and untruthfulness. In ordinary healthy young girls the onset of the monthly period is often marked by a fit of unusual boisterousness.

The period of the year seems also to have some influence on the emotional instability. Miss Carpenter remarks that “the prisoners are always the most ill-behaved at Christmas time,” perhaps because this period has, even before the days of Christianity, been associated with excesses. Among the men at Elmira, judging from the charts given by Dr. Wey, there is a tendency to insubordination in the autumn, and also in the spring. In Spanish prisons, it appears from Salillas’s Vida Penal en España, quarrels and arrests are much more common in spring and summer than at any other season. Thus, to take one record: March-May, 8; June-Aug., 9; Sept.-Nov., 4; Dec.-Feb., 3. Two suicides both occurred in September.

Very interesting is the instinctive and irresistible character of criminal impulses, as shown by evidence which there is no good reason to impeach. Casanova, speaking of his clever schemes of fraud, says: “When I put into execution a spontaneous idea which I had not premeditated, it seemed to me that I was following the laws of destiny, and yielding to a supreme will.” Several pickpockets have said to Lombroso: “You see, in those moments of inspiration (sic) we cannot restrain ourselves, we have to steal.” “I did try very hard, Miss,” the women will sometimes say to the matron, remarks Miss Carpenter, “but it wasn’t to be. I was obliged to steal, or to watch some one there was a chance of stealing from. I did try my best, but it couldn’t be helped, and here I am. It wasn’t my fault exactly, because I did try.” A pickpocket said to Marro: “When I see any one pass with a watch in his pocket, even though I have no need of money, I feel a real need to take it.” Dostoieffsky, giving a minute account of one of the convicts who was most feared, but who was sincerely devoted to him, says: “He sometimes stole from me, but it was always involuntary; he scarcely ever borrowed from me, so that what attracted him was not money or other interested motive.” Once it was a Bible which he sold to obtain drink. “Probably he felt a strong desire for drink that day, and when he felt a strong desire for anything it had to be satisfied. I endeavoured to reproach him as he deserved, for I regretted my Bible. He listened to me without irritation, very peacefully; he agreed with me that the Bible is a very useful book, and he sincerely regretted that I no longer possessed it, but he felt no repentance, not even for an instant, for having stolen it; he looked at me with such assurance that I immediately ceased to scold him. He bore my reproaches because he judged that it could not be otherwise, that he deserved to be blamed for such an action, and that I ought to abuse him, in order to relieve myself, as a consolation for the loss; but privately he esteemed it a folly, a folly which a serious man would have been ashamed to speak of. I even think he regarded me as a child, an urchin who does not understand the simplest things in the world.”

Precisely the same instinctive and involuntary impulses, unaccompanied by shame, are found among various lower races. Of the natives of British New Guinea, for instance, it has been said, “They are inveterate thieves, but they experience no sense of shame when they are discovered. They frequently say that they can feel an irresistible power which compels them to put out their hand and close it upon some article which they covet, but which does not belong to them.”

§ 5. Sentiment.

It may seem a curious contradiction of what has already been set down concerning the criminal’s moral insensibility, his cruelty, and his incapacity to experience remorse, when it is added that he is frequently open to sentiment. It is, however, true. Whatever refinement or tenderness of feeling criminals attain to reveals itself as what we should call sentiment or sentimentality. Their cynicism allies itself with sentiment in their literary productions. Their unnatural loves are often sentimental, as revealed in the character of the tattoo marks. Two interesting examples of criminal sentiment have recently been recorded by Dr. Lindau. A German criminal (it is perhaps as well to note that he was a German), having murdered his sweetheart most cruelly, went back to her house to let out a canary which might suffer from want of food. Another, after having killed a woman, stayed behind to feed her child which was crying. Lacenaire, on the same day that he committed a murder, risked his own life to save that of a cat. Eugene Aram was very indulgent to animals. Wainewright was always very fond of cats; in his last days “his sole companion was a cat for which he evinced an extraordinary affection.” One of the chief characters of Wainewright’s essays is their sentimentality. Himself, when in prison, he described as the possessor of “a soul whose nutriment is love, and its offspring art, music, divine song, and still holier philosophy.”

PLATE XI.

All prisoners make pets of birds, or animals, or flowers, if they get the chance. This is simply the result of solitude, and has no connection whatever with criminal psychology. It is found, if anything, more frequently among non-criminal prisoners. No one has described better than Dostoieffsky, in his Recollections of the Dead-House, the part that animals play in the lives of prisoners. He describes at length the goat, the horse, the dogs, the ducks, the eagle. No one who has once read it may forget the history of the eagle. The eagle would not be tamed; solitary and inconsolable he refused all food; at last his mournful despair aroused the sympathy of the convicts; they resolved to liberate him, bore him to the ramparts on the cold and grey autumn afternoon, and stood long and wistfully watching him as he winged his way across the steppes, free.

Family affection is by no means rare among criminals. Often indeed, as is well known, it constitutes the motive for the crime. It is very rare to find a prisoner who is not touched by an allusion to his mother. Inspector Byrnes, of New York, says: “Remember that nearly all the great criminals of the country are men who lead double lives. Strange as it may appear, it is the fact that some of the most unscrupulous rascals who ever cracked a safe, or turned out a counterfeit, were at home model husbands and fathers. In a great many cases wives have aided their guilty partners in their villainy, and the children too have taken a hand in it. But in as many all suggestions of the criminal’s calling was left outside the front door. There was George Engles, the forger. His family lived quietly and respectably, mingled with the best of people, and were liked by all they met. George Leonidas Leslie, alias Howard, who was found dead near Yonkers, probably made away with by his pals, was a fine-looking man, with cultured tastes and refined manners. Billy Porter and Johnny Irving were not so spruce, but they would pass for artisans; and Irving is said, in all his villainy, to have well provided for his old mother and his sisters. Johnny the Greek paid for his little girls’ tuition at a convent in Canada, and had them brought up as ladies, without even a suspicion of their father’s business reaching them. I know this same thing to be done by some of the hardest cases we have to contend with.”

Inspector Byrnes also mentions a celebrated burglar and forger of America, called by the fraternity “the Prince of Thieves,” on account of his great liberality; “it is a well-known fact that he has always contributed to the support of the wives and families of his associates when they were in trouble.”

The criminal appreciates sympathy. Dostoieffsky tells how immediately the convicts responded to a governor who was affable and good-natured, and treated the prisoners as equals: “They did not love him, they adored him.... I do not remember that they ever permitted themselves to be disrespectful or familiar. On the contrary. When he met the governor the convict’s face suddenly lighted up; he smiled largely, cap in hand, even to see him approach.” Prince Krapotkine quotes and confirms the observations of Dr. Campbell, an experienced prison surgeon. By mild treatment, says Dr. Campbell, “with as much consideration as if they had been delicate ladies, the greatest order was generally maintained in the hospital.” He was struck with that “estimable trait in the character of prisoners—observable even among the roughest criminals; I mean the great attention they bestow on the sick. The most hardened criminals,” he adds, “are not exempt from this feeling.”

Such sentiment as this—limited, imperfect, fantastic, as it may sometimes seem—is the pleasantest spot in criminal psychology. It is also the most hopeful. In the development of this tenderness lies a point of departure for the moralisation of the criminal. What a ruined fund of fine feeling, for instance, was concealed in the young thief, recorded by Lombroso, who committed suicide by hanging, having first set his shoes on the bed between two straw crosses, as though to say, “I am going; pray for me.” “If one thinks of it,” adds Lombroso, “it is a pathetic poem.”

§ 6. Religion.

In all countries religion, or superstition, is closely related with crime. The Sansya dacoits, in the Highlands of Central India, would spill a little liquor on the ground before starting on an expedition, in order to propitiate Devi. “If any one sneezed, or any other very bad omen was observed, the start was postponed. If they heard a jackal, or the bray of the village donkey, their hearts were cheered; but a funeral or a snake turned them back. They were also very superstitious about their oil. The vessel was not allowed to touch the ground until the oil had been poured upon the torch, and then it was dashed on the earth; and from that moment until the job was finished no water touched their lips.”

Among 200 Italian murderers Ferri did not find one who was irreligious. “A Russian peasant,” remarks Mr. Kennan, “may be a highway robber or a murderer, but he continues nevertheless to cross himself and say his prayers.” Dostoieffsky also notes the religious ardour with which the convicts gave candles and gifts to the church. All those who live by unlawful methods, said Casanova, confide in the help of God. Naples is the most criminal city in Europe for crimes against the person; the number of murderers there is about 16 in 100,000, while in Italy generally it is 8.12; and in Ireland (the least criminal land in Europe) it is about 5. Naples is also the most religious city in Europe. “No other city,” observes Garofalo, “can boast of such frequent processions; no other, perhaps, is so zealous an observer of the practices of the church. But unfortunately—as an illustrious historian [Sismondi], speaking of the Italians of his day, wrote—‘the murderer, still stained with the blood he has just shed, devoutly fasts, even while he is meditating a fresh assassination; the prostitute places the image of the Virgin near her bed, and recites her rosary devoutly before it; the priest, convicted of perjury, is never inadvertently guilty of drinking a glass of water before mass.’ Those words of Sismondi’s,” Garofalo adds, “are as true to-day as when they were written.” Of Marro’s 500 criminals, 46 per cent. were regular frequenters of church, 25 per cent. went irregularly. Among sexual offenders the proportion of frequenters rose to 61 per cent. A man of sixty, known to Marro, imprisoned for rape on a child of eight, was much scandalised at the irreligious talk of some of his companions. “I do not imitate them,” he said; “morning and evening I say my prayers.”

Among women, the governor of Saint Lazare remarked to M. Joly, it is especially the criminals by passion who are superstitious, thieves very slightly so; they are practical women.

It must not be supposed that there is insincerity or hypocrisy in the religion of criminals. For the man of low culture the divine powers lend themselves easily to the succour of the individual, and it is always as well to propitiate them. German murderers believe they can do this crudely, according to Casper, by leaving their excrement at the spot of the crime. A rather higher grade of intelligence will[Pg 158] effect the same end by prayer. A wife who was poisoning her husband wrote to her accomplice:—“He is not well ... if God wished it. Oh, if God would have pity on us, how I would bless Him! When he complains [of the effects of the poison] I thank God in my heart.” And he answers, “I will pray to Heaven to aid us.” And she again, “He was ill yesterday. I thought that God was beginning His work. I have wept so much that it is not possible God should not have pity on my tears.” Lombroso found 248 tattooed prisoners out of 2480 bearing religious symbols, while the slang of criminals witnesses to a faith in God, in the immortality of the soul, and in the church. When a woman who had strangled and dismembered a child, in order to spite its relations, heard her sentence of death pronounced, she turned to her advocates and said, “Death is nothing. It is the salvation of the soul that is everything. When that is safe, the rest is of no account.”

It is clear how easily religious beliefs and religious observances, especially in Catholic countries, lend themselves to the practices of the ignorant criminal, and it very rarely happens that the criminal condemned to death fails to avail himself of the ministrations of the chaplain (only once in more than thirty years at La Roquette), and frequently to respond to them with gratifying eagerness. In religion his primitive emotional nature, with its instability and love of sentiment, easily finds what it needs. A French chaplain of experience and intelligence told M. Joly that he had “more satisfaction” with his prisoners than with people of the world. The Rev. E. Payson Hammond, who has conducted many missions to[Pg 159] prisoners, finds very great aptitude for conversion among them. Of the convicts of the State Prison of Jefferson City, in the United States, for instance, he remarks:—“Many hearts were melted to tears, and I believe that a very large number were converted.” “Convicts at their last hour,” wrote Lauvergne, “nine times out of ten die religiously. Whatever the enormity of their crimes, they all leave durable recollections in the heart of the priest who assists them. He sees them long afterwards in his dreams, beautiful and happy.”

When the criminal is not superstitiously devout, he is usually stupidly or brutally indifferent. Maxime du Camp, during a visit to the prison of Mazas, at service time on Sunday, had the curiosity to look into thirty-three cellules, to observe the effect of the ceremony: three were reading the mass; one stood up, with covered head, looking at the altar; one was on his knees; one displayed a prayer-book, but was reading a pamphlet; one wept with head buried in his arms; twenty-six sat at their tables, working or reading.

It seems extremely rare to find intelligently irreligious men in prison. The sublime criminals whom we meet with in Elizabethan dramas, arguing haughtily concerning Divine things and performing unheard-of atrocities, are not found in our prisons. Free-thinkers are rarely found. A trifle will induce the prisoner to inscribe himself as Protestant, instead of Catholic, or vice versâ, or to change from one side to the other; but out of 28,351 admissions to three large metropolitan prisons, remarks the Rev. J. W. Horsley, only fifty-seven described themselves as atheists, and this number, he adds, must be[Pg 160] further reduced as containing some Chinese and Mahommedans. It should be noted that a profession of atheism would deprive the prisoner of no advantage or privilege open to the others. Mr. Horsley once resolved to keep notes of the first twelve consecutive cases of those who on entrance described themselves either positively as atheists or negatively as of no religion. The results were interesting: 1 was a thief, a rather ignorant person, whose chief reason for being an infidel was that his parents had “crammed religion down his throat.” 2 an ex-soldier, a heavy drinker, and when asked why he had described himself as an atheist, “he said he only called himself mad;” he was actually insane. 3 a burglar, who said he meant that he never attended church because he had seen so much hypocrisy among professing Christians; in a few days he gave up the designation of atheist. 4 was a swindler, a great liar, and probably insane. 5 was a lad of nineteen, of very little intellect, who had deserted from the army; his father had been “a follower of Bradlaugh.” 6 a German Jew, who frequented Christian churches, but not having been baptised, simply did not know how to describe himself. 7 an intemperate schoolmaster, charged with deserting his family; he meant that he had ceased to attend religious worship because he was conscious that his religion was merely formal; his “atheism” was simply a form of penitent self-abnegation. 8 a conceited lad of seventeen who had assaulted his guardian, and had adopted atheism to justify his spirit of revenge. 9 a young man who had robbed his employer; he was brought up under religious influences, but having attracted attention by objecting to revealed religions, became[Pg 161] a Secularist lecturer. 10 a prostitute and dipsomaniac with 150 convictions; always called herself an atheist when she was in a bad temper or drunk. 11 a young baker who had taken poison; called himself an atheist under influence of laudanum; goes regularly to a Congregational Chapel. 12 a girl of fifteen; she meant that she rarely, if ever, attended any place of worship. So that only in two or three, or at most four cases out of the twelve, was there profession of atheism in any legitimate sense of the word.

PLATE XII.

§ 7. Thieves’ Slang.

Every profession, every isolated group of persons, almost every family possesses a more or less extended set of words and phrases which are unintelligible to strangers. This dialect is termed in English slang, in French argot, in Italian gergo. The most highly developed and the most widely extended slang of this kind is that used by habitual criminals. Every country has its own thieves’ slang, but within the bounds of that country the slang is generally intelligible; the Lombard thief, Lombroso remarks, can understand the Calabrian; Parisian argot is intelligible at Marseilles. The use of criminals’ slang marks the recidivist. “When a man talks argot,” said the Abbé Crozes, “he is registered in the army of evil-doers.”

“I was jogging down a blooming slum in the Chapel, when I butted a reeler, who was sporting a red slang. I broke off his jerry, and boned the clock, which was a red one, but I was spotted by a copper, who claimed me. I was lugged before the[Pg 162] beak, who gave me six doss in the Steel. The week after I was chucked up I did a snatch near St. Paul’s, was collared, lagged, and got this bit of seven stretch.” That is a pickpocket’s history of his arrest as narrated to Mr. Davitt. Here is the translation:—“As I was walking down a narrow alley in Whitechapel, I ran up against a drunken man, who had a gold watch-guard. I stole his watch, which was gold, but was seen by a policeman, who caught me and took me before the magistrate, who gave me six months in the Bastille [the old House of Correction, Coldbath Fields]. When I was released I attempted to steal a watch near St. Paul’s, but was taken again, convicted, and sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude.”

Mr. Horsley has an interesting passage on English thieves’ slang, which I will transcribe at length:—“Of multifold origin, it is yet mainly derived from Romany or gipsy talk, and thereby contains a large Eastern element, in which old Sanskrit roots may readily be traced. Many of these words would be unintelligible to ordinary folk, but some have passed into common speech. For instance, the words bamboozle, pal (companion, a friend), mull (to make a mull or mess of a thing), bosh (from the Persian), are pure gipsy words, but have found some lodging, if not a home, in our vernacular. Then there are survivals (not always of the fittest) from the tongue of our Teutonic ancestors, so that Dr. Latham, the philologist, says—‘The thieves of London’ (and he might still more have said the professional tramps) ‘are the conservators of Anglo-Saxonisms. Next there are the cosmopolitan absorptions from many a tongue. From the French bouilli[Pg 163] we probably get the prison slang term ‘bull’ for a ration of meat. ‘Chat,’ thieves’ term for house, is obviously château. ‘Steel,’ the familiar name for Coldbath Fields Prison, is an appropriation and abbreviation of Bastille; and he who ‘does a tray’ (serves three months’ imprisonment) therein, borrows his word from our Gallican neighbours. So from the Italian we get casa for house, filly (figlia) for daughter, donny (donna) for woman, and omee (uomo) for man. The Spanish gives us don, which the universities have not despised as a useful term. From the German we get durrynacker, for a female hawker, from dorf, a village, and nachgehen, to run after. From Scotland we borrow duds for clothes, and from the Hebrew shoful for base coin. Purely of native manufacture, however, and entirely artificial, are the two classes of rhyming and back-slang which mingle with cant to make a whole. By the former, any word that rhymes with the one you mean to use is put in its place, and gradually becomes accepted. This has the merit of unintelligibility when it is desired not to let chance passers-by know of what we are speaking, which naturally occurs not seldom in the days of detectives and plain-clothes constables. Suppose I have ‘touched’ (i.e., been successful in some robbery), and feel inclined for some relaxation in company with my sweetheart (or one of them), I might address her thus—‘Come, cows and kisses, put the battle of the Nile on your Barnet Fair, and a rogue and villain in your sky-rocket; call a flounder and dab with a tidy Charing Cross, and we’ll go for a Bushey Park along the frog and toad into the live eels.’ This would apparently be but a pendant to the celebrated bit of nonsense extemporised by[Pg 164] Foote, but, as a matter of fact, to a master or mistress of rhyming slang it would at once be understood as—‘Come, missus, put a tile (hat) on your hair, and a shilling in your pocket; call a cab with a tidy horse, and we’ll go for a lark along the road into the fields.’ And the second class of manufactured slang is that largely patronised by costermongers. It is called back-slang, and simply consists of spelling (more or less accurately) words backwards. Thus—‘Hi, yob! kool that enif elrig with the nael ekom. Sap her a top o’ reeb and a tib of occabot,’ is only, ‘Hi, boy! look at that fine girl with the lean moke (donkey). Pass her a pot of beer and a bit of tobacco.’ The art or merit of this form of slang consists in the rapidity, often remarkable, with which such words can be reversed. Thus a gentleman, wishing to test the skill of a professor of the art with a word not in common use in the market, asked his coster friend what was the back slang for hippopotamus. At once he answered, ‘Summatopoppy,’ the y being euphoniously put for ih.”[69] Mr. Davitt thus describes a form of slang (“thieves’ Latin”) commonly used by professional burglars and the superior order of thieves:—“Its chief peculiarity consists in reversing the position of the syllables of a word containing more than one syllable, and making two syllables of all words having only one in ordinary pronunciation, by adding a vowel or liquid consonant to the first or second part of such word. By the application of this simple rule to slang words, the ‘lingo’ becomes too complicated for any but the initiated to understand. For instance, if two thieves were hunting for game, and one were to see a policeman, he[Pg 165] would shout to his comrade—‘Islema! Ogda the opperca!’ which in slang is—‘Misle! Dog the copper!’ Otherwise—‘Vanish! See the policeman!’”[70] Very similar practices prevail in the thieves’ slang of France, Italy, Spain, and India. It is doubtless, indeed, universal. Closely allied is the kind of slang called largongi, by which, for example, macaroni becomes lacaronimique, and vache, lachevane.

The chief interest of the slang of habitual criminals is psychological. It furnishes us with a curious insight into the mental processes of those who invent and use it; it is itself an embodiment of criminal tendencies; in Victor Hugo’s vigorous phrase, “C’est le verbe devenu forçat.” It is full of metaphorical expressions, of objects named after their attributes. Nearly everything is degraded, sometimes with coarse and fantastic wit. “While the imagination of the poet gives a soul to animate objects,” remarks M. Joly, “the imagination of the criminal transforms living forms into things, assimilates man to animals.” Thus the skin for them is leather, the face un mufle, the mouth un bec, the arm un aileron. The body is called the corpse, and to eat is to put something in one’s corpse. The woman who supports a bully is called his saucepan (marmite), a friend un poteau; ne pas être méchant means to be a fool. Everything is thus vulgarised. The criminal instinctively depreciates the precious coinage of language, just as to his imagination money is at Paris “zinc,” and in the Argentine Republic “iron.”

The soul in French argot is significantly called la fausse, and the conscience la muette; shame is[Pg 166] simply la rouge. In English slang, as Mr. Horsley remarks, “the delicate expression ‘fingersmith’ is descriptive of a trade which a blunt world might call that of a pickpocket. Or, again, to get three months’ hard labour is more pleasantly described as getting thirteen clean shirts, one being served out in prison each week. The tread-wheel again is more politely called the everlasting staircase, or the wheel of life, or the vertical care-grinder. Penal servitude is dignified with the appellation of serving her Majesty for nothing, and an attempt is even made to lighten the horror of the climax of a criminal career by speaking of dying in a horse’s night-cap—i.e., a halter.” So that while the better things of life are degraded, there is a tendency to elevate those that truly indicate degradation.

The criminal slang of France and Italy has been studied in its psychological bearings much more thoroughly than the English, by Mayor, Lombroso, and others. Lombroso considers that the most marked and most curious characteristic of criminal slang is that already noted by which a thing is designated by its most salient qualities from the criminal point of view. Thus the advocate becomes the blanchisseur or imbiancatore (washerman); the juge d’instruction, the curicux or the père sondeur; the sermon, l’ennuyeuse or tediosa; the purse is la santa; the court, la juste. “The guillotine,” remarks M. Joly, “is designated without imprecation, without contempt, without hatred, but with a wealth of expressions and with a resignation, one might almost say a fatalistic humour, which is not reassuring for them—or for others. The executioner himself is called the juge de la paix.”

[Pg 167]Etrangler un perroquet is to drink a glass of absinth, the allusion being to the colour (green), and also, it is said, to the sensation in swallowing the absinth, and to other minute points. A prostitute is the hôtel du besoin, a Louis-quinze, and also the bourre-de-soie, in allusion, it is said, to murmured offers and a silk dress; the brothel is le cloaque. In Venetian slang a promise is called a shadow. In Bavarian cant a playing card is karzerweg—the road to prison.

Very strange, remote, and bizarre are some of these slang synonyms, full of coarse ironies and jests. Paradouze = paradis (douze instead of dise); saucisse = moi (by way of moi-s-aussi); crottard = trottoir; blanchir du foie = to intend betrayal (play on foi); perdreau = pederaste (pedro-pédero); herbe sainte = absinthe; être dans l’infanterie = to be pregnant (enfanter); moulin à vent = derrière; pape = verre de rhum (Rome); veronique = lanterne (verre); vert-de-gris = absinthe (play on vert and verre, with allusion to its deleterious properties); demoiselle du Pont-neuf (that all may go over) = prostitute; apaier = to assassinate; boire dans la grande tasse = to drown oneself; a knife is a lingre (from Langres, the French Sheffield); the souteneur (a prostitute’s bully) is called by the English word fish, or some similar name (poisson, goujon, baraillon, maquereau); the prostitute is called morue, and Banc de Terre-Neuve is applied to that portion of the Parisian boulevards lying between the Madeleine and the Porte Saint-Denis.

Sometimes the slang of criminals, like that of the rest of the world, commemorates an historical fact. To dethrone in France is juilletiser. The sun is le grand Jablo, Jablochoff’s electric lamps having been[Pg 168] the first used to illuminate Paris. A coup de Raguse is a defection, in allusion to the Duke of Ragusa. In Italy a drunkard is called a Frenchman, a beggar a Spaniard, a card-sharper a Greek. In Spain a thief is called a Murcio, from the province of Murcia.

Words are frequently abbreviated. As examples, Lombroso mentions tra = travail; ces mess = ces Messieurs = the police; chand = marchand; lubre = lugubre; abs = absinthe; avoir ses aff = avoir ses affaires (menstrues); mac = maquereau = souteneur, of a prostitute.

Very curious are the large number of foreign words, in more or less corrupted form generally, which are to be found in criminal slang. In the German cant Hebrew words are numerous; German and French in Italian; German and English in French; Italian and Romany in English. “Hebrew, or rather Yiddish,” Lombroso observes, “supplies the half of Dutch slang, and nearly a fourth of German, in which I counted 156 out of 700, and in which all the terms for various crimes (except band-spicler for a cheater at dice) are Jewish.” The presence of archaisms, classical and mediæval, is also curious.

It is more interesting to find a revelation of the things in which the criminal is most intimately interested by noting the wealth and variety of synonyms for certain words. Thus Cougnet and Righini found 17 words for warders or police; 9 for the act of sodomy; 7 for plunder. French cant has 44 synonyms for drunkenness, besides 20 for drinking, and 8 for wine, in all 72; while there are only 19 for water and 36 for money.

This slang is largely of ephemeral life, but a considerable proportion is permanent. Its tendency is,[Pg 169] however, to die out. The modern professional criminal avoids slang as he avoids tattooing.

PLATE XIII.

§ 8. Prison Inscriptions.

Whenever the average human being is secluded for any considerable length of time from his fellows, he experiences the need of embodying some literary or artistic expression of himself. This instinct seems to be deeper and more wide-spread than that which induces some people to leave their names or other sign manual—the frothiest efflorescence of vain moments—on the places they visit. There is no vanity here, and it is an instinct from which no individual, whatever his degree of culture, is exempt; it is indeed scarcely distinguishable from the instinct which leads to the production of heroic works of art. The expression must vary with the individual. I knew a room, the residence of a long succession of medical students during certain weeks of seclusion involved by hospital duty, of which the walls were covered by inscriptions, humorous or broadly witty, cleverly artistic sketches, happy lines from the classics. Each person’s inscription is after his kind: Mgr. Darboy, the Archbishop of Paris, writes in the form of a cross, “O crux, mentis robur, ave;” Bill Sykes at Clerkenwell writes, “Lads, your only friend here is your brown lofe and pint of thick.”

In general, it seems, the lower the order of culture the more complete and trustworthy is the inscription as an expression of individual peculiarities. “The child loves to speak to himself,” as Dr. Corre remarks; “the negro, and especially the negress, think aloud; and if from restraint or distrust the criminal keeps[Pg 170] silent his most intimate thoughts, he feels himself compelled to fix them wherever he may find himself, on the walls of his prison, or on the books that are lent to him. It is for himself, for himself alone, that he writes what he cannot or dare not say, and these revelations are very curious for the psychologist.” His desires and lusts, his aspirations, his coarse satires and imprecations, his bitter reflections, his judgments of life, are all recorded in these prison inscriptions on whitewashed walls, cell doors, margins of books, tin knives, and the bottoms of skilly cans and dinner tins. In Italy they have been studied in reference to their psychological significance with characteristic thoroughness by Lombroso; and in England Mr. Horsley and Mr. Davitt have recorded a considerable number.[71] The Italian inscriptions, on the whole, are marked by a greater preponderance of the sentimental, reflective, and imprecatory elements; the English are generally very practical and material, dealing with food questions, or giving a concise statement of the event which led to the individual’s incarceration, with occasional tendency to moral aspiration and didactic exhortation. Mr. Horsley notes that comparatively few inscriptions are found on the women’s side, but that these are obscene much more frequently than on the men’s side. I conclude from Lombroso’s very comprehensive collection that this remark also holds good of the Italian inscriptions. It should be added that every inscription is an infringement of prison regulations; it is “a vulgar question of bread and water to the hungry author,”[Pg 171] and the impulse which produces it must therefore be of considerable strength.

Here are a few terse English examples of exploits, probably the work of old hands, and recorded by Mr. Davitt and Mr. Horsley:—

“A burst in the City. Copped while boning the swag. 7 stretch, 1869. Roll on 1876. Cheer up, pals.”

“Little Dicky from the New Cut. 10 and a ticket. Put away by a Moll” (i.e., sold by a prostitute).

“Fullied for a clock and slang” (i.e., committed for trial for stealing watch and chain).

“Poor old Jim, the lob crawler, fell from Racker, and got pinched” (i.e., James and Racker having gone out to commit till robberies, the former was apprehended, and the latter escaped).

“For seven long years have I served them,
And seven long years I have to stay,
For meeting a bloke in our Alley,
And taking his ticker away.”

“The judge he seven years gave me,
Transported to Van Diemen’s Land,
Far away from my friends and relations,
And the girl with the dark velvet band.”

The last writer was at Dartmoor, and introduced Van Diemen’s Land because of the exigencies of rhyme.

The delights of food inspire much verse, and dissatisfaction with its quality or quantity a large number of remarks:—

“I had for my dinner, ochone! ochone!
One ounce of mutton and three ounce of bone!”

“Here’s luck to the pint of skilly!”

“Lord save me from starvashun!”

[Pg 172]“One more month then out we go,
Then for feed of hot Coco;
Fried Bread and steak, Plenty of Beer,
Better luck than we get here.”

“Cheer up, boys, down with sorrow,
Beef to-day, Soup to-morrow.”

“O for a pot of beer!”

“Love is a great thing,” writes an Italian philosopher, “but hunger surpasses everything.”

“O who can tell the panes I feel,
A poor and harmless sailor,
I miss my grog and every meal;
Here comes the blooming jailer.”

A poet, Crutchy Quinn by name, known to Mr. Davitt, and who was himself acquainted with seven of the prisons he characterises, wrote as follows with a nail on the bottom of a dinner can:—

“Millbank for thick shins and graft at the pump;
Broadmoor for all laggs as go off their chump;
Brixton for good toke and cocoa with fat;
Dartmoor for bad grub but plenty of chat;
Portsmouth, a blooming bad place for hard work;
Chatham on Sunday gives four ounce of pork;
Portland is worst of the lot for to joke in—
For fetching a lagging there’s no place like Woking.”

Quinn, in spite of his name, was not an Irishman, but two-thirds of the prison-poets, Mr. Davitt found, are Irish.

From the more miscellaneous group of sentimental, religious, moral, didactic, and reflective sayings may be quoted the following:—

“The heart may breake, yet may brokenly live on.”

Mr. Davitt found a book at Newgate with “Good-bye,[Pg 173] Lucy dear,” written throughout it, and at the end—

“Good-bye, Lucy dear,
I’m parted from you for seven long year.
Alf. Jones.”

A poet of a more caustic school had added beneath this—

“If Lucy dear is like most gals,
She’ll give few sighs or moans,
But soon will find among your pals
Another Alfred Jones.”

Remarks against women are by no means rare, as the following given by Lombroso—

“La donna è un essere inutile; io la stima soltanto quando la ch...

Napoleone I. empereur.”

And another Italian writes—

“He is a poor deluded fool who believes in the love and honour of women.”

But the women reciprocate this sentiment, and in an Italian illustrated magazine a woman writes—

“In this stormy sea which is called the world I have only found fleeting pleasures and cruel disillusions. And if I felt any happiness I had to pay for it with bitter tears. Never believe in the love of men: for them love is a pastime. When you have sacrificed for them honour, family, religion, interest, youth, they will turn their shoulders to you with contempt, in search of other loves. That is the kind of thing that man is.”

But the same woman writes passionately to her accomplice in murder, robbery, and adultery—

“Questo foglio dal cuor ti mando,
L’ho scritto ieri sera lacrimando,
L’ho scritto avante cena,
Senza inchiostro e senza penna.
[Pg 174]La punta del mio cuore era la penna,
Il sangue delle mia vene era l’ inchiostro,
Se penna e calamaio poco ti costa,
Se merito pietà ti prego d’ una riposta.
Addio, Addio,
Addio, mio bene,
Addio, mio amore,
Tu sei il mio cuore,
Per ti morirò.
1886.”

Another woman’s inscription is a pathetic recollection of an old ballad—

“I wish to God my baby was born,
And smiling on its father’s knee,
And I, poor girl, lay in my grave,
The green grass growing over me.”

Beneath a design of a funeral monument a thief wrote this inscription (translated from Lombroso)—

“Here lies the body of poor Tulac Who, tired of stealing in this world, Goes to steal in another. His happy relatives have erected this memorial.”

Very significant of mental vacuity in solitude are some inscriptions given by Mr. Horsley:—

“21,000 times have I walked round this cell in a week.”

“3330 bricks in this cell.”

“131 black tiles, 150 red tiles in this cell.”

Good resolutions and moral exhortations are not uncommon:—

“It’s no good crying, you have got to do it, then after you have done it don’t do it any more; I wont.”

“Cheer up, girls; it’s no use to fret.”

“Brethren in adversity, turn your heart to God and be happy.”

[Pg 175]“Good-bye all. Give up drink.”

“½ pint whisky brought me here—took the pledge for 2 years—renewable for ever.”

“The Lord saith, It is good to be here.”

“The Almighty for master, the devil for servant. Amen.”

“Fear God and scorn the Devil, then you will not be here again.”

The Italian inscriptions supply a more dubious exhortation:—

“O thieves! our profession is ruined by those rascally judges. But courage! Forward!”

This brief account would not be complete if I neglected to give some specimens of the imprecations, crude erotic aspirations, and perverse instincts which occupy some considerable space in Lombroso’s collection. I will leave them untranslated:—

“Abbasso il direttore delle carcere e il capo-guardia, che sono due avanzi di galera. A morte le gafe [warders] e tutti le spie, a morte il capo-guardiano delle carcere, a morte l’Arca che sono la rovina di tanti giovani.”

“Mia adorata stella, quando potrô ch...?”

“Pensare che in questo stesso luogo vi sono tante bighe [women] che hanno volontà di farsi infilzare e non possono e tanti p... che infilzerebbero un cane altro che una f... e non possono farlo.”

“Pare impossible. Che si possa stare tanto tempo senza piantare il membro in una f... od in un culo. Eppure sono già 22 mesi che me lo meno due volte ogni quattro giorno e non sono ancora tisico.”

The last I will give was written by a woman in a religious book, and is translated by Lombroso from the Piedmontese dialect—

[Pg 176]“La Marietta del taglio salute le sue amiche che fanno la porca come lei, e saluta tutti i giovanotti che l’hanno ch... Menatevi una volta l’uccello al mio gusto, che io me la meno al vostro, e quando sarô libera venite a trovarmi che ce l’ho sempra calda e stretta tanto che volete. Allegri!”

§ 9. Criminal Literature and Art.

M. Joly has made some interesting investigations (which he has recorded recently in the Archives de l’Anthropologie Criminelle) concerning the favourite reading of French prisoners. He found that such criminals do not read either Molière or Voltaire. Nor do they care for the psychological novel of character and analysis; they have no taste and no capacity for introspection; they prefer the rococo style, and an old romance in five or six volumes called Épreuves du Sentiment is a great favourite at La Grande Roquette. This is what we should expect from that sentimentalism which has already been noted. But among the favourite prison novelists Alexandre Dumas is facile princeps. We must not seek to explain this by finding in Dumas a response to specific criminal instincts. In this matter prisoners are at one with a very large body of non-prisoners, with George Sand, Tolstoï, and Rossetti at their head. It is the universally human quality in the prolific novelist, the anodyne of his entrancing and unflagging interest, the satisfaction which he offers to the love of adventure, by which Dumas fetters the criminal as well as the man of genius. The female prisoners at Saint Lazare, unlike the male prisoners, are constantly asking for Voltaire’s books, which, however, the sisters are not able to supply. They are very fond of Henri Conscience, the Flemish Walter Scott, a[Pg 177] preference which is also by no means shared by the men, and they delight in all sorts of innocent and sentimental love-stories, although their marginal annotations to these do not always admit of reproduction.

If the favourite reading of those whose criminal career is decided is of so innocent a character, the same cannot always be said of the literature read by the immature. There is ample and unquestionable evidence to show that a low-class literature in which the criminal is glorified, as well as the minute knowledge of criminal arts disseminated by newspapers, have a very distinct influence in the production of young criminals.[72] Tropmann, a notorious French murderer, was influenced by novels. The famous criminal Lacenaire, who glorified himself and was glorified by others, has had an influence in the production of crime down to our own day. After every celebrated or startling crime, some weak-minded and impressionable persons go and commit the like, or give themselves up to the police under the impression that they have been guilty of the crime. It is youths and children who are especially prone to the imitation of criminal events from books or from real life. After the murders associated with the name of Jack the Ripper several murders by young children took place throughout the country.

It is not, usually, until he is in prison that the criminal tries to find literary expression for himself. This expression takes chiefly the form of verse, nearly always of a rude character, often affected or boastful,[Pg 178] but not seldom vigorous or pathetic. A criminal has been known to declaim from the scaffold a poem on his own death; another asked and obtained permission to present his defence in verse. It would be difficult to give stronger proof of a predilection for verse forms.

A song, of which this is a translation, was heard in a Russian prison:—

“In this spot where infamy has placed for ever her dwelling, two angels pant, having in their hands a cross.... But at night, with measured steps, slowly, slowly, watching the prison, the sentinels turn. Within these walls are sadness and terror. Without are life, gold, and liberty.... But the black echo of that slow, slow step warns me: Thou shalt stay, stay.” This was written and most sweetly sung by a man who had cruelly murdered his wife.

The poetic productions of English criminals, however numerous, are of no great interest; they seem to appear at their best in the inscriptions already given. Mr. Davitt has a chapter on “Prison ‘Poets,’” but what he has to say of them is not encouraging, although he tells us that Portsmouth has the reputation of being “a community of imprisoned songsters,” and such a specimen as the following does not produce much desire for more—

“’Twas one fine morning I left Wakefield Jail,
Myself and comrades we did cry our fill,” etc.

One could write as well as that without being a convict.

Lamb and other good judges thought well of Thomas Wainewright, the forger and poisoner. As a man of letters he enjoyed considerable reputation as[Pg 179] a critic, and was certainly a man of refined artistic tastes.[73] It is to-day not easy to detect in him many signs of critical insight or fine literary ability. He was one of the writers of that “Dandy and Silver Fork School” of whom Hazlitt says:—“Macassar Oil, Eau de Cologne, Hock and Seltzer Water, Atta of Roses, Pomade Divine, glance through the page in inexhaustible confusion, and make your head giddy.” His writing is but the vain froth of a nauseous life. The following extract is fairly characteristic:—“It appears to us that the time requireth not the hand of genius to give it a gusto for the tastes and feelings of what are called the lower orders,—rather the reverse! We want more macaroni and champagne, less boxing and bull beef. Now, Mr. Drama [Hazlitt] of the London seems determined to show his readers that his stomach is hearty—that he can relish bread and cheese and porter, which certainly are very fine things in the country, and—when we can get nothing else—and so far, all this is very well. But surely, in the centre of fashion, we might be now and then indulged with more elegant fare,—something that would suit better with the diamond rings on our fingers, the antique cameos in our breast-pins, our cambric pocket-handkerchief breathing forth Attargul, our pale lemon-coloured kid gloves! some chicken fricaseed white, for instance; a bottle of Hock or Moselle, and a glass of Maraschino.” These things and the like of these were for Wainewright the only things in the world[Pg 180] that seemed desirable, and his passion for them lay at the root of his crimes.

In Italy we meet with a genuine, and often traditional body of criminal songs which is of great interest. It is found in chief perfection in Italy and the large neighbouring islands, Sardinia, Corsica, and especially Sicily, where the civilisation is more primitive, and the level of criminality much higher. In the Canti Siculi of the able and enthusiastic folklorist, Pitré, there are twenty-seven which he describes as Prison Songs; with others rather similar in the same collection, the total amounts to forty-one (4 per cent. of the whole), mostly declarations of vengeance, laments for lost liberty, imprecations against judges and police. Some are in praise of prison, as the following:—

“Carcere, vita mia, cara, felice!
Lo starmi entro di te come mi piace!
Se spiechi il capo a quel che mal ne dice,
O pensa che far perdere la pace.
Qua sol travi i fratelli e qua gli amici,” etc.

There are also fine notes of despair, and sweet recollections of the absent mother or sweetheart. Sardinia, a land of brigandism and assassination, has produced numerous criminal songs of interest. “The Corsican songs collected by Tommaseo,” remarks Lombroso, “might be said to be almost all the creation of brigands. Nearly all breathe vengeance for a slain friend, or hatred against an enemy, and admiration for murder.” A ferocious Corsican brigand, named Peverone, who used to leave his mark behind by covering his victim with capsicums (peperoni), wrote verses which, says Lombroso, “would not be unworthy of Laura’s sweet singer.”[Pg 181] In such a case as that of Corsica, we must, however, be very cautious how we use the word “criminal.” In that land barbarous conceptions still rule; a child is brought up from its earliest days in an atmosphere of robbery and bloodshed; what in a more civilised country we call “crime” is there to a large extent the normal social state. It is in Corsica that a parish may vote a pension to a brigand (the commune of Ciammance, for example, in 1886); that more than half the persons liable to serve as jurymen in an arrondissement (4400 out of 8000 in one instance) may themselves have appeared behind the bar; and where a mayor (arrondissement of Sartène) may issue a proclamation in the following terms:—“Art. I. The carrying of arms is formally forbidden on the territory of the commune of Levie. Art. II. Exception is made in the case of persons notoriously in a state of enmity.”

As a specimen of French criminal literature I will give a poem by Lebiez, the young murderer spoken of in Chapter I.; it is addressed to a young girl’s skull:—

“De quelque belle enfant restes froids et sans vie,
Beau crâne apprêté par mes mains,
Dont j’ai sali les os et la surface blanchie
D’un tas de noms grecs et latins,
Compagnon triste et froid de mes heures d’étude,
Toi que je viens de rejeter
Dans un coin, ah! reviens tromper ma solitude,
Réponds à ma curiosité.
Dis-moi combien de fois ta bouche s’est offerte
Aux doux baisers de ton amant;
Dis-moi quels jolis mots de ta bouche entr’ ouverte
Dans des heurs d’égarement ...
Insensé!... Tu ne peux répondre, pauvre fille;
[Pg 182]Ta bouche est close maintenant,
Et la mort, en passant, de sa triste faucille
A brisé tes charmes naissants.
Triste leçon pour nons, qui croyons que la vie
Peut durer pendant de longs jours!
Et jeunesse, et bonheur, et beauté qu’on envie,
Tout passe ainsi que les amours!
Aussi, quand, vers le soir, âpre et dur à la tache,
Je travaille silencieux,
Mon esprit suit le monde et, tout inquiet, s’attache
A des pensers plus sérieux,
Je rêve au temps qui passe ... alors je te regarde,
Et, songeant aux coups de destin,
Sur ton front nu je crois lire en tremblant: ‘Prends garde,
Mortel, ton tour viendra demain.’”

When his papers were returned to him by the police, Lebiez wrote on the margin of this: “Poor verses! but, bad as they are, they are a faithful picture of the state of my mind in moments of solitude. In the world I am amiable and gay. I am taken for a wild fellow, who mocks at everything; but if they knew my character thoroughly, if they were aware that when I laugh and joke I have just come out of a solitude of despair and tears! If they knew that there are sobs at the bottom of my heart when smiles cover my lips, they would not say that I mock at everything. My gaiety is only a mask which hides the anguish which has for so long torn my heart.”

There are one or two examples of newspapers written and conducted by prisoners. The Abbé Crozes, in his Souvenirs de la Petite et de la Grande Roquette, gives us specimens and a facsimile page of one of these, the Tam-Tam, which, however, only lasted a very short time. Here are a couple of fragments from this remarkable journal:—

[Pg 183]Fable Express.

“Un grand tambour-major, pressé par la famine,
Dinait d’une maigre sardine
Et s’en régalait sur ma foi!
Morale.—On a souvent besoin d’un plus petit que soi.”

Echos et Bruits.

“Nons apprenons avec plaisir à nos lecteurs le projet formé par la Société Agricole de France, de se servir des oreilles de Transparent, pour se livrer à des essais sur la culture des champignons.

L’abondance et la qualité du fumier que contiennent ces vastes esgourdes, leur grandeur, leur système d’aération promettent aux amateurs de cèpes les résultats les plus satisfaisants.”

Very different from the Tam-Tam is the Summary, a newspaper published at the Elmira Reformatory, New York. This newspaper, largely written by prisoners and, at one time at all events, edited by a prisoner, contains, besides original contributions and the news of the Reformatory, a summary of general news; and by its tone and its method of selection, it compares favourably, as it has been said, with many newspapers published outside prison-walls. The following contribution to the Summary is from “a bright young burglar,” about eighteen years old, and is entitled “God and the Robin”; it has an allegorical and personal significance:—

“Early in the morning, long before the lazy cock crows, you may hear the robin singing his welcome to the sun. He has been watching through the darkness for the first rays of coming day, and as they appear he pours forth the melody as an expression of his joy. All is quiet till his music rends the air, and as you listen you are inspired with thoughts of Him who made the robin and you. Perhaps the sweet song is a prayer of thanks to God for sheltering him from the dangers of the[Pg 184] night. Do they know of God? Who can tell? Perhaps He is the cause of what we in our ignorance call instinct. Once as I listened to their music I fell asleep, and dreamt of a house near the sea. It had a lawn in front, on which was a robin hopping in search of food for her young. But as she hopped about the sky seemed to grow darker. I knew that a storm was approaching, and when it came I saw the robin cling to the tree for shelter. But the wind was fierce, and it tore her from the branch, and in spite of all her efforts it bore her away out over the ocean, farther and farther from the land, till at last, when its energy was spent, its fury gone, it left her on the ocean with no land in sight to guide her to her home; and as she flew she thought of her little ones at home, and of her mate. She thought she was flying to them, but every little effort was taking her farther away, though she knew it not. When at last she began to tire, she looked at the restless waters, but they offered her no relief; and in her frightened cry I seemed to hear her say, ‘O where shall I rest my weary wing?’ But in the murmuring of the ocean she heard no reply, so she could but fly on till darkness came, when, utterly exhausted, she fell upon the cruel waves and died. And He who made her will receive her when the course of life is past. Cannot the little robin find in that house of many mansions a place to rest her weary wing? Is heaven made for man alone? Are not these little creatures who never offend God, but worship Him with the purity and happiness of their little hearts, entitled to the joys of hereafter? Who can doubt it?”

The following interesting dialogue in the Socratic manner—“An Imaginary Conversation between two Members of the Casuistry Class”—is also by a very young criminal, who was also something of a poet:—

“Did you not agree last Sunday with the member of our class who said that life in prison is a state of slavery?

No, I did not. In fact, I am astonished at your question. I rather think it is not a state of slavery.

That is a very curious belief.

It may appear to be; but I think it can be proved to be[Pg 185] logical. You say that imprisonment for wrong-doing is slavery; but what is slavery?

I should define it to be the involuntary subjection of one person to the will of another.

But cannot a person be a slave to passion and to other qualities of mind as well as to persons?

Yes.

Then your definition is obviously incorrect. I would define slavery as a state in which one’s actions are regulated by some power over which he has no control. Would you agree with me?

Well, I think I would.

Very well. Having agreed upon a definition of slavery, we will discuss whether life in prison is slavery. Now, let me ask, why are men sent to prison?

Usually for violating the law.

Well, do you believe that men steal, for instance, voluntarily?

Undoubtedly.

Your tone is rather confident, so I daresay you can tell me why men steal?

In order to get certain articles that will enable them to live more comfortably, or which they desire to have.

That is, you mean that they have certain feelings—such as laziness, love of gain, etc.—which they wish to gratify?

Well, yes.

But if a man had not these feelings he would not steal?

I think not.

Then these feelings regulate his conduct in stealing?

It seems so.

But you agreed that he whose conduct is regulated by some power other than his own free will is a slave.

Well, I am afraid you have caught me again.

But do you admit it?

I do.

Then he who prevents this man from stealing is emancipating him, not enslaving him?

I see you are right.

Then one who is in prison for wrong-doing is a free man, not a slave?

Yes. But suppose that the man has been sent to prison unjustly; what then?

[Pg 186]To answer your question, I should have to know what your conception of true freedom is. True freedom is, as it appears to me, the triumphing of the spirit or better part of man over the flesh or weaker part; that is, acting according to one’s highest conception of what is right. Do you agree with me?

I do.

Then do you not think that the truly righteous man, be he in prison or out, is free? Do you not see that a man who does right, even though he lose fortune or life by doing so, is freer than the one who allows his conduct to be regulated by fear, malice, or other passions? Remember that a man may be free in a dungeon and bound down with chains, and that he may be an abject slave and be clothed in purple.”

The Summary perhaps does something to encourage priggishness, but priggishness, it need scarcely be said, indicates a far higher moral level than the vacuous brutality which lies behind so large a proportion of prison inscriptions.

So far we have been dealing with writers who are first and above all criminals. It is necessary to mention a few artists and men of letters who, while distinctly criminals, are not primarily criminals. Villon is generally named at the head of these, and with good reason, as he has himself supplied the evidence by which he must be counted a criminal. But Villon was a poet, and a great poet; his crimes never degraded his art. It is worth noting that almost the only passage[74] which Lombroso quotes to prove such degradation is, on independent grounds[Pg 187] and apparently with good reason, regarded by Jannet, Villon’s editor, as spurious.

Cellini, as self-revealed in his wonderful autobiography, bears more distinct marks than Villon of instinctive criminality. Crime is, however, rare among great sculptors; on the other hand it has been, as Lombroso points out, very common among painters; numerous are the examples of murder, cruelty, theft, sexual offences, among distinguished painters; alcoholism is also very common.

Casanova, a man of various and extraordinary abilities, has in his Memoirs, of which the strict historical accuracy is now generally accepted, produced one of the most valuable and interesting records of the eighteenth century, and at the same time a most complete and complaisant history of his own criminal offences. It is difficult to say whether in him the criminal or the man of genius is most prominent.

A living poet of some eminence, M. Paul Verlaine, furnishes an interesting example of the man of genius who is also distinctly a criminal. M. Verlaine is the chief of the so-called “Decadant” school. The precise rank that he will ultimately take as a poet is not yet clear; while on the one hand he has been unduly neglected, on the other he has been unduly extolled. At his best he excels in delicate passages of vague and mystic reverie, in sudden lines of poignant emotion. His style, a curious mixture of simplicity and obscurity, is studded with words borrowed from the criminal’s argot. His latest volume[75] contains poems which well show his curious power of expressing the most delicate nuances of sentiment side by side with[Pg 188] the crudest, most unabashed impulses of cynical depravity, self-revelations of sexual perversity, which might have earned for the book a title in a line of its own, “L’embarquement pour Sodome et Gomorrhe.” I do not propose to quote any of these but from a short but interesting series written during an imprisonment of several years at Brussels. Here is a poem describing the life of the prisoner:—

“La cour se fleurit de souci
Comme le front
De tous ceux-ci
Qui vont en rond
En flageolant sur leur fémur
Debilité
Le long du mur
Fou de clartè.

Tournez, Samsons sans Dalila,
Sans Philistin,
Tournez bien la
Meule au destin.
Vaincu risible de la loi,
Mouds tour à tour
Ton cœur, ta foi
Et ton amour!

Ils vont! et leurs pauvres souliers
Font un bruit sec,
Humiliés,
La pipe au bec.
Pas un mot ou bien le cachot,
Pas un soupir.
Il fait si chand
Qu’on croit mourir.

J’en suis de ce cirque effaré,
Soumis d’ailleurs
Et préparé
A tous malheurs.
[Pg 189]Et pourquir si j’ai contristé
Ton vœu tetu,
Société,
Me choierais tu?

Allons, frères, bons vieux voleurs,
Doux vagabonds,
Filons en fleur,
Mes chers, mes bons,
Fumons philosophiquement,
Promenons-nous
Paisiblement:
Rien faire est doux.”

I do not know any more interesting document in criminal literature than one poem, Læti et Errabundi, contained in this volume. Fully to understand the significance of this remarkable poem, it is necessary to state that Verlaine’s imprisonment was due to an attempt on the life of his comrade in sexual perversity, himself also a poet of some note. The latter left Europe, and it is not now known whether he is alive or dead. To him Læti et Errabundi is addressed.

I quote the concluding lines:—

“On vous dit mort, vous. Que le Diable
Emporte avec qui la colporte
La nouvelle irrémédiable
Qui vient ainsi battre ma porte!

Je n’y veux rien croire. Mort, vous,
Toi, dieu parmi les demi-dieux!
Ceux qui le disent sont des fous.
Mort, mon grand péché radieux.

Tout ce passé brûlant encore
Dans mes veines et ma cervelle
Et qui rayonne et qui fulgore
Sur ma ferveur toujours nouvelle!
[Pg 190]
Mort tout ce triomphe inouï
Retentissant sans frein ni fin
Sur l’air jamais évanoui
Que bat mon cœur qui fut divin!

Quoi le miraculeux poème
Et la toute-philosophie,
Et ma patrie et ma bohème
Morts? Allons donc! tu vis ma vie!”

Verlaine’s very remarkable head, though large, is the head of a criminal much more than of a man of genius, with its heavy jaw, projecting orbital arches and acrocephalic occiput, with central ridge—the head which the acute Lauvergne called Satanic, and which, in its extreme form, he believed to announce the monstrous alliance of the most eminent faculty of man, genius, with the most pronounced tendencies to crime. M. Verlaine has long been a victim to chronic alcoholism, and the author of the Fêtes Galantes and of some of the most tender lines written in our day is now most often found within the wards of Parisian hospitals.

“Je compte parmi les maladroits.

J’ai perdu ma vie et je sais bien
Que tout blâme sur moi s’en va fondre:
A cela je ne puis que répondre
Qui je suis vraiment né Saturnien.”

A few words may be added concerning criminal art as shown in design. Lombroso reproduces numerous drawings, etc., made in prison. They are generally very rough and slight, never beautiful, but frequently expressive, rendering character, now and then, in face and attitude, with ease and felicity.[Pg 191] Scenes of murder or robbery, law courts, men hanging from the gallows, women, mostly nude, with huge or pendent breasts, men or women in extravagantly perverse sexual attitudes—these are the visions which come to the criminal in prison, and to which he seeks, by such means as may be within his reach, to give artistic expression. Sexual imagery, not beautiful but gross and ugly, undoubtedly has the chief part in these designs; but it is scarcely necessary to point out that the artificial conditions under which the prisoner lives is largely responsible for this characteristic of his art, although not for its generally deliberate ugliness.

Dr. Laurent, in his work, Les Habitués des Prisons, has treated this matter more completely than any other writer known to me, and has reproduced some very characteristic and instructive examples of this art, although he has not dared to reproduce the more extravagant designs which he describes. What has chiefly impressed him among the large number of drawings by prisoners which have passed through his hands is the absence of any elevated thought, of any noble sentiment. In the erotic designs there is occasionally an imaginative audacity, but love is always regarded as a purely physiological act, and everywhere else the design is pathetically commonplace; it is naturalistic in the lowest sense of the word, adding nothing, suppressing nothing; and these drawings have therefore a remarkable family likeness. If there is any great artist of whom they ever remind us it is Ostade, with his perpetual research of the mean and degraded, physically and morally, in humanity. Dr. Laurent draws special attention to a design which appears to represent[Pg 192] some winged angel of hope; there is something in the bold, predaceous face of this vulgar fairy, in the coarse firm attitude, so suggestive of the things that alone have left a firm impress on the artist’s mind, that is very pathetic. In one of those designs only is it possible to catch a glimpse of the ideal; it is the figure of a woman by a clerk of some education, and possessed of personal qualities which brought him into relation with women of a somewhat superior type. The face in this drawing has a tender and melancholy air; even here, however, the body is drawn in too crude and realistic a manner. Where these artists succeed best is in the photographic delineation of commonplace or unpleasant human types, such as may be seen in large cities, especially after nightfall. There is usually something hard, cynical, degraded in these types, in their whole bodies as well as their faces; they remind us of what was said of portraits executed by Wainewright, that he had contrived to put the expression of his own wickedness into them.

These artists also do not succeed in caricature, and rarely attempt it. To be successful here involves some judgment, delicacy, and insight, and these the prison artists do not appear to possess.

In the nude, as I have already mentioned, prison artists take great delight, and they even achieve a certain amount of success. There is a certain Hogarthian vigour and ease with which the faces and forms of these coarse, low-browed, animal, energetic women, with their large pendent breasts, are brought before us. The only prison sketch I have seen showing anything more than a crude sense of beauty, any real appeal to the imagination, or distinct science of[Pg 193] form and composition, is a group of nude women in extravagant attitudes, which Dr. Laurent reproduces; he says nothing of the artist, except that he was probably a Saint Anthony by necessity, who, in this scene as of a Sabbath of witches, has given expression to the dreams that tormented him. It is a genuine piece of fantastic art, and seems to recall certain designs of the Belgian artist, Félicien Rops. This design escapes to some extent—and to some extent only—from the judgment which Dr. Laurent pronounces on the treatment of sex by criminals:—“Sex is not for them a sacred and mysterious thing, a mystic rose hidden beneath the obscure vault of the body, like a strange and precious talisman enclosed in a tabernacle. For them it is a thing of ugliness, which they drag into the light of day and laugh at.”

§ 10. Criminal Philosophy.

One of the most interesting and instructive departments of criminal literature is that dealing with the criminal’s mental attitude towards crime. In considering the problems of crime, and the way to deal with them, it is of no little importance to have a clear conception of the social justification for crime from the criminal’s point of view. Not only is he free from remorse; he either denies his crime or justifies it as a duty, at all events as a trifle. He has a practical and empirical way of his own of regarding the matter, as Dostoieffsky remarks, and excuses these accidents by his destiny, by fate. “What contributes to justify the criminal in his own eyes is that he is quite certain that the public opinion of the class in which he was[Pg 194] born and lives will acquit him; he is sure that he will not be judged definitely lost unless his crime is against one of his own class, his brothers. He is secure on that side, and with so good a conscience he will never lose his moral assurance, which is the main thing. He feels himself on solid ground, and by no means hates the knout which is administered to him. He looks upon it as inevitable, and consoles himself by thinking that he is not the first nor the last to receive it. Does the soldier hate the Turk who sabres him? By no means!”

To be caught is the foolish part of the business. “You are a lot of fools to get in here, myself included,” is one of the prison inscriptions noted by Mr. Horsley. “Had God wished me to be different, He would have made me different,” said Goethe. In the same spirit is the philosophy of crime set forth by a man known to Lombroso: “If God has given to us the instinct to steal, He has given to others the instinct to imprison us; the world is an amusing theatre!” It is rare, however, for the criminal to take so lofty a standpoint as this; more usually he bases the justification for his own existence on the vices of respectable society—“the ignorance and cupidity of the public,” as one prisoner expressed it—that he is shrewd enough to perceive; “it is a game of rogue catch rogue,” a convict told Mr. Davitt. A youthful French brigand in the days of Charles IX., as he impassively ascended the scaffold, declared that he was innocent, because he had never robbed poor people but only princes and lords, the greatest robbers in the world. “We are poor rogues, and so hanged, while others, no less guilty in another way, escape,” pleaded Captain Bartholomew Roberts’s fifty-two[Pg 195] pirates, executed at the beginning of the eighteenth century. “Law for the rich but none for the poor,” is a modern English prison inscription which would probably have expressed its writer’s meaning better if it had been transposed. Quels gredins les honnêtes gens!

An Italian criminal wrote in a book of “Moral Maxims” by Tommaseo: “When you have read this book become a priest or a master; if not it will be of no use to you. There are fine maxims in this book, but maxims are no good in this world, where the god of gold reigns alone. He who has money is brave and virtuous; all the maxims of Tommaseo are of no use to him who has none; he will still be treated with contempt.” A Milanese thief said to Lombroso: “I do not rob; I merely take from the rich their superfluities; and, besides, do not advocates and merchants rob? Why accuse me rather than them?” “Knowing,” wrote the murderer Raynal, “that three-fourths of the social virtues are cowardly vices, I thought that an open assault on a rich man would be less ignoble than the cautious combinations of fraud.” J. G. Wainewright, when in prison, said to a visitor: “Sir, you city men enter upon your speculations and take the chances of them. Some of your speculations succeed, and some fail. Mine happen to have failed.” An Italian thief, one Rosati, said: “I am proud of my deeds; I have never taken small sums; to attack such large sums I consider a speculation rather than a theft.” Another Italian thief said that there were two kinds of justice in the world: natural justice, that which he himself practised when he shared the proceeds of his thefts with the poor; and artificial justice, that which is protected by social laws. The criminal[Pg 196] is firmly convinced that his imprisonment is a sign that the country is going to the dogs. A prison inscription quoted by Lombroso runs: “I am imprisoned for stealing half-a-dozen eggs; Ministers who rob millions every day are honoured. Poor Italy!” “We are necessary,” a brigand chief said proudly to his judges; “God has sent us on the earth to punish the avaricious and the rich. We are a kind of divine scourge. And for the rest, without us what would you judges do?”

This conviction of the criminality of the honest is engrained in the criminal mind, and one meets it at every turn. “Who doesn’t deserve the galleys?” was a remark often heard by Dr. Lauvergne at the convict establishment at Toulon, and the same idea was cynically expressed by Lacenaire:—

“Buvons à la sagesse,
A la vertu qui soutient!
Tu peux sans crainte d’ivresse,
Boire à tous les gens de bien.”

Most people must have observed, in talking with persons of vicious instincts, the genuine disgust which these so often feel for the slightly different vices of others and their indifference to their own. So the man in prison feels indulgence for his own offence and contempt for his more cautious brother outside who continues to retain the respect of society, feelings which the latter heartily reciprocates. Every individual, whatever his position, feels the need of a certain amount of amour propre. “I may be a thief, but, thank God, I am a respectable man.”

Among the criminal songs still found in Sardinia there is one (quoted by Lombroso from Bouillier’s[Pg 197] Les Dialectes et les Chants de la Sardaigne) that may be quoted here. “Tell me,” asks Achea of the priest, “if I have nothing to eat, and if I find wherewith to appease my hunger, may I take the goods of another?” “Believe me, if you have nothing to eat, and you meet with something, you would be a fool not to take it.” “That is a good counsel, but here is a difficulty: what I have taken in this way, ought I to return it?” “No. The observance of the law would subject you to a fast too severe; you are a great fool if you do not understand that in the face of necessity all things belong to all.” That is the morality of a lawless and primitive society, but it has points of contact with some of the latest and highest developments of social morality. Tolstoï would justify it; as, to a certain extent, a respected archbishop has justified it.

“The laws of society,” remarked an educated convict to Mr. Davitt, “are framed for the purpose of securing the wealth of the world to power and calculation, thereby depriving the larger portion of mankind of its rights and chances. Why should they punish me for taking by somewhat similar means from those who have taken more than they had a right to? My dear sir,” said he, “I deny your contention that there is any such thing as honesty in the world at all.” This man, who had a considerable acquaintance with literature and philosophy, maintained soberly that “thieving was an honourable pursuit,” and that religion, law, patriotism, and bodily disease were the real and only enemies of humanity. “Religion,” he would observe, “robbed the soul of its independence, while society’s social laws, in restraining the desires and faculties given by Nature to men for[Pg 198] the purpose of gratification, declared war against the manifest spirit of the law of our being.” Patriotism he termed “the idolatry of an idea, in the stupid worship of which the peace of the world, and the wellbeing of its inhabitants, were sacrificed by the lawmakers and others who profit thereby.”

Lombroso found the following note written with a piece of iron in a politico-economical work, under the chapter of “Considerations on the Co-operative spirit”: “The best governed nation is that which has fewest thieves. Do you want to abolish thieves? See to it that the working man and the peasant have work to do, and are better paid for it; then they will be content, and will have nothing to say against the government; in consequence they will do their duty, and will not be forced to do evil.” Another, reading a book about an official who had been removed from the administration of taxes, wrote: “I advise you all to be public thieves, and then you will be free citizens and men who are useful to society, and will be decorated with medals and crosses. This man here was a public thief; but I am only a private robber; if I had been a public one I should not have been here.” Again: “Why are those who wear coarse breeches treated in one way, and those who are dressed finely and wear yellow gloves treated in another? Why are the first called thieves while the others are said to have committed undue appropriation? Have not both classes broken the commandment which says simply ‘Thou shalt not steal’?” In a confession made to Gisquet, the prefect of police, a different standpoint is taken up; the criminal justifies himself, not on moral grounds, but as a man of the world: “You regret the robbery that I have[Pg 199] committed, and you call it a bad action; the insignificant act for which I have been condemned is the first link in a chain which will not, I hope, finish so soon. If I were not a thief by vocation, I would be one by calculation. I have faced all the good and the evil of other occupations, and I find that this is the best. What would have become of me among honest men? A bastard, with no one to take care of me, what could I do? Become a shopman, earn at the most six hundred francs a year, and having sweated all my life, grow old and ill and finish at a hospital. Take men in the mass and you will find them all humiliated, slaves, disgraced; it is never talent and honesty that are recompensed; vice prospers more often than virtue.

“In our profession we depend on nobody; we enjoy the fruits of our experience and ability. I know well that we may end in prison; but out of the 18,000 thieves in Paris not one-tenth are in prison, so that we enjoy nine years of freedom against one of prison. Besides, where is the working man who is not sometimes without work? For the rest, the working man has to pledge his things at the pawn-shop, while we, when we are free, want for nothing, and lead a life of constant feasting and pleasure.

“The fear of being arrested, and the pretended remorse that people talk of, are things to which one soon gets accustomed, and which finish by giving a pleasurable emotion.

“And then, if we are arrested, we live at the expense of others, who clothe us, feed us, and warm us, all at the cost of those whom we have robbed!

“I will say more. During our detention in prison we think out and prepare new means of success.

[Pg 200]“If I regret anything, Mr. Prefect, it is that I am condemned to only a year. If it had been for five I should have been sent to a central prison, where I should have met some old hands, who would have taught me some new trick, and I should have returned to Paris clever enough to live without working.

“They talk of thieves as of persons always in misery, and who always finish their lives in prison; but they think of those whom they have seen in their apparent state when arrested. They do not consider that many have secret resources, and that most of them are clever enough to get on without ever having anything to do with justice.” This man, it is clear, had aspirations and ideals which, though they found satisfaction by a different method, were much the same as those of ordinary persons. He represents the professional criminal.

“Ah! too often it is forgotten,” wrote G. Ruscovitch, a prince among forgers, the accomplished student of science, the perfect master of half-a-dozen languages, “too often it is forgotten that criminals are members of society. All these bodies, sometimes abandoned by all except the satellites charged to guard them, are not all opaque; some of them are diaphanous and transparent. The vulgar sand which you tread under foot becomes brilliant crystal when it has passed through the furnace. The dregs may become useful if you know how to employ them; to tread them under foot with indifference and without thought is to undermine the foundations of society and to fill it with volcanoes. The man who has not visited the caverns, can he know the mountain well? The lower strata, for being situated deeper and[Pg 201] farther from the light, are they less important than the external crust? There are deformities and diseases among us to make one shudder; but since when has horror forbidden study, and the disease driven away the physician?”

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