carefully studied by Mr. Dugdale—52.4 per cent, of the women following prostitution. If hereditary disease accompanies the entailment of crime, pauperism is a matter of course; the subject rarely attaining the rank of a criminal, except in the most petty of the offenses against property. Pauperism is a condition of effeteness. It represents the dregs which drop downward through the several strata of society. Morally, it is the most negative condition of humanity. The pauper has sunk below the level of crime. He abstains from crime, not by moral restraints, but by inertness. The woman with the same taint has sunk below the level of the active phases of crime. She drifts into harlotry because it is easier than to steal. If disabled, she becomes a pauper, and thus oscillates between the almshouse and the brothel—a passionless, nerveless being, with all the normal energies crushed out under the burden of entailed defects.
3. It is a more difficult matter to trace through the complicated net-work of passions, emotions, and motives, which underlies the degrees and varieties of crime, the purely sexual physical factor. The main difficulty consists in discriminating this from 'the mental sexual differences which may exist as a cause of differentiation in crime. It is essential, if possible, to gain an approximate idea of the limits of these differences. With the present data at command, this can be accomplished only in the most superficial manner. There exists here more than the suspicion of a great law, the operation of which, if fully known, would clear up many of the doubts lingering around this important subject. While the physical differences will serve to explain the varying relations of the sexes to crime in their broader and more superficial aspects, the mental sexual traits will serve to define the differences in motives, tendencies, and innate moral proclivities of the sexes. Instead of being satisfied with the simple explanation, that the extent of man's excess over woman as a criminal represents the excess of woman over man as a moral being, this knowledge would show that this is not a question of comparative morality alone, but one of intellectual equivalents. To study carefully the scope of the moral equivalents of the sexes is to reach the relations of things in their genesis. It is in this way that the relations of the sexes socially, as well as in crime, will be taken out of the realm of sentimentalism and placed upon a basis of fact. Sentimental views of the relationship of women to crime exist so generally, that they act as a force in the way of an unbiased investigation of the subject. Take, for instance, such a writer as M. de Marsangy,[1] whose motive is the serious one of the amelioration of the penal laws in their bearings upon women, who gravely concludes that man has a "nature less noble, less delicate, less perfect than woman," and yet quotes approvingly that, "Das Weib ist Engel oder Teufel." It is this personal bias which has hitherto obscured this subject, and rendered the work of such writers
- ↑ Loc. cit., p. 133.
