and cultivation. Has not Darwin laid down the law of atavism and variation, and is not stiffest Orthodoxy become entirely rec onciled to it, and its unique Book of Gen esis, after fighting the Darwinian theory for forty long years as fiercely as the cru sader did the infidel? These things are at length established. They have become com monplace facts of natural science. Even the law partially concedes them, — though not entirely without reluctance and much misconception. Here again its confidence had a slow and painful birth. But the law refuses to take a single step farther, — that step next in order, which concerns a due rec ognition of the heredity of peculiar moral and mental traits, — the heredity of peculiar operations of cerebration and other physiopsychological phenomena affecting the prac tical morality of a man's actions. It will stubbornly persist in ignoring the fact that variations in the amount and texture of brain matter have an influence upon the kind and character of human activity in any given direction. Hence it will not admit that ob liquity of moral vision, and with this, crime, can trace their origin to a source as en tirely physical as a broken bone, a hump back, or an attack of typhoid fever, though the human race has long ago found out that some men are born thieves, and that "like begets like." Kleptomania is an ad mitted mental disease affecting the prac tical moral nature of the victim; and no argument is needful to demonstrate that where like begets like, neither prior edu cation nor subsequently applied disciplinary regulation suffices to work any essential abiding change in the elements common to the hereditary uniformity, any more than a course of chemistry would add an inch to the stature of a dwarf or subtract an inch from that of a giant. Now let the mind picture to itself a moral dwarf, as warped against, and as intractable to, all no bility of thought or action as the hyena, — let it picture to itself the untutored and unregenerate savage, and it will at once see
that the intangible quality called virtue, while in no wise an inherent principle in either instance, may, by artificial cultivation, possibly be educated in both instances as one would educate a trick-horse or a pet parrot to do certain things; yet both the faculty and the intelligence for the due appreciation of the peculiar quality are entirely wanting, and to find a substitute for either of these highly requisite two in the cases exemplified is extremely difficult if not wholly impossible, — as much so, indeed, as to find a substitute for the wit absent in the vacuous mind of the drivelling idiot. Shall punishment for failure here to make a responsible moral agent be visited upon the moral dwarf, the unregenerate savage, the human hyena in capable of virtue and born thus, or upon the fatuous system of jurisprudence which per sists in being blind to psycho-physiological phenomena and not discriminating on ac count of the same? Is it not true that virtue is only the per fection of the moral principle, as men can be made to agree upon what is good and what is bad? It is therefore a wofully shifting, artificial affair of pure dialectics and constant dispute. It is not born with man as are his organs and their several functions. He is only susceptible to it by education and culti vation of it, providing his mind, inclinations, and opportunities are constituted to make him receptive and appreciative here. The taste for virtue is acquired esoterically. Noble, indeed, is the law of altruism; yet are there not innumerable intelligent and not wholly egotistical men (persons in unexceptionable social and church standing), who will ask in all good faith, or show by their acts, that they do not see why it is better to pursue some other person's business in the matter of the latter's comfort and welfare, than attend to one's own business? All this is ancient knowledge, and holds its quiet humor airily enough to him who can see. Where society and its rights are concerned there is but one thing clear and indubitable with reference to crime; namely, that society
