fact of recidivism shows the habitual crim inal, and here no punishment will suffice. The man must be treated as though afflicted with a serious illness and removed from society, for which, however, he may and should be made to work. He insists that these questions are of vital importance to every nation, and asserts repeatedly that teachers in ragged schools and founders of polytechnics are patriots and philanthropists in the highest sense of the words, because helping to stamp out crime more than all the long-term sentences in the world. Crime is at once a biological and a social phenome non. The criminal is a microbe which only flourishes on suitable soil. Without doubt it is the environment which makes the crim inal, but, like the cultivation medium, with out the microbe it is powerless to germinate the crime. To use Professor Ferri's expres sion, up to recent times the criminal has been regarded as a sort of algebraic for mula; the punishment has been proportioned not to the criminal but to the crime. An thropologists are teaching us to strive after scientific justice. Time and events have brought into clear relief the inadequacy of legal maxims, founded on antiquated and unscientific conceptions, and thus modern Italians show us that not the nature of the crime but the dangerousness of the offender constitutes the only reasonable legal criterion to guide the inevitable social reaction against the criminal. This position is the legitimate outcome of the scientific study of the crim inal. And where the man of science has led the way the man of law must follow. Such, in brief and somewhat in the rough, are the conclusions of Italian criminal anthro pology, which we have given at some length, as the subject is too vast as well as too new to be clearly comprehensible in a few words. In the autumn of 1896 an International Con gress of Criminal Anthropologists was held at Geneva, and on this occasion the Italian school triumphed as never before over all ad versaries and schismatics, and especially over
their French colleagues, who have carried their antagonism to Italy and things Italian even to the serene fields of science. The French objections were beaten down by a very hailstorm of facts, so carefully collated, so industriously collected, that opposition was perforce silenced. In the front ranks of the combatants, indeed, leading the at tack, was that eminent criminal sociologist, Enrico Ferri, whose legal vocations have not hindered him from continuing his favorite studies, though he is no less valiant as a lawyer than as a scientist. Indeed, he holds that the two studies ought to go hand in hand. All lawyers, he affirms, should dedi cate themselves to the study of criminal an thropology if they would go to the fountainhead of human responsibility; all judges should be inspired by this doctrine, ere blindly punishing a culprit on the faith of a code not always founded on direct observa tion of the environment or of the individual. "It is not true that with Lombroso's theories all prison doors would be broken down and respectable humanity given over to the mercy of the delinquents, as our opponents say. And were the first part of this strange para dox to be verified — i.e., that which demands that in order to be logical, all prison doors be opened — there would open also those of the lunatic asylums in order to permit the entry of the men ejected from the prisons, individ uals whose mental and physical constitutions pushed them into crime." It was just this theory of the darn criminal, which Lombroso was the first irrefutably to prove, and whose effects must shortly be felt in criminal legis lation, that carried off the most clamorous victory at Geneva. Cesare Lombroso, who is a Hebrew by birth, was born at Turin, in 1836. As a mere lad he loved to write, and composed, with the same facility and rapidity that dis tinguishes him to this day, novels, poems, tragedies, treatises on archaeological, physi ological, and already on sociological subjects, those dating from his student days
