m by punishment. They ought to be
treated with life-long sequestration in asylums (p. 135), and rigidly
forbidden to perpetuate the species. That is the conclusion to which the
whole of his long argument is carried. He contends that the prevalent
juristic conception of crime rests upon ignorance of nature, brute-life,
savagery, and the gradual emergence of morality. So radical a revolution
in ideas, which gives new meaning to the words sin and conscience,
which removes moral responsibility, and which substitutes the
anthropologist and the physician for the judge and jury, cannot be
carried out, even by its fervent apostle, without some want of severe
logic. Thus we find Lombroso frequently drawing distinctions between
"habitual" or "born" criminals and what he calls "occasional" criminals,
without explaining the phenomenon of "occasional crime," and saying how
he thinks this ought to be regarded by society. Moreover, he almost
wholly ignores the possibility of correcting criminal tendencies by
appeal to reason, by establishing habits of self-restraint, and by the
employment of such means as hypnotic suggestion.[40] Yet experience and
the common practice of the world prove that these remedies are not
wholly inefficacious; and indeed the passage from childish savagery to
moralised manhood, on which he lays so great a stress, is daily effected
by the employment of such measures in combination with the fear of
punishment and the desire to win esteem.

The final word upon Lombroso's book is this: Having started with the
natural history of crime, as a prime constituent in nature and humanity,
which only becomes crime through the development of social morality, and
which survives atavistically in persons ill adapted to their civilised
environment, he suddenly turns round and identifies the crime thus
analysed with morbid nerve-conditions, malformations and moral insanity.
Logically, it is impossible to effect this coalition of two radically
different conceptions. If crime was not crime but nature in the earlier
stages, and only appeared as crime under the conditions of advancing
culture, its manifestation as a survival in certain individuals ought to
be referred to nature, and cannot be relegated to the category of
physical or mental disease. Savages are savages, but not lunatics or
epileptics.

NOTE TO THE FOREGOING SECTION.

At the close of this enquiry into medical theories of sexual inversion,
all of which assume that