o criminal
courses. But where this great inequality of social conditions does not
exist--where all are poor as in Ireland or Italy--poverty alone is not
a weighty factor in ordinary crime. In Ireland, for example, there in
almost as much poverty as exists in Italy, and if the amount of crime
were determined by economic circumstances alone, Ireland ought to have
as black a record as her southern sister. Instead of that she is on
the whole as free from crime as the most prosperous countries of
Europe. In the face of these facts it is impossible to say that the
high rate of crime in Italy and Spain is to be wholly accounted for by
the pressure of economic adversity.

Will not difference of race suffice to account for it? Is it not the
case that some races are inherently more prone to crime than others?
In India, for instance, where the great mass of the population is
singularly law-abiding, a portion of the aboriginal inhabitants have
from time immemorial lived by plunder and crime. "When a man tells
you," says an official report, quoted by Sir John Strachey, "that he
is a Badhak, or a Kanjar, or a Sonoria, he tells you what few
Europeans ever thoroughly realise, that he, an offender against the
law, has been so from the beginning and will be so to the end; that
reform is impossible, for it is his trade, his caste--I may almost say
his religion--to commit crime." It is not poverty which makes many of
these predatory races criminals. Speaking of the Mina tribe inhabiting
one of the frontier districts of the Punjab, Sir John Strachey says:
"Their sole occupation is, and always has been, plunder in the native
States and in distant parts of British India; they give no trouble at
home, and, judging from criminal statistics, it would be supposed that
they were an honest community. They live amid abundance, in
substantial houses with numerous cattle, fine clothes and jewels, and
fleet camels to carry off their plunder." Special laws have been made
for dealing with these tribes; a register of their numbers is kept;
they can be compelled to live within certain local limits, but in
spite of these coercive measures crime is not suppressed, and "a long
time must elapse before we see the end of the criminal tribes of
India."

Coming back to European peoples, it is worthy of note that both
Hungary and Finland are inhabited by the same race. These two
countries are separated by about fifteen degrees of latitude, but in
the matter of m