raw attention to the
abnormal development, sometimes to the striking deficiency of the back
of the head. I have tried to discover what is the invariable factor,
the one permanent mark of the scientific criminal type; after exhaustive
classification I have to come to the conclusion that it consists in
being poor.

But it was among the pictures in this article that I received the final
shock; the enlightenment which has left me in lasting possession of the
fact that criminologists are generally more ignorant than criminals.
Among the starved and bitter, but quite human, faces was one head, neat
but old-fashioned, with the powder of the 18th century and a certain
almost pert primness in the dress which marked the conventions of the
upper middle-class about 1790. The face was lean and lifted stiffly up,
the eyes stared forward with a frightful sincerity, the lip was firm
with a heroic firmness; all the more pathetic because of a certain
delicacy and deficiency of male force, Without knowing who it was, one
could have guessed that it was a man in the manner of Shakespeare's
Brutus, a man of piercingly pure intentions, prone to use government
as a mere machine for morality, very sensitive to the charge of
inconsistency and a little too proud of his own clean and honourable
life. I say I should have known this almost from the face alone, even if
I had not known who it was.

But I did know who it was. It was Robespierre. And underneath the
portrait of this pale and too eager moralist were written these
remarkable words: "Deficiency of ethical instincts," followed by
something to the effect that he knew no mercy (which is certainly
untrue), and by some nonsense about a retreating forehead, a peculiarity
which he shared with Louis XVI and with half the people of his time and
ours.

Then it was that I measured the staggering distance between the
knowledge and the ignorance of science. Then I knew that all criminology
might be worse than worthless, because of its utter ignorance of that
human material of which it is supposed to be speaking. The man who could
say that Robespierre was deficient in ethical instincts is a man utterly
to be disregarded in all calculations of ethics. He might as well say
that John Bunyan was deficient in ethical instincts. You may say that
Robespierre was morbid and unbalanced, and you may say the same of
Bunyan. But if these two men were morbid and unbalanced they were morbid
and unbalanced by feeli