d
meets with the first obligation, with the first necessity for a
well-regulated, purposive existence. What is the result? Truancy,
disobedience, and finally expulsion--not because of intellectual
deficiency, but because of those same attributes which later served to
put him in the penitentiary. It was the first evidence of his pathologic
emotionalism and vindictiveness. We next see him in an effort to lead an
industrial life, but here, too, everything he does proves a failure, and
likewise not because of intellectual deficiency, but because of a
disharmony, a disproportion, between his various mental faculties. He
could not, somehow, submit himself to any well-regulated existence. His
egotism and absolute lack of the sense of responsibility made it
impossible for him to adjust himself effectively to the world about him.
He next tries matrimony, and the same story reasserts itself. His
conjugal life is characterized by repeated desertions; and thus he
becomes steadily more debased, more depraved, sinks to the level of the
professional gambler and finally even this becomes too strenuous for
him, and he turns to a life of crime. At the age of forty we find him
with a record of numerous arrests, and as far as known, one-fourth of
his lifetime has thus far been spent in jails and penitentiaries. The
characterological anomalies at the bottom of his career came to the
front already in his childhood days. Before completing his fourteenth
year we find him deliberately planning the murder of a human being
because of an insult. His idea concerning that situation has not
changed in the least since then. He now speaks of it without the least
sign of remorse or regret. As a matter of fact, he is inclined to
impress one as being rather proud of that deed, and he cannot see the
criminality of it. The atavistic nature of his act in throwing the dog
into the oil tank is quite evident. Then his attempts at suicide
throughout his lifetime, evidence of a pathologic emotionalism, must
also be remembered. These are a few examples of his mode of reaction to
everyday occurrences in life. Is it at all strange that he has developed
finally into the habitual criminal? On the contrary, it would be rather
strange that an individual with such attributes should turn out to be an
honest, peaceful citizen. He likewise was a prey to all the vices of
modern civilization, and these, as in the preceding case, unquestionably
added to the dissolution of the o