, show cases of mob psychology
that have led large masses of men to take an active part in killing. The
pursuit of those charged with crime shows that all people like the chase
when the emotions are thoroughly aroused. Under certain impulses,
communities gloat over hangings and commend judges and juries because
they have the courage to hang, when, in fact, they were too cowardly not
to hang and when their reason did not approve the verdict and judgment.
Men who do not kill often wish others might die and are pleased and
happy when they do die. We approve of death when it is the right one who
dies. Whether all persons are murderers or not may depend upon a
definition of murder. But, beyond doubt, all persons are potential
murderers, needing only time and circumstances, and a sufficiently
overwhelming emotion that will triumph over the weak restraints that
education and habit have built up, to control the powerful surging
instincts and feelings that Nature has laid at the foundation of life.

XI

SEX CRIMES

Most of the inmates of prisons convicted of sex crimes are the poor and
wretched and the plainly defective. Nature, in her determination to
preserve the species, has planted sex hunger very deep in the
constitution of man. The fact that it is necessary for the preservation
of life, and that Nature is always eliminating those whose sex hunger is
not strong enough to preserve the race, has overweighted man and perhaps
all animal life with this hunger. At least it has endowed many men with
instincts too powerful for the conventions and the laws that hedge him
about.

Rape is almost always the crime of the poor, the hardworking, the
uneducated and the abnormal. In the man of this type sex hunger is
strong; he has little money, generally no family; he is poorly fed and
clothed and possesses few if any attractions. He may be a sailor away
from women and their society for months, or in some other remote
occupation making his means of gratifying this hunger just as
impossible. There is no opportunity for him except the one he adopts. It
is a question of gratifying this deep and primal instinct as against
the weakness of his mentality and the few barriers that a meagre
education and picked-up habits can furnish; and when the instinct
overbalances he is lost.

Incest, which is peculiarly the crime of the weak, the wretched and the
poor, has a somewhat different origin. Westermarck in his "_History of
Human Marria