nse, indeed, it may be said that
the proportion of misdirected letters depends upon 'the state of
society,' if by that expression be meant, among other things, the
numerical proportion which individuals of different characters and
habits bear to each other. In that sense, we may accept some far more
startling propositions. We may partly admit that the state of society
determines the number of murders and suicides, if by this be simply
meant that the number of murders and suicides committed will depend upon
the number of persons whose characters have been so moulded by
circumstances as to dispose them to put an end to their own or other
people's lives. But Mr. Buckle, by whom the assertion was made, was
careful to explain that his meaning was the very reverse of what is here
supposed. Speaking of suicide, he declares it to be 'a general law that,
in a given state of society, a certain number of persons must put an end
to their own lives;' adding that 'the question as to who shall commit
the crime depends upon special laws,' and that 'the individual felon
only carries into effect what is a necessary consequence of preceding
circumstances.' In other words, it is not the amount of crime that
depends upon the number of persons prepared to commit it; it is the
number of criminals which depends upon the amount of crime that must
needs be committed. 'Murder,' he elsewhere says, 'is committed with as
much regularity, and bears as uniform a relation to certain known
circumstances, as do the movements of the tides and the relations of the
seasons.' 'The uniform reproduction of crime is more clearly marked, and
more capable of being predicted, than are the physical laws connected
with the disease and destruction of our bodies. The offences of men are
the result not so much of the vices of individual offenders, as of the
state of society into which the individuals are thrown.'

There is here so much looseness and inconsistency of language, that what
is most offensive in it may easily bear more than one interpretation:
and the shocking dogma that, in a given state of society, the force of
circumstances constrains the commission of a certain amount of crime,
may possibly admit of being explained away and softened down into the
comparatively harmless proposition that, where all the circumstances,
conditions or causes required for the commission of a certain amount of
crime are present, that amount of crime will certainly be committed. B