s counterfeiting_ ..." etc. Can you see before
your mind's eye a counterfeiter, in the act of engraving on the stone or
the others may ignore the penalty that awaits them, but he cannot. This
illustration is convincing, for in cases of other crimes one may always
assume that the criminal acted without thinking of the future, even when
he was not in a transport of passion. But in the case of the
counterfeiter the very act of committing the crime reminds him of the
threat of the law, and yet he is imperturbable while perpetrating it.

Crime has its natural causes, which lie outside of that mathematical
point called the free will of the criminal. Aside from being a juridical
phenomenon, which it would be well to examine by itself, every crime is
above all a natural and social phenomenon, and should be studied
primarily as such. We need not go through so hard a course of study
merely for the purpose of walking over the razor edge of juristic
definitions and to find out, for instance, that from the time Romagnosi
made a distinction between incompleted and attempted crime rivers of ink
have been spilled in the attempt to find the distinguishing elements of
these two degrees of crime. And finally, when the German legislator
concluded to make no distinction between incompleted and attempted crime
and to recognize only the completed crime in his code of 1871, we
witnessed the spectacle of Carrara praising that legislator for leaving
that subtile distinction out of his code. A strange conclusion on the
part of a science, which cudgels its brains for a century to find the
marks of distinction between attempted and incompleted crime, and then
praises the legislator for ignoring it. And another classic jurist,
Buccellati, proposed to do away with the theory of attempted crime by
simply defining it as a crime by itself, or as--a violation of police
laws! A science which comes to such conclusions is a science which moves
in metaphysical abstractions, and we shall see that all these finespun
questions which abound in classical science lose all practical value
before the necessity of saving society from the plague of crime.

The method which we, on the other hand, have inaugurated is the
following: Before we study crime from the point of view of a juristic
phenomenon, we must study the causes to which the annual recurrence of
crimes in all countries is due. These are natural causes, which I have
classified under the three heads of anthr