human beings, two groups must be particularly
distinguished. Limiting our observations to those who are true
aggressively antisocial abnormals, that is to say, who are not adapted
to a certain social order and attack it by crimes, we must distinguish
those who for egoistic or ferocious reasons attack society by atavistic
forms of the struggle for existence by committing socalled common crimes
in the shape of fraud or violence, thereby opposing or abolishing
conditions in which their fellow beings may live. This is the atavistic
type of criminals which represents an involutionary, or retrogressive,
form of abnormality, due to an arrested development or an atavistic
reversion to a savage and primitive type. These constitute the majority
in the world of criminals and must be distinguished from the minority,
who are evolutionary, or progressive, abnormals, that may also commit
crime in a violent form, but must not be confounded with the others,
because they do not act from egoistic motives, but rebel from altruistic
motives against the injustice of the present order. These altruistic
criminals feel the sufferings and horrors due to the injustice
surrounding them and may go so far as to commit murder, which must
always be condemned, but which must not be confounded with atavistic or
egoistic murder. Recourse to personal violence is always objectionable
from the point of view of higher manhood, which desires that human life
should always be held in respect. But the reasons for such a crime are
different, being egoistic in the one, and altruistic in the other case.
The evolutionary abnormal is often an instrument of human progress, not
in the form of criminality, but in that of intellectual and moral
rebellion against conditions which are sanctioned by laws that
frequently punish such an evolutionary rebellion harder than atavistic
crime, as they do in Russia, where capital punishment has been abolished
for common crimes, but retained for political violations of the law! We
are living in an epoch of transition from the old to the new, and
contemporaneous humanity has an uneasy moral conscience in this critical
time. The ruling classes are losing their clearness of vision, so that
they promise monuments to those political murderers who promoted their
own historical victories, but would condemn like any common criminal him
who now devotes his soul to a revolutionary ideal, would throw into
prison the pioneer of new human ideals,