When a crime is committed in some place, attracting public attention
either through the atrocity of the case or the strangeness of the
criminal deed--for instance, one that is not connected with bloodshed,
but with intellectual fraud--there are at once two tendencies that make
themselves felt in the public conscience. One of them, pervading the
overwhelming majority of individual consciences, asks: How is this? What
for? Why did that man commit such a crime? This question is asked by
everybody and occupies mostly the attention of those who do not look
upon the case from the point of view of criminology. On the other hand,
those who occupy themselves with criminal law represent the other
tendency, which manifests itself when acquainted with the news of this
crime. This is a limited portion of the public conscience, which tries
to study the problem from the standpoint of the technical jurist. The
lawyers, the judges, the officials of the police, ask themselves: What
is the name of the crime committed by that man under such circumstances?
Must it be classed us murder or patricide, attempted or incompleted
manslaughter, and, if directed against property, is it theft, or illegal
appropriation, or fraud? And the entire apparatus of practical criminal
justice forgets at once the first problem, which occupies the majority
of the public conscience, the question of the causes that led to this
crime, in order to devote itself exclusively to the technical side of
the problem which constitutes the juridical anatomy of the inhuman and
antisocial deed perpetrated by the criminal.

In these two tendencies you have a photographic reproduction of the two
schools of criminology. The classic school, which looks upon the crime
as a juridical problem, occupies itself with its name, its definition,
its juridical analysis, leaves the personality of the criminal in the
background and remembers it only so far as exceptional circumstances
explicitly stated in the law books refer to it: whether he is a minor, a