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Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development by Francis Galton
page 75 of 387 (19%)
criminal in England, and is punished as such by English law in social
self-defence, may nevertheless have acted in strict accordance with
instincts that are laudable in less civilised societies. The ideal
criminal is, unhappily for him, deficient in qualities that are
capable of restraining his unkindly or inconvenient instincts; he
has neither sympathy for others nor the sense of duty, both of which
lie at the base of conscience; nor has he sufficient self-control to
accommodate himself to the society in which he has to live, and so to
promote his own selfish interests in the long-run. He cannot be
preserved from criminal misadventure, either by altruistic
sentiments or by intelligently egoistic ones.

The perpetuation of the criminal class by heredity is a question
difficult to grapple with on many accounts. Their vagrant habits,
their illegitimate unions, and extreme untruthfulness, are among the
difficulties of the investigation. It is, however, easy to show that
the criminal nature tends to be inherited; while, on the other hand,
it is impossible that women who spend a large portion of the best
years of their life in prison can contribute many children to the
population. The true state of the case appears to be that the
criminal population receives steady accessions from those who,
without having strongly-marked criminal natures, do nevertheless
belong to a type of humanity that is exceedingly ill suited to play
a respectable part in our modern civilisation, though it is well
suited to flourish under half-savage conditions, being naturally
both healthy and prolific. These persons are apt to go to the bad;
their daughters consort with criminals and become the parents of
criminals. An extraordinary example of this is afforded by the
history of the infamous Jukes family in America, whose pedigree has
been made out, with extraordinary care, during no less than seven
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