constitutes "the criminal class." They invoke the name of "science"
with just as much confidence and just as much claim as the early
Victorian phrenologists. They speak and write with ineffable profundity
about the "criminal" ear, the "criminal" thumb, the "criminal" glance.
They gain access to gaols and pester unfortunate prisoners with
callipers and cameras, and quite unforgivable prying into personal and
private matters, and they hold out great hopes that by these expedients
they will evolve at last a "scientific" revival of the Kaffir's witch-
smelling. We shall catch our criminals by anthropometry ere ever a
criminal thought has entered their brains. "Prevention is better than
cure." These mattoid scientists make a direct and disastrous attack
upon the latent self-respect of criminals. And not only upon that
tender plant, but also upon the springs of human charity towards the
criminal class. For the complex and varied chapter of accidents that
carries men into that net of precautions, expedients, prohibitions, and
vindictive reprisals, the net of the law, they would have us believe
there is a fatal necessity inherent in their being. Criminals are born,
not made, they allege. No longer are we to say, "There, but for the
grace of God, go I"--when the convict tramps past us--but, "There goes
another sort of animal that is differentiating from my species and
which I would gladly see exterminated."

Now every man who has searched his heart knows that this formulation of
"criminality" as a specific quality is a stupidity, he knows himself to
be a criminal, just as most men know themselves to be sexually rogues.
No man is born with an instinctive respect for the rights of any
property but his own, and few with a passion for monogamy. No man who
is not an outrageously vain and foolish creature but will confess to
himself that but for advantages and accidents, but for a chance
hesitation or a lucky timidity, he, too, had been there, under the