HEREDITY AND CRIME.

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 2645, 11 September 1906, Page 5

HEREDITY AND CRIME.

A DOCTOR'S DEPRAVITY The amazing confessions of Dr Patterson, M.A., L.LD., have been published by tho ' New York Woi Id.' J)r Pnter>on is a fairly well known Am erican criminologist, and was lately arrested on a charge of forgery, lie declares that from childhood he always recognised in himself proof of the theory tlr.t the criminal is what he is because he was bom with the instincts the development of which neither environment, fear of punishment, sociil ostracism, nor anything else can pievent. Tn his case it has been a continual fight between heiedity and environment, and heredity, he declares, has finally won. Dr Patterson whs arrested twice, and the police now regard his downfall as complete. As a child, Dr Patterson says, he felt he was born to be a thief. He stole marbles, filched pockets, and gloried in the stories of crime. That he did not succumb earlier he attributes only to a desire to please'his parents. He writes: "My one great regret in life is that I have fallen a slave to the morphine habit, and am unable to resist the me of the drug. I have failed in my ambition to become the greatest ciiininal of the age. I glory in crime, and I am a criminal because it is impossible for me to be anything else. 1 have tried and failed, and am glad of it. The fight was unequal at the best, and lam glad I finally started out in a career of and tint J committed thefts and burglaries, hiv* stolen into houses at night-time, and taken property that belonged to others, for pure love of it. I did not want money, 1 did not want the booty I took away after I it; but there was the satisfaction too deep for words, too self-satisfying for explanation. I imagine a woman who has held her lover at arm's length, and perhaps for the best of reasons refused to surrender to him for a long time, must feel much as I did when I committed my first theft." Dr Patterson writes in this strain at considerable length, always regretting that his long use'of morphine destroyed his cunning, and prevented the realisation of his ambition to make a name in the criminal world.