THE CRIMINALITY OF CHILDREN.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1248, 30 January 1896, Page 10

THE CRIMINALITY OF CHILDREN.

•(By Professor Cesare Lombroso.) Montaigne has said that lying and istinacy grow in children just as their dy doea. The moral sense is.certainly inting in children in the first months or eh the first years of life. For them, rhb and wrong are what ia permitted or rbidden by the father or mother, but t once do they perceive independently at a thing is wrong. " This age is thout pity," said La Fontaine, faithful rfcrayer of nature. Cruelty, in fact, is e at the common characteristics of U&c@£i- Says Broussais (Irritation et ■lie, p. J2O), "There is scarcely a child 10 does pot abuse his power over those lo are wea&er than he." Such is the it impulse, bufc the cries of the victim ack him unless he is born to ferocity, til anew instinctive impulse lead him commit a new abuse. In general he ifers wrong to right; he is cruel rather m good because he thus feels a greater otion and can feel his own unlimited and therefore ho is seen to break animate objects with delight. He deKits in torturing animals, in drowning Is ; he beats the dog, and he smothers | bird. Even that' fundamental principle of ■ealomania and of criminality which is

excessive vanity, self-absorption, is very great in children. In two families in which the principles of equality are main fcained by the parents, the children even at three years of age observe the pretended artificial distinction of tiocial clashes and treat witn haughtiness the poor, and with deference the children of their own age whose parents are rich or titled. The same thing, for that matter, is also seen ill animals ; for instance, in the watchdog that barks at persons in shabby clothes. All children, from the age of seven or eight months, to like show off their new shoes or hata, and get angry when they are taken off. Many children, even those who afterwards show little intellect and slight precocity, at nine or ten months of age are wont to cry if they are not dressed in some particular pretty gown; especially doe 3 this passion extend to red shoes. One who lives among the upper classes has no idea of the passion babies have for alcoholic liquor, but among the lowerclasses it is only too common a. thing to gee even aucking babes drink wine and liquors with wonderful delight, and to see parents enjoy seeing them get drunk. Now when the child becomes a youth, largely through the training of his parents and of the school still more so by nature itself,-when inclined to the good, all this criminality disappears, just as in the fully developed foetus the traces of the lower animals gradually disappear which are so conspicuous in the first months of the fcet-*l life ; we have a genuine echical evolution corresponding to the physical evolution. But in some unfortunates this evolution does not take place, just as in physical monsters thv-re is arrest of physical development or of foetal evolution, and then the criminal tendencies become more marked than in the majority of youths, often breaking out in terrible atrocities and obscenities, and persisting ever after. A child, rive years old, intelligent and wide awake, seeing blood flow from his little brother's nose, knocked him off the chair and, plunging his hands in the blood, cried : "I want to kill this baby, I want to see his blood, I want nothing else." Asked whether he would be willing to kill his mother, he answered: " I can't just now, I shall wait till lam bigger." Another bright child, eleven years old, had struck and threatened a comrade, then he killed him with blows from a sickle, not stopping till tired out, then threw the body into a ditch, where he washed himself, and pretended that they had been attacked by a peasant, and confessed only when he was promised immunity. Cruelty was observed in tha earliest youth of Caracalla, of Caligula, and of Commodus, who at thirteen had a slave thrown into a furnace for a trivial reason ; of Louis XL and of Charles IX., who had animals tortured, and of Louis XIII, who crushed slowly between two stones the head of a little bird, and became so irritated against a gentleman whom he did not like that to calm him down they had to pretend to kill the gentleman. When he became king he delighted to watch the agony of Protestants condemned to death. j

Now these criminals are recognised even from their earliest days, because they have extraordinary anomalies of the face and of the skull, asymmetry, macrocephaly, exaggeration of the langfch or breadth, strabismus, ears badiy placed, or too large, enormous jaws, bad conformation of the teeth, especially of the incisors, now too large, and again too far apart, nose fi it and crooked, hair abun dant on the forehead, an exaggerated de velopment of the body (a child of seven having the stature and weight of one of nine), strength precocious, left-handed-nesa more common, and above all great dullness of the tenses. The sense of touch, instead of marking one or twj millimetres, is so dull as to give four millimetres or more. The sensibility to pain is very alight. The sense of odours and colours is imperfectly developed. There is then a criminal type, so that your intuition leads you unconsciously to shrink from a person who h s the face of a thief, and I have heard the case of a woman \vh", a few days after the birth of a iiiecc who aftuf >ards hecune a ureat criminal, said on seeing her eyes, " She looks as if she were going to murder us all." Recently the notorious Craveri was lonth to rent * room to a man who had mado a sinister impression on her, and who afterwards killed her. 1 explain this fact scientifically, by maintaining that in the strata of our bruin there must exist elements of the sensations experienced by our progenitors, aenaations which are reawakened as soon as the causes are represented which first awakened them. The vicious tendencies of morbid childhood were recently shown in most startling* manner in the murder of the wife of an English ship steward by her two sons. These two children, but eight and ten years of age respectively, revealed a depth of diabolic cruelty, of unparalleled insensibility to every human emotion, and of fearlessness as to consequence that the most debased and brutal graduate in crime would hardly hope to attain. Were the past life of those parents fully known, with the microscopic day-today study of the lives of those children, science would receive a revelation.

It is worth while to study the inclinations which predominate in these individual, in order to be able to direct them and guide them in a special direction. Above all, withdraw them from those fields in which their criminal activity would most develop, especially aa they would infect the innocent. When at laat no measures will longer avail, and when

vice has become crime, and habitual crime, procure their isolation as if they were lunatics, so as to spare society a series of misfortunes, the family greater disgrace, and the judges an activity often useless. Human justice examines ou'y 50 per cent, (if those who become guil'y, and of these does not punish 25 per cent., J and punishes them inefficaciously, often sending them back, especially if young, to their wicked deeds, frequently several times a year. That is why crime triumphs every day, and all that we do serves only to aggravate it. And thus we suffer from the harm the criminal does us, and suffer for the expense of investigations to find him out and convict him, without all this preventing us from being injured again by him in the near future. If the teacher, by pointing out the future criminal, prevents his maturing in the bosom of society, he will do a holy work and one truly u*e ful to humanity.—The Monist.